The School of Architecture has announced that architect Dennis Sola is the Harry der Boghosian Fellow for 2026–27. Sola will succeed current fellow, Tiffany Xu and become the eleventh fellow in the program’s history.
Fellows play a significant role at the school by enhancing student instruction and faculty discourse while supporting both research and the development of research-related curriculum relevant to architectural education and practice.
As the 2026–27 Harry der Boghosian Fellow, Sola will develop a year-long body of design research centered on time, finitude, maintenance and architecture’s relation to absence. His investigation will examine how architecture enters duration, how it persists through maintenance and transformation and how buildings might anticipate their own disappearance as part of their conception.
Drawing from a reading of absence against essence, the fellowship will ask how architecture can be understood through exposure, use, alteration and withdrawal, allowing form to register an awareness of its own lifespan. The research is informed by construction cultures in which adaptation and transformation often take precedence over permanence, and where continuity is secured through ongoing modification.
During the fall semester, Sola will teach a seminar focused on maintenance as a cultural, spatial and expressive practice. The course will examine repair, replacement, weathering, material aging and protocols of intervention as forces that reshape existing structures and sustain them over time. Students will consider how these operations can become drivers of architectural expression and use, positioning maintenance as a generative design framework.
In the spring, Sola will lead a studio and companion seminar organized around the design and production of a single field object. Developed at one-to-one scale and deployed either in Latin America or the United States, the object will operate as a built research instrument, testing how architecture can register environmental force, logistical conditions, civic use and temporal change through direct construction.
Sola’s year-long investigation will connect seminar, studio and built work through a sustained investigation into what he describes as “geometries of tendency,” where form emerges through pressures, inclinations, durations and the productive incompletion of architecture over time.
“Moving between research and deployment, the year will test architecture as protocol, artifact and field condition at once, seeking precision through measured engagement with finitude, withdrawal, territories and the cultural life of construction,” says Sola.
Like the ten previous Boghosian Fellows, Sola will work closely not only with faculty and students at the School of Architecture but will also explore interdisciplinary collaborations within the University and its various centers and colleges, while also anchoring fieldwork to nearby landscapes such as Onondaga Lake and Green Lakes State Park.
“We are thrilled to welcome Dennis Sola as the next Harry der Boghosian Fellow,” says School of Architecture Dean Michael Speaks. “His work challenges conventional ideas of permanence in architecture and will offer our students an extraordinary opportunity to engage questions of construction, adaptation and change through both research and making.”
Prior to joining Syracuse Architecture, Sola co-founded and led Ídem, a former Quito-based architectural practice whose residential work unfolded across the Andean highlands and rainforests of Ecuador, while its cultural and infrastructural projects engaged Quito and other territories. These projects shaped a practice attentive to logistics, construction protocols, material duration, environmental exposure and the temporal life of buildings. Sola’s work has been featured internationally and exhibited.
Sola earned his architecture degree from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador and holds a master’s in architecture II from the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
The Boghosian Fellowship has helped the School of Architecture attract the best and the brightest emerging professors. Previous fellows include Maya Alam (2016–17), Linda Zhang (2017–18), James Leng (2018–19), Benjamin Vanmuysen (2019–20), Liang Wang (2020–21), Leen Katrib (2021–22), Lily Chishan Wong (2022–23), Christina Chi Zhang (2023–24), Erin Cuevas (2024–25), and Tiffany Xu (2026–27).
To learn more about the Harry der Boghosian Fellowship, visit the School of Architecture’s website.
