Rasa Navasaityte

Architecture is joined time. A building does not stop being designed when construction ends: materials weather, programs shift, ecologies move in, and the spaces between parts keep negotiating long after the architect has left. I teach and research architecture as this time-active, relational system, and I believe foundational design education is where students first learn to see it.

My path built this conviction in stages: an artistic foundation in Lithuania, a diploma from Studio Zaha Hadid at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, doctoral research at the University of Innsbruck, postgraduate teaching at the Bartlett, and since 2019 a sustained teaching practice at The University of Texas at Austin. My dissertation, Between the Parts: A Relational Methodology for Ecological Design, develops the concept of the ecological void: the interstitial space where environmental, social, and technological systems meet and produce new spatial possibilities. It argues across three scales, from composition to building to city, through four operations that structure my teaching as much as my research: typological variation, dimensional translation, synthetic multiplicity, and interdisciplinary integration.

Teaching is my primary evidence. At UT Austin I carry a foundation course at cohort scale, intermediate core studios, and advanced research studios on ecological infrastructure and circular urban spaces; before Austin I led postgraduate research by design at the Bartlett, where my students won the Gold Medal in 2018 and the Silver Medal in 2019. Construction grounds the method: as project architect I carried the Garden of 999 Trees, a 30,000 m² timber complex in Nanjing, from design through execution. My toolkit spans drawing, physical models, simulation, robotics, and generative AI, instruments in the service of design judgment, introduced to students in that order of importance.