Linda C. Samuels

Linda C. Samuels is Professor and Chair of urban design at the Sam Fox School at Washington University in St. Louis and the inaugural Director of Sustainable Design and Environmental Justice. Samuels’s research focuses on infrastructural opportunism—leveraging investment in large-scale systems to create more socially and environmentally productive public works. She teaches inter-disciplinary urban design studios and seminars on Infrastructural Urbanism, urban history and theory, and alternative sustainability metrics. In 2023, she completed an Infrastructure Equity Scorecard Pilot Project for the City of Los Angeles and a produce rescue and distribution mapping project for LA-based nonprofit, Food Forward. Samuels was co-PI on Mobility For All By All, an interdisciplinary project aiming to increase the benefits of St. Louis’s MetroLink expansion for local residents living along the alignment. Previously, Samuels was the director of the Sustainable City Project at the University of Arizona and a Senior Research Associate at UCLA’s cityLAB where she co-developed and co-ran the WPA 2.0 (Working Public Architecture) design competition. Her book, Infrastructural Optimism, is available now from Routledge.

Sixth Street Viaduct as Next Generation Infrastructure

“Sixth Street Viaduct as Next Generation Infrastructure” will compare and combine quantitative information—demographic data, property values, modal usage—with lived experience—photography, video, interviews, sketches, storytelling—evaluating next generation performance as a combination of abstract and empirical worlds. The result, to be presented in public discussion and drawing format at the end of the residency, will be a multi-dimensional assessment of the bridge and its next gen performance, and an exploration of how different modes of research can inform the design of socially and environmentally productive mobility infrastructure.

2025 Research Topic

Exploring the Potential of Mobility Corridors

This year’s topic aims to explore how every scale of movement infrastructure shapes our built environment. How might new approaches to mobility corridors provide sustainable growth, from improving how people and goods move from place to place to supporting the ecosystems, communities, and activities that surround them? Ultimately, how can existing or proposed interconnected systems help define the future of our cities?

Residency Overview

The Researcher-in-Residence is a $5,000 award and four-to-eight-week summer residency at one of two R.M. Schindler residences stewarded by the MAK Center in Los Angeles, California. The residency is awarded annually to an architect, artist, and/or researcher to conduct original research that contributes to the current topic. The Researcher-in-Residence Program was jointly established in 2024 by the MAK Center for Art and Architecture and the SOM Foundation to provide space and time for rigorous work that addresses pressing issues related to the built environment.

Outcomes

During the research period, the MAK Center and the SOM Foundation will schedule periodic check-ins with the recipient.

The MAK Center and the SOM Foundation will provide mentorship and networking support to recipients.

Each residency will culminate with a public talk or program related to the recipient’s research and interests. The nature of this program is flexible and will be proposed by the recipient and organized with MAK Center staff.

The public talk or program can present work in progress or can be final. Work and research conducted during the residency can be continued after the residency period. Research projects are not required to be directly related to Los Angeles in order to be considered.

Mackey APartments

The resident will live and work in one of the units of R.M. Schindler’s Mackey Apartments.

About the Mackey Apartments

Pablo Castillo Luna
A Permeable Atlas

Rather than seeking a single resolution, this project engages in a research-based material and spatial study that makes visible the hidden circulations of water within architecture. The outcome was A Permeable Atlas—a collection of drawings, maps, and prototypes documenting how water moves through buildings, landscapes, and bodies. This atlas traced the relationships between historical water-harvesting techniques, contemporary infrastructural failures, and speculative architectural responses that embrace rather than resist water’s agency. It served as both a research archive and a design toolkit, offering strategies for working with seepage, condensation, and controlled dissolution as design tools rather than failures.

LEARN MORE

Maya Livio
Hospes: Housing Justice and Multispecies Cohabitation at the Wildland-Urban Interface

Hospes is a curatorial and artistic research project that investigates the frictions and affinities between environmental and housing justice organizations in Los Angeles, aiming to spark dialogue, collaboration, and exchange towards just and multispecies futures.

Los Angeles, one of the most diverse and biodiverse urban centers in the world, faces significant challenges related to rapid urbanization, unhoused peoples, climate change, biodiversity loss, and the need for sustainable development. As such, it is home to a rich set of organizations, artists and designers, engaged communities, and activists who center housing justice, conservation, Indigenous land justice, and habitat connectivity across the city’s fractured landscapes. These projects and communities often lack space for dialogue around shared goals and commitments such as habitability and are sometimes even positioned as in false conflict due to scarcity logics.

This project not only surfaced the points of friction but particularly highlight the affinities among these groups, make space for conversation, and investigate the organic and technological landscapes in which they operate through research and curation.

LEARN MORE