Alumna Profile: Valérie Lechêne

Valérie Lechêne GSAPP'17 is a trained architect, systems researcher, and policy innovator. Her work transforms how architecture and urban systems can advance environmental and climate justice. A global citizen, Val called Paris, Beijing, Montreal, DC, and Rotterdam home before settling in New York. She was drawn to the city's dynamism and diversity, magnified by the audacious spirit for innovation at Columbia's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP).

Before attending GSAPP, Val spent a couple of years in architectural practices, deemed the pinnacle of the profession. It opened her eyes to the profession's systemic issues. It was typical that she worked 100 hour-weeks during busy times and over 50 during calmer phases. All-nighters were a regular occurrence. The experience revealed the harsh realities of architectural labor: precarious employment, standard overwork, undercompensation, and rare job security. Underlings were oppressed, and making it in the field meant becoming the oppressor. "Architecture's 'winner takes all' system made me seek more compelling approaches," she told me. 

These experiences raised fundamental questions about architecture's role in society. "Environmental justice requires abandoning outdated notions of the architect," Val explains. The myth of the individual genius is actively embraced by business-as-usual architects, serving capital interests rather than public needs. Her early experiences engaging with motions to rebuild post-Katrina New Orleans revealed this tension. She witnessed how scientific evidence about resilience and community needs was repeatedly sidelined by the profit motive, spreading existential risk to vulnerable communities. This recognition sparked her mission to fundamentally rethink the lifecycle of the built environment and its relationship to equity and resilience.

At GSAPP, Val encountered transformative ideas about the interconnected scales of architecture with justice, health, and earth systems through Laura Kurgan's pedagogy. Inspired by Eames ‘Powers of Ten’, this framework revealed how seemingly isolated architectural decisions connect to systems vast and infinitesimal—from indoor air quality impacts on childhood asthma rates in public housing to embodied carbon, from neighborhood tree canopy correlations with heat-related mortality to architectural waste streams overwhelming municipal landfills. This perspective illuminated the links between professional practice, education, governance, and policy, showing that addressing architecture's systemic issues simultaneously required intervention across multiple scales.

This multiscalar thinking led Val and her GSAPP peers to form the A-Frame collective. In parallel with their studies, they developed various activities at the nexus of technology, innovation, entrepreneurship, and social justice—conferences, seminars, career fairs, publications, and pitch decks. After graduation, they were awarded a residency at the GSAPP incubator at New Museum (NEW INC). This creative and entrepreneurial context became a laboratory for expanding the architect's traditional toolbox.

At the incubator, Val initiated an urban science research project examining the physiological and psychological impacts of green versus gray space. This study used biofeedback and AI to demonstrate to urban dwellers the measurable health benefits of urban nature, creating evidence-based arguments for climate-resilient design. Simultaneously, Val deepened her collaboration with The Architecture Lobby, a grassroots organization advocating for just labor practices. This community became the foundation for her systems change work, researching and testing frameworks addressing the profession's deep-rooted problems. "Education, research, and design must be tools for systemic change," she remarked.

These parallel investigations evolved into initiatives with lasting impact. Val played a key role in spearheading the first season of the Architecture Beyond Capitalism (ABC) School, a virtual academy that attracted hundreds of participants from over 60 countries. This work led to co-authoring The Organizer’s Guide to Architecture Education (Routledge, 2024), introducing organizing as a co-production methodology applicable across the scales of the architecture education lifecycle to meet today's environmental and social challenges. It provides key skills for reconfiguring architectural pedagogy toward planetary commons, addressing students, faculty, practitioners, and administrators seeking to expand and decenter the discipline.

Val's commitment to systems change led her to the Institute at Earthshot Labs (now Collaborative Earth), where she advanced research in ecological science, remote-sensing technology, and AI to scale nature-based solutions toward planetary regeneration. "Technology isn't inherently problematic—it's how we govern it and who benefits that matters," Val explains. With the Lobby's Green New Deal Working Group, Val co-crafted A Just Transition for the Building Sector, a policy roadmap illuminating the path to restructuring the building sector to prioritize ecological justice and public needs, housing as a human right, and labor justice over development solely optimized for the performance of profits. This work helped build working relationships with multiple congressional offices. With the Lobby, she also initiated and directed an interview-based documentary film, Architecture Workers Organizing for Change. It disseminates to broader audiences the power of relational organizing in architecture. Three episodes will be shown at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale. All seven episodes will be released online later this year.

Now at the New School's Urban Systems Lab, Val leverages her architecture and systems change background to advance urban systems research, bolstering initiatives in AI-driven hyperlocal climate risk modeling, urban nature-based solutions, and community co-production. As Assistant Director, she facilitated the development of a theory of change based on the Lab’s decade of experience and informed its next decade of developing research for measurable impact on the ground. Two significant initiatives demonstrate the Lab's leadership in urban resilience and equity: ClimateIQ and the NATURA Global Roadmap for Urban Nature-based Solutions. "ClimateIQ puts critical information directly into the hands of communities," Val explains. "This kind of data-driven tool is essential to drive the decisions allowing resilience at the neighborhood level." Complementing this work, the NATURA Global Roadmap synthesizes evidence on nature-based solutions across seven global regions, producing actionable reports that help policymakers, planners, and communities implement effective urban resilience strategies.

Val also underscored the role of universities in the environmental justice movement. "Universities create spaces for nuanced dialogue across diverse perspectives," she emphasized when I asked about student involvement. "Even as they face unprecedented and disillusioning attacks, universities remain crucial sites for brokering new relationships between stakeholders, generating evidence-based research, and translating these insights into community action." This belief, rooted in her own transformative journey at Columbia, continues to inform her collaborative and community-centered approach.

From rethinking professional paradigms to advancing technology-driven solutions, Val's journey embodies the transformation she advocates for within urban systems. Moving beyond conventional architectural practice, she redesigns the systems that determine what gets built, by whom, and for whose benefit. Her interdisciplinary approach offers a blueprint for how designers, researchers, and communities can collaboratively create not just resilient infrastructure but just societies.