projects            
Block Island, Rhode Island
2025.01 A team from UM Public Design Corps students, under the guidance of Akoaki, has released a proposal to integrate police and fire services on Block Island. Commissioned by the Block Island Chamber of Commerce, Police Department, and New Shoreham Volunteer Fire and Rescue Department, the project engages with intersecting concerns of public safety, community identity, and environmental preservation. This is not merely about operational efficiency; it is an exploration of how design can advance equity and sustainability.

Fieldwork in May 2023, including interviews with residents and local leaders, revealed the nuances of Block Island’s geography, social dynamics, and ecological fragility. These insights inform a framework for integration that privileges resilience over expedience. Students discovered that while operational alignment is vital, it is insufficient on its own. The project addresses the tension between functionality and the island's ecological and cultural particularities, proposing solutions that safeguard Block Island’s character and its rare environmental richness.

This report is not a conclusion but a starting point, navigating a challenging paradox: creating a security complex for a community that resists the notion of being policed. This requires a sensitive approach, balancing the practicalities of emergency response with an architecture that feels embedded within—rather than imposed upon—the community.

Block Island Lifesaving Station


Milan, Italy 
2024.08 The Cultural Center Plan has been recognized at The Plan – Architecture Magazine Awards 2024, an international competition focused on architecture, interior design, and urban planning. Chosen from over 1,200 global submissions, the plan received the award for “Best Future Public Space Design.” The recognition reflects the collaborative effort behind the project, including its design team and partners. The ceremony took place on November 14 in Milan, convening architects, designers, and planners from around the world. This year’s competition included 1,200 finalists in 20 categories, divided between “Completed” and “Future” projects. The Cultural Center Plan distinguished itself among 489 entries in its category, representing a notable milestone for Detroit’s Cultural Center.


Bilbao, Spain 
2024.07 Detroit’s Cultural District Plan has been awarded the inaugural “Partners in Progress” Award at the 2024 Bay Urban Visioning Awards, held at Bilbao’s iconic Guggenheim Museum during the WRLDCTY forum. This accolade celebrates the visionary collaboration at the heart of the plan, developed in partnership with Agence Ter and spearheaded by the Detroit Cultural Center Association (DCCA). The project exemplifies a forward-thinking reimagination of Detroit’s cultural core, emphasizing inclusivity, sustainability, and innovative public-private partnerships.


Brooklyn, New York 
2024.07 e-flux Index is a new print journal that explores the wide scope of contemporary culture through e-flux’s publications on art, theory, architecture, film, criticism, and art education. It's second volume is out and features Anya Sirota's recent article, "Contradictions of a Benevolent City," a complex piece that took years of reflection on how philanthropic giving influences the structure and stewardship of community-focused initiatives. The full article is available online..


Chicago, Illinois 
2024.05 With support from the Graham Foundation, Anya Sirota and Suzanne Lettieri are compiling *JR Architects*, a book examining the shifting landscape of architectural and design education. Driven by student-led movements for an emancipatory educational model amid sociopolitical divisions around race and class, the book addresses current and emerging paths to lasting diversity in design education. It critically evaluates early-learning initiatives at U.S. architecture schools, assessing their ability to foster a more diverse generation of designers and to prompt a paradigm shift in teaching methods, knowledge creation, and professional standards. A significant transformation for educational institutions and the profession is on the horizon. Image: Jacob Comerci Workshop Michigan ArcPrep program.


Detroit, Michigan
2023.12 The Detroit Cultural District Plan has been named a finalist for the 2024 Bay Urban Visioning Awards in the Partners in Progress category. This category honors global projects that exemplify public-private collaboration and significantly enhance community vitality and well-being. On October 9-10, 2024, in Bilbao, Anya Sirota, representing the Detroit Cultural Center Association and the design team, will participate in a open debate on the future of public space and the essential partnerships for an inclusive vision. Winners will be announced that evening at The Bay Awards Gala at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. The program is part of the Bilbao Metropoli 30 initiative.


University of Michigan
2023.04 The final review of Urbanisms of Dissent marked a punctuation mark in the proposition studio’s exploration of the intersection between architecture, urbanism, and militant environmental activism. Anchored in the study of France’s Zones à Défendre (ZAD) movement, the studio interrogated the spatial, material, and organizational frameworks of resistance as a means to reimagine territorial and urban futures amidst ecological and social precarity. Student proposals engaged with the ZAD not only as sites of resistance but as prototypes for alternative spatial imaginaries rooted in degrowth, collaboration, and obstructionism. Leveraging insights from rigorous fieldwork and analysis, the projects ranged from speculative design provocations to highly specific interventions addressing themes of vernacular construction, communal self-governance, and ecological stewardship. The works articulated a nuanced understanding of ZAD methodologies, translating them into critical design strategies that challenged conventional architectural paradigms and urban development norms.


Rotterdam, Netherlands 
2022.10 MONU 35: Unfinished Urbanism explores the notion of "unfinishedness" within architecture and urbanism, scrutinizing its economic, political, ecological, and social dimensions across various scales, from cities to interiors. This issue presents a global view on the potential and challenges of unfinished urban projects. Anya Sirota and Jean Louis Farges, in their dialogue "The Perks and Quandaries of Coming Undone," tackle the persistent difficulties faced by Detroit's projects in reaching completion, highlighting the complex interplay of ambition and reality in urban development.


New York, New York 
2020.11 The New York Architecture League's book Young Architects 20: Objective is out. This volume showcases the work of the winners of the 2018 Architectural League Prize for Young Architects + Designers, highlighting their diverse approaches and the various "objectives" they pursue. Congratulations to the featured architects: Bryony Roberts, Gabriel Cuéllar and Athar Mufreh, Coryn Kempster and Julia Jamrozik, Dan Spiegel, and Lap Chi Kwong and Alison Von Glinow. Special thanks to Claire Weisz, Anne Rieselbach, and Catarina Flaksman for their contributions, support and vision.


Detroit, Michigan 
2019.06 Detroit Square has been chosen as the winning entry in the DIA Plaza/Midtown Cultural Connections Design Competition. This project, created in collaboration with Agence Ter, rootoftwo, and Dr. Harley Etienne, initiates an intensive planning and engagement effort to activate an 83-acre district and its public spaces. The aim is to unite twelve distinct institutions under a shared vision for the future of Detroit's cultural district. Appropriately, the selection process was rigorous, comprehensive, and public. We are humbled and delighted to begin this next chapter of developing a guiding plan to invigorate Midtown Detroit.


New York, New York
2018.06 "Objective," an exhibition featuring work from the League Prize 2018 winners, opens on June 21st. It includes a series of five freestanding models by Anya Sirota, displayed diagonally across the gallery. Each model represents recent architectural interventions and scenographies completed by her studio, Akoaki. The series showcases the "playful lexicon" of her activist interventions in "unlikely contexts." The exhibition is free and open to the public at the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, Parsons School of Design / The New School, Arnold and Sheila Aronson Galleries, from June 21 to August 4, 2018.


Weil am Rhein, Germany 
2018.06 Nightclubs and discothèques have played a pivotal role in contemporary culture, challenging social norms and blending design, art, and fashion into a unified experience. *Night Fever: A Design History of Club Culture*, the book accompanying the Vitra Museum's exhibit, documents this evolution from the Radical Design group's 1960s Italian clubs to New York's Studio 54, Philippe Starck’s Les Bains Douches in Paris, Carsten Höller's Double Club in London, and Akoaki's Mothership. Featuring films, vintage photographs, posters, and fashion, *Night Fever* offers a sober examination of these cultural epicenters and their impact on the social landscape. Edited by Mateo Kries, Jochen Eisenbrand, Catharine Rossi, Katarina Serulus, and Jörg Heiser, the book underscores the profound influence of club culture on modern society.


St Etienne, France 
2017.03 Hot off the press: the Out of Site catalogue. For the 10th Saint Etienne International Design Biennale, Akoaki curated a 10,000 square foot exhibit titled Out of Site, addressing Detroit's transforming urbanity. This carte blanche exhibit brought together over thirty Detroit artists, residents, and activists to showcase their evolving ideas, activities, and resourcefulness. Set against three full-scale installations originally deployed in Detroit and then transplanted to France, the exhibit featured ten days of public programming: performances, conversations, workshops, pop actions, and other experimental encounters. The catalogue details the backstory of the installations, why they were transported to France along with the embodied actors who give the work meaning.


Paris, France 
2016.12 Anya Sirota will be at the City/Cité conference, "Neighborhoods: A Transatlantic Exchange," in Paris, France, from December 1-3, 2016, held at le Centquatre. She will join the final day's session, "Planning Neighborhoods: Space, Design, and Urban Democracy," alongside a distinguished group of urban planners, designers, architects, and scholars from both sides of the Atlantic, including Marie-Hélène Bacqué (Paris X – Nanterre), José-Manuel Gonçalvès (Centquatre), Richard Sennett (NYU), Saskia Sassen (Columbia University), Christophe Hutin (Arc en rêve centre d'architecture), Maurice Cox (City of Detroit), Monica Chadha (IIT, CivicProjects), and Olga Stella (Detroit Creative Corridor Center). Part of the City/Cité: A Transatlantic Exchange program, which began in Chicago in 2015, the conference aims to spark dynamic debates on urban democracy by uniting a diverse array of voices from the US and France.


Ann Arbor, Michigan 
2015.04 Taubman College's Research Through Making Exhibition opens tonight. Our contribution, titled Electrofrost, is an ongoing collaborative experiment based on a simple idea: the atmosphere is an abundant, ambient resource. Its particulates, gases, vapors, and invisible fields form the ubiquitous ether that shapes our experience. By calibrating these elements, the project cultivates and trains the ethereal production of frost, making the material environment visible. Our current research explores how architecture can literally design with frost. We are testing how electrostatics affect the appearance and longevity of frost, both as an ornament and a thermal amenity. We are designing new substrates, experimenting with electric fields, and considering how this ephemeral process can be applied to architectural scenarios.


Rotterdam, Netherlands 
2015.10 MONU 23: Participatory Urbanism addresses the challenge of making participation in architecture and urban design more than a token gesture. This issue reassesses the extent to which individual citizens can and should actively shape cities and neighborhoods and questions whether architects and urban designers should relinquish some control. In their conversation "What's Wrong With?" Anya Sirota and Jaffer Kolb examine the complexities of participatory urbanism, particularly in Detroit, and explore why some projects fail. They critique the superficial nature of participation when it becomes a political formality rather than fostering genuine engagement.


Lausanne, Switzerland 
2014.06 Adore Me Wild is a deployable urban wilderness—mobile, stackable, mutable, and ephemeral. It examines the intersection of urban spaces and wilderness, proposing that the wild no longer opposes development but is instead optimistic and restorative. Drawing inspiration from Rust Belt cities like Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo, it mirrors the resurgence of lush, bio-diverse environments in urban areas, serving as a remedy for the industrial damage of modernity.


Lausanne, Switzerland 
2014.06

Detroit, Michigan 
2014 The O.N.E. Mile Magazine, a publication featuring the best in art, urbanism, music, and new enterprise from Detroit's North End, was designed to share stories about Detroit's urban advocates and locally rooted actors -- stories which might otherwise have gone unheard. The magazine, envisioned as a tool of broadcast,  offered participants a platform to communicate narratives and aspirations to a broad audience: institutions, foundations, neighbors, and others.

O.N.E. Mile, V1

O.N.E. Mile, V2