ALEXANDRA NEYMAN

Alex is a designer, educator, and researcher working at the intersection of architecture, representation, and emerging modes of practice. She holds a Master of Architecture and a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, along with a strong background in Critical Theory and History of Art. Alex was born and raised in Chișinău, Moldova.

With over 25 years of professional experience, Alex has worked across a wide range of architectural scales, from housing, libraries, and schools to small-scale residential projects and has taught architecture for more than fifteen years.

She has previously taught at the University of Michigan and is currently a faculty member at Lawrence Technological University in Detroit and Academy of Art University in San Francisco. She has served as an invited critic at RPI, CCA, UC Berkeley CED, the University of Michigan, Cranbrook Academy of Art, and the Boston Architectural College.

Alex is the founder of agglab, an interdisciplinary design and research practice focused on competition work, installations, publications, and experimental methodologies informed by systems thinking. The practice develops spatial propositions through critical inquiry, representational experimentation, and iterative making across analog and digital media. Agglab’s work resists fixed typologies, emphasizing process, interpretation, and the construction of meaning through architectural form.

Her work engages architecture as a cultural and intellectual practice, drawing from literature, film, philosophy, and contemporary theory to examine how spatial ideas are constructed, mediated, and perceived. Alex’s investigations of the critical integration of artificial intelligence into architectural design not as a tool for efficiency or automation, but as a medium for thinking, speculation, and the production of new forms of authorship, representation, and estrangement. Estrangement is understood not as an aesthetic effect but as a critical method that disrupts habitual ways of seeing and slows recognition. Her pedagogy foregrounds making as a mode of inquiry, engaging drawing, modeling, archiving, and material experimentation to produce spatial systems that resist singular meaning.

In addition to teaching, Alex has participated in exhibitions, interdisciplinary collaborations, and academic initiatives that bridge architecture with art, technology, and the humanities. Through both practice and pedagogy, Alex advocates for an expanded architectural education that embraces uncertainty, cultivates critical distance, and equips students to engage thoughtfully with the cultural and technological conditions shaping the discipline today.