Linda C. Samuels currently serves as professor and chair of urban design at the Sam Fox School at Washington University in St. Louis. (photo courtesy of Washington University)

The MAK Center for Art and Architecture and the SOM Foundation have announced that Linda C. Samuels has been awarded the 2026 researcher-in-residence position.

Samuels is professor and chair of urban design at the Sam Fox School at Washington University in St. Louis and the inaugural director of sustainable design and environmental justice. Samuels will receive a $5,000 stipend and a five-week summer residency in Los Angeles at the MAK Center’s Mackey Apartments, designed by R.M. Schindler, for work related to her research proposal, “Sixth Street Viaduct as Next Generation Infrastructure.”

The research project utilizes a combination of data-based analysis and empirical, qualitative explorations, intentionally combining quantitative information with lived experience. The outcomes will be a set of thick mappings, multi-dimensional and humanistic, that assess L.A.’s Sixth Street Viaduct as a mobility conduit, public space and prototype for next generation infrastructure.

“The MAK Center is pleased to welcome Linda C. Samuels as the 2026 researcher-in-residence. This ongoing partnership between the MAK Center and the SOM Foundation supports critical research on the future of the built environment, and Linda’s project offers an especially timely examination of the Sixth Street Viaduct as both connective infrastructure and contested civic space,” said Beth Stryker, director and curator of the MAK Center. “At a moment when Los Angeles continues to rethink mobility, public space and investment in urban infrastructure, her research offers an important framework for understanding how these large-scale projects are experienced and claimed by the communities around them.”

Samuels’s research focuses on infrastructural opportunism – leveraging investment in large-scale systems to create more socially and environmentally productive public works. For information, visit makcenter.org.