Sixth Street Viaduct, Los Angeles. © By Spaghettifier - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0.
The MAK Center for Art and Architecture and the SOM Foundation are pleased to announce that Linda C. Samuels has been awarded the 2026 Researcher-in-Residence. Linda C. 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.”
This 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 LA’s Sixth Street Viaduct as a mobility conduit, public space, and prototype for next generation infrastructure.
“Large, multi-agency infrastructure projects take years to complete, so it is often a challenge to study them from design through implementation and use. The Researcher-in-Residence program allows me to revisit a project I first studied during its design phase more than four years ago: the Sixth Street Viaduct that connects two sides of the Los Angeles River in downtown LA. Since completion, the bridge has become a new LA icon, but also a destination for graffiti artists, cruisers, thrill seekers, and protesters. Coming back to the bridge in its complete and activated form allows a more immersive, personal, and experiential analysis, with the luxury of dedicated time and resources,” states Samuels. “The 2026 theme for the residency, Exploring the Potential of Mobility Corridors, also helps legitimize the claims I make in my research for infrastructure as socially and environmentally productive civic space where architects, landscape architects, and urban designers are essential from the start. I am honored to be named the 2026 SOM Foundation and MAK Center for Art and Architecture Researcher-in-Residence and hope to further share the value of next generation infrastructure with the design community and our partners.”
“The Researcher-in-Residence program, started in 2024 by the SOM Foundation and the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, provides a unique framework to research key aspects of our built environment. Over the last two years, this joint effort allowed Maya Livio and Pablo Castillo to develop their work at the historic Fitzpatrick-Leland House. Focusing on LA’s Sixth Street Viaduct, we look forward to seeing the work that Linda C. Samuels develops during her residency,” said Iker Gil, Executive Director of the SOM Foundation.
“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. 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,” said Beth Stryker, Director and Curator of the MAK Center.
Linda C. 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’s research focuses on infrastructural opportunism—leveraging investment in large-scale systems to create more socially and environmentally productive public works. She teaches inter-disciplinary urban design studios and seminars on Infrastructural Urbanism, urban history and theory, and alternative sustainability metrics. In 2023, she completed an Infrastructure Equity Scorecard Pilot Project for the City of Los Angeles and a produce rescue and distribution mapping project for LA-based nonprofit, Food Forward. Samuels was co-PI on Mobility For All By All, an interdisciplinary project aiming to increase the benefits of St. Louis’s MetroLink expansion for local residents living along the alignment. Previously, Samuels was the director of the Sustainable City Project at the University of Arizona and a Senior Research Associate at UCLA’s cityLAB where she co-developed and co-ran the WPA 2.0 (Working Public Architecture) design competition. Her book, Infrastructural Optimism, is available now from Routledge.
“Sixth Street Viaduct as Next Generation Infrastructure” will compare and combine quantitative information—demographic data, property values, modal usage—with lived experience—photography, video, interviews, sketches, storytelling—evaluating next generation performance as a combination of abstract and empirical worlds. The result, to be presented in public discussion and drawing format at the end of the residency, will be a multi-dimensional assessment of the bridge and its next gen performance, and an exploration of how different modes of research can inform the design of socially and environmentally productive mobility infrastructure.