November 18, 2026 • 5:00 pm to 6:30 pm • The Assembly House - 150 Edward St, Buffalo, NY 14201

Laurence Lafforgue is executive director of the Onera Foundation, where she leads the organization of art and architecture exhibitions, educational programs and advocacy initiatives centered on architectural preservation. Her work explores how artistic practice, research and public programming can engage broader audiences and create new ways for people to understand, value and care about the built environment.

Based in a landmarked building in New Canaan, Connecticut, the Onera Foundation organizes exhibitions and public programs and supports films and research that bring new perspectives to historic architecture and its preservation. The foundation also funds the Onera Prize for Historic Preservation at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), an annual $25,000 award that enables graduating students in the M.S. in Historic Preservation program to test new preservation theories and technologies.

Prior to joining Onera, Lafforgue was a partner at Otero-Pailos Studio, where she produced public exhibitions at the intersection of art, architecture and preservation. Throughout her career, she has collaborated with artists, architects, scholars and cultural institutions to develop projects that approach preservation as a creative and evolving cultural practice.

She serves on the advisory board of the DAG Foundation, an artist-endowed foundation. She holds a B.A. and an M.B.A. from Paris Dauphine University and a certificate from the Aspen Institute’s Artist-Endowed Foundation Initiative.

Jorge Otero-Pailos is a Spanish-American artist, preservation architect, scholar and educator renowned for pioneering experimental preservation practices. Alongside his artistic practice, he serves as director and professor of Historic Preservation at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), where he also directs the Columbia Preservation Technology Lab and founded the first PhD program in Historic Preservation in the United States. He is a licensed architect who studied architecture at Cornell University and earned a doctorate in architecture from MIT.

His artworks have been commissioned by and exhibited at major heritage sites, museums, foundations and biennials, including New York’s Park Avenue malls (2024), the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennial (2024), Chicago Architecture Biennial (2017), Artangel’s public art commission at the U.K. Parliament (2016), the V&A Museum (2015) and the 53rd Venice Art Biennale (2009). He is the recipient of the Roy Lichtenstein Visual Arts Residency at the American Academy in Rome (2021–22).

Otero-Pailos employs artistic methods—informed by advanced technologies, materials research and interdisciplinary collaborations—to expand the range of objects valued as cultural heritage and to develop new ways of caring for those objects. His wide-ranging artistic practice finds expression through materials such as airborne atmospheric dust, smells, sounds and architectural fragments. His series The Ethics of Dust (2008–ongoing) consists of large-scale latex casts made from the dust and pollution residues found on landmarked monuments, highlighting how sedimented dust functions as a repository of unexamined environmental histories and collective memories.

As a preservation architect, Otero-Pailos collaborates on the creative restoration and interpretation of landmark sites. Notably, he achieved award-winning restorations of New Holland Island in St. Petersburg, Russia, in partnership with WorkAC (2013), and the former U.S. Embassy in Oslo in collaboration with Langdalen Arkitektur (2023).

Dennis Maher is an artist working across sculpture, installation, architecture and design. He creates fantastic environments from found and newly built architectural fragments, furnishings, miniatures and other objects. His architectural dreamworlds are immersive spaces of material, memory and imagination—existing between construction and demolition, archaeology and invention, ruin and renewal.

Maher’s practice is grounded in the continuous unbuilding and rebuilding of the built environment. Working through layers of objects, materials, scales and histories, he creates spaces that intensify our experience of time, as if they have been excavated from an unknown past or are becoming something else. His work asks us to reconsider the nature of house and home, the boundary between art and architecture, and the memories and possibilities carried by the things around us.

In Buffalo, New York, Maher’s own residence, The Fargo House, operates as an evolving experiment in art, architecture and living—part curiosity cabinet and part archaeological dig. His long-term project, The Assembly House, transforms a former church into a “dreamworld for the building arts”: an ever-changing 3-D collage of building fragments, sculptural environments, models and other artifacts constructed in collaboration with tradespeople, apprentices, students and others.

Maher’s work has been exhibited at venues including the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (Buffalo, New York), the Mattress Factory Art Museum (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), the Bi-City Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism (Shenzhen, China), Cornell University (Ithaca, New York), Real Art Ways (Hartford, Connecticut), and Black and White Gallery and Project Space (New York City). Maher has taught in the Department of Architecture at the University at Buffalo since 2004.

Hadas A. Steiner is an associate professor of architecture at the University at Buffalo who researches cross-pollinations of technological, scientific and cultural aspects of architectural fabrication. She is currently working on a manuscript, “The Accidental Visitant,” which studies the impact of the modern field of ornithology on architecture and the conceptualization of the built environment as an ecosystem. Steiner is the author of “Beyond Archigram: The Technology of Circulation” (Routledge), and her scholarship and reviews have been published in OCTOBER, Grey Room, New Geographies, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Journal of Architectural Education, Journal of Architecture and arq.