Design That Heals: Documentary Film Screening and Discussion

How architecture can improve lives, strengthen communities, and promote healthier, more equitable environments?
About this Event

Join City Tech Architecture and AIA Brooklyn for this special evening featuring a screening of Design That Heals, a documentary exploring how architecture can improve lives, strengthen communities, and promote healthier, more equitable environments. The film follows the collaboration between Model of Architecture Serving Society (MASS) and Les Centres GHESKIO in Haiti, where innovative healthcare design and infrastructure helped address the devastating cholera outbreak following the 2010 earthquake.

Through strategies integrating sustainable infrastructure, local materials, community participation, and dignified healthcare environments, the film demonstrates how thoughtful design can go beyond buildings to improve public health, strengthen local economies, and support community resilience.

The screening will be followed by a panel discussion featuring Katie Swenson from MASS and Professors Elena M’bouroukounda and Anne Leonhardt from City Tech. exploring the intersections of architecture, healthcare, infrastructure, and community well-being. The conversation will connect these real-world challenges to architectural education and highlight how design professionals can make a meaningful impact on the communities they serve.

Event Schedule

• 6:00 Doors Open
• 6:30 Chair's Welcome & Introduction
• 6:45 Screening
• 7:10 Discussion
• 7:30 Q & A
• 7:50 Breakout & Networking

Speaker:

• Katie Swenson (Model of Architecture Serving Society, MASS)

Moderators:

• Prof. Elena M’bouroukounda (CityTech)
• Prof. Anne Leonhardt (CityTech)

City Tech Voorhees Theater - 186 Jay Street - 1.5 HSW learning units

Katie Swenson is a designer, writer, and educator working at the intersection of architecture, equity, and public life. A Senior Principal at MASS (Model of Architecture Serving Society), she leads strategic partnerships, helping mission-driven partners make transformative projects possible. Before MASS, she spent nearly two decades at Enterprise Community Partners, where she rose to Vice President and led the Enterprise Rose Fellowship. She is the author of Design with Love: At Home in America and In Bohemia: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Kindness, and is at work on a new memoir, Architecture: A Love Story. She is the 2026 Gensler Visiting Critic at Cornell AAP and a former Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.