The Urban Classroom Public Lecture with Vicky Achnani and Vikki Ayanna Jones

In an era of environmental reckoning and social unrest, architectural practice and pedagogy must cultivate a community-centered discipline that serves as a bold experiment, a tangible demonstration, and a new common.

Addressing the critical intersections of the climate crisis, social equity, and food apartheid, The Urban Classroom: Sankofa Bamboo Greenhouse establishes a design-build methodology anchored in material adaptation and reuse, digital prefabrication and empirical structural verification. Winner of ACSA 2026 Best Design Project.

Located in Pittsburgh’s Homewood neighborhood, the project provides vital spatial infrastructure — including a sapling nursey, a gathering space, and weekend market platform – for the Sankofa Village Community Garden, directly confronting the persistence of local food insecurity while empowering the urban community it serves. Through a full-scale design-build intervention in an underserved neighborhood, it constructs a compelling case for low-carbon practice, framed as an act of community solidarity and sustainable intervention. At its core, the project is dedicated to expanding the boundaries of both professional practice and architectural education while producing exemplary instances of community-driven architecture.