Urban experience is shaped not only by form and function but by the body’s continuous negotiation with its surroundings. Drawing on recent research in neuroscience and environmental psychology, this paper argues that open public spaces—plazas, sidewalks, shared streets, and civic thresholds—operate as multisensory environments that directly influence stress regulation, attention, emotional safety, and social connection. Extending neuroarchitecture to the scale of the city, the study examines how light, sound, shade, texture, rhythm, enclosure, and biophilic presence modulate the nervous system and contribute to urban well-being.

Using a mixed methodology that includes literature review, phenomenological observation, perceptual mapping, and design-research case studies, the paper analyzes how small-scale atmospheric cues support or hinder perceptual ease. Contemporary works by Petra Blaisse, Kazuyo Sejima, and Frida Escobedo demonstrate how softness, shadow, porosity, and movement can generate environments of perceptual clarity and emotional grounding. Four practice-based design projects—the Living Chair, Urban Biombo, the UPM Library threshold, and the Double City neighborhood—further show how neuroarchitectural principles translate across scales, from furniture to the urban fabric.

The paper proposes a vocabulary for neuro-urban design—including Urban Salons, Sensory Thresholds, Biophilic Patches, Microzones of Illumination, Acoustic Refuges, Human-Sound Zones, Sensory Corridors, and Domestic Urbanity—to articulate how atmospheric conditions shape inclusive and emotionally supportive urban spaces. By foregrounding the unity of body and mind, the research reframes urban design as an act of care, emphasizing that well-being emerges not only from infrastructure but from the perceptual and emotional qualities that make everyday environments habitable.

As housing affordability deteriorates and housing instability increasingly manifests as a public health crisis, governments worldwide are searching for governance models capable of delivering deeply affordable housing at scale while improving social outcomes. In Canada, the emerging Public–Private–Philanthropic–Provider (P⁴) model represents a significant institutional innovation: a collaborative governance framework that aligns government, private-sector expertise, philanthropic capital, and nonprofit housing providers to produce supportive housing designed for long-term stability, health, and social inclusion.

Despite extensive scholarship on public–private partnerships, little research has examined governance models in which philanthropic actors and nonprofit service providers function as co-equal institutional partners shaping both housing delivery and the built environment. This paper addresses that gap by evaluating the P⁴ model through a mixed-methods analysis combining policy review, financial and operational data, tenancy outcomes, and architectural program assessment.

The study focuses on Calgary’s Resolve Campaign and the stewardship model of HomeSpace Society, where more than 1,850 units of permanent supportive housing have been delivered and over $120 million in cross-sector capital mobilized. Reported outcomes include tenancy retention rates exceeding 85 percent at twenty-four months, a 40 percent reduction in emergency-room utilization, and a 54 percent decline in police interactions among residents. Spatial analysis further demonstrates that supportive housing within the P⁴ system incorporates integrated service environments—including on-site clinical rooms, communal kitchens, counseling offices, and adaptable community spaces—illustrating how governance alignment directly informs architectural form.

By defining the “Provider” as nonprofit housing organizations that combine property stewardship with embedded social services, the P⁴ model clarifies the relationship between institutional design and spatial design. Comparative reflection on more fragmented public–private partnership systems highlights P⁴’s distinctive capacity to produce stable, health-supportive housing ecosystems. The paper argues that P⁴ reframes architecture as civic infrastructure—where governance, design, and care converge—offering a transferable framework for cities seeking durable, equity-centered housing solutions.

Architect A. William Hajjar (1917–2000) was obsessed with two seemingly contradictory architectural concepts: the square-plan building and environmental design. A square-plan building is often designed in a three-by-three, four-by-four, or other double-symmetrical grid with the same façade appearance to all its sides, thus being unspecific in orientation. Environmental design, on the other hand, responds to local site conditions and orientation-specific solar and wind patterns. As archival studies revealed, in the late 1950s, Hajjar developed a façade system that allowed him to negotiate these two concepts. Called “Air Wall,” it surrounded an entire building and consisted of two glass-curtain walls approximately three feet apart. Within the two glass layers, air moved freely between cold and warm orientations to create a temperature equilibrium surrounding the occupiable space. In various square-plan designs, Hajjar explored different grids and transformed the Air Wall for local climates. For the temperate conditions of Pennsylvania, it was intended to create a warm “air blanket” on cold days, with operable vents removing heat on hot days. A three-story test structure was built in 1959 on the campus of Pennsylvania State University to investigate the functionality of the Air Wall concept. For a 1965-municipal office building in the warm-humid climate of coastal Virginia, designed by architect Vincent G. Kling (1916-2013), Hajjar’s Air Wall research was adapted by utilizing heat-absorbing tinted glass for the outer glass layer with openings on every floor to improve ventilation. Discussing selected projects by Hajjar, the paper unpacks the architect’s strategies to negotiate the square plan with environmental design. It thus contributes to understanding the conflicting mid-century architectural discourses and to reconciling two seemingly contradicting concepts, both universally used and contextually adapted in today’s design tasks.

The paper examines how contemporary multifamily housing—understood as both spatial typology and cultural artifact—might be recalibrated toward a more nuanced, threshold-based framework. Amid a global housing crisis and widening socio-spatial inequities, value-engineered inward-facing typologies prioritize oversized private interiors while minimizing gradated thresholds between domestic and civic realms. The result is a spatial regime that exacerbates isolation, demographic stratification, and diminished social resilience. In response, the paper introduces the threshold spectrum as both a theoretical framework and an operational design instrument. Drawing from Space Syntax research and global precedents, the spectrum identifies a layered sequence of inhabitable spaces (the domestic hinge, cluster commons, and civic ground) through which adjacency, permeability, and shared infrastructure shape everyday life. Thresholds are understood not as residual spaces, but as essential spatial infrastructure that sustains dwelling. The framework is tested through an applied spatial study, the Commonscape project, sited within Charleston, South Carolina’s historically regulated and climate-vulnerable urban fabric. By elevating residential clusters above permeable civic ground and externalizing circulation as inhabited gallery space, the project demonstrates how threshold-rich configurations can reconcile preservation constraints, environmental risk, and long-term housing needs. Rather than proposing a singular formal solution, the paper advances a scalable spatial ethic – one that reframes housing as an ecology of interdependent thresholds and positions social viability as a core metric of design.

In the context of accelerating climate change, operational historic buildings, particularly in hot arid regions, face increasing thermal discomfort and rising energy demands. As many remain in daily use, retrofitting presents a complex challenge. Interventions must improve comfort and efficiency while preserving architectural integrity and complying with heritage conservation guidelines. This paper presents a primarily digital simulation-based and partly observational methodology for climate adaptive retrofitting through low-impact, phased interventions that enhance thermal comfort and reduce energy use intensity over time.

The study focuses on a historic house currently used as office space on the University of Arizona campus in Tucson, AZ, USA. Following one month of on-site observation and indoor environmental monitoring, including temperature and humidity measurements, a digital twin of the building was developed and segmented into 29 functional zones. Using Rhino and Grasshopper with Ladybug, Honeybee, and “OpenStudio”, the model evaluated projected climate conditions based on NOAA 1991–2020 Climate Normals, extended in 30-year intervals for 2020, 2050, and 2080. Eight retrofit scenarios were defined across minimal, moderate, and extensive resource tiers and aligned with building lifecycle maintenance phases. Design strategies included attic and wall insulation, operable glazing systems, aperture shading, and user-engaged passive interventions. Each scenario was assessed using energy use intensity metrics and thermal comfort thresholds defined by the ASHRAE 55 adaptive comfort model.

Results show that moderate-level interventions, including attic insulation, operable double-pane windows, and operable shading systems, achieve the best balance between energy reduction and occupant comfort. These strategies reduced energy use intensity to approximately 70 percent of baseline while maintaining adaptive comfort compliance in primary occupied zones. The framework supports scalable, evidence-based decision-making by linking simulation feedback with resource availability and maintenance cycles, emphasizing adaptability and incremental implementation within preservation constraints.

As part of the foundational education of an architect, students are introduced to abstract concepts in design and technology. Students, for example, may be expected to understand the load flow in a building, while not truly understanding the parts of the building conveying that load. To begin to address this disconnect, a team from architecture and civil engineering constructed a virtual reality environment based on a campus building for the purpose of educational research. This model allows students to explore and participate with various structural concepts in a building’s structure which was also accessible to them on campus. The research team then designed an educational study and tested whether interacting with the virtual reality environment aided students in obtaining a more advanced three-dimensional understanding of building structure. The singular model environment was developed to be tested in both an architecture and engineering class and to meet the needs of the two levels of students (sophomore and senior year). This paper outlines the educational research project through several mechanisms including the project team as well as the funding. The ethical considerations of student research will be discussed through elements of the institutional review board review and requirements. The testing evaluations, surveys, and analysis will be presented. The results of the architectural class 2025 participation reveal that the VR module may support student learning, and that the comfort of the student of the technology has an influence. Further, the majority of the students supported VR as an educational tool. Lastly, the paper will share the challenges of such a research project, highlight possible changes, and reflect on the lessons learned. The position of the conference recognizes that big changes happen with smaller localized solutions. This paper suggests that even in education, a local position can help students grapple with larger concepts.

This paper presents a graduate design studio that integrated computational design, clay 3D printing, and environmental testing to teach climate-responsive architecture in the semi-arid context of West Texas. As global cooling demand is projected to triple by mid-century, the studio examined how small-scale ceramic evaporative cooling systems can function as low-energy alternatives to mechanical HVAC while serving as instruments for climate literacy. Using locally sourced clay, students designed modular systems that manipulated porosity, surface area, capillarity, and water retention. Prototypes were fabricated with a PotterBot 10 Pro clay printer and evaluated in a custom-built wind chamber that measured temperature and relative humidity.

Three projects titled Woven Tile, Ceramic Bloom, and OctaHive demonstrate how digital fabrication can reinterpret vernacular cooling strategies through iterative cycles of modeling, making, testing, and refinement. Each project employed distinct geometric logics to balance surface exposure and internal void volume. Four-hour environmental tests recorded temperature reductions of five to six degrees Fahrenheit and relative humidity increases of up to seventeen percent, confirming measurable evaporative effects under controlled airflow conditions. Variations in cooling duration and intensity revealed clear relationships between geometry, material mass, and moisture retention.

The studio positions fabrication as a mode of climate inquiry, linking digital decisions directly to physical performance. By engaging clay, water, and airflow as active design variables, students developed an evidence-based understanding of passive cooling and environmental feedback. The resulting workflow combines local materials, computational modeling, and accessible testing infrastructure to offer a replicable pedagogical model for teaching climate-responsive design through place-based experimentation and measurable performance.

This continuing research argues for an alternative instructional model integrating active, embodied graphics for introductory architectural structures. This teaching and learning model is designed to improve upon the conventional lecture-drill format by combining different aspects of modern pedagogy, such as multimedia-associative learning, embodied learning, and collaborative learning. The research limits its scope to the initial structural topics which challenge many architecture students: forces, equilibrium of forces, and simple truss analysis for internal forces.

The modified model of instruction and the methodology for gathering data, refined 2018-2019, were used to answer whether the integration of active, embodied graphic techniques contributed to the students’ learning performance. Two small-medium sized classes each year, from 2021 to 2025, form the sample population. This present iteration assigns “control” to the computation-dominant Method of Joints (MoJt) and assigns “intervention” to the graphics-dominant Maxwell Diagram (MaxD) method. Students, instructed in both approaches, select their preferred analysis method to employ in their assessment. Using the midterm test’s major task of simple truss analysis for internal forces, performances were evaluated based on completed task processes, outputs, and efficiency.

The research hypothesized that the learning method integrating graphics-actions would both perform better and be much preferred by students. Data has so far shown that preference for the proposed graphics-active method is not decisive and may be influenced by less tangible social and naturalistic factors in the students’ overall learning environment. However, findings across the last five years do point to the graphical MaxD approach outperforming the conventional MoJ approach in terms of correctness of analyses, as well as efficiency of task completion.

With these initial results suggesting better performance, the findings lend support for the integration of active, embodied graphics-actions into the instructional approaches for introductory architectural structures, indicating the position that visual-biased learners may benefit from correspondingly graphics-attuned pedagogical strategies.

As corporations, institutions, and authoritarian governments gain more control over the production of space, the right to the city is rapidly eroding. In the U.S., for example, hegemonic land-use policy has driven housing unaffordability to unprecedented levels, displacing the working class into marginal suburban zones. People with moderate to low incomes are priced out of access to the city with now power over production. While theorists widely agree that our dominant mode of spatial production is inequitable, inhumane, and unsustainable, neither architectural theorists nor political scientists have fully conceptualized how local grassroots spatial practices have disrupted global consolidation. Informal settlements in Ankara, Turkey - known as gecekondu - offer a critical case study, as they represent a historically rich and spatially granular form of resistance to neoliberal expansion. This study asks: in a globalized neoliberal economy where formal repertoires of contentious politics are vulnerable to cooptation, what mechanisms remain for local actors to resist marginalization? Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s spatial triad and Christopher Alexander’s System-A/B framework, the research employs ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and spatial analysis to examine how lived space in Zafertepe operated as mundane resistance. Though ultimately demobilized, Zafertepe residents’ adaptive and strategic spatial practices in their gardens, pigeon enclosures, gazebos, houses, and paths functioned as mobilizing structures that temporarily sustained collective identity and spatial agency. These findings suggest that recognizing and supporting informal spatial practices is essential for architects and urban advocates confronting hegemonic spatial consolidation. The study proposes a theoretical framework for translating local acts of resistance into globally relevant urban strategies to empower the working class’s right to the city.

Metal roofing is widely used for its durability, fire resistance, structural efficiency, and resilience. Historically adopted for fire safety (and reduced lightning risk when grounded), metal roofs remain valued today for long spans, low-slope applications, and performance against extreme weather. As the global construction industry intensifies efforts to reduce carbon emissions, evaluating the environmental performance of metal roofing systems and optimizing their design for sustainability is critical. This study investigates the thermal and acoustic performance of metal roofs as part of a broader life-cycle assessment (LCA). It evaluates metal roofing systems across three distinct climatic regions: Florida (USA), Kayseri (Türkiye), and Rivers State (Nigeria) during the summer, and applies a four-stage workflow comprising field measurements, life-cycle assessment, acoustic evaluation, and thermal discomfort assessment. Key parameters include interior and exterior surface temperatures, indoor air temperature, sound attenuation, and relative humidity. Tools include OpenLCA and SimaPro for environmental modeling, FLIR cameras and TESTO thermometers for thermal measurements, an Extech sound level meter, and CypeSound software. Results indicate strong regional variability: Florida and Kayseri exhibit pronounced surface overheating, whereas Rivers State shows smaller surface-air temperature differences but higher humidity-related durability risks. By integrating empirical data with analytical tools, this research supports the development of optimized, low-impact, resilient roofing systems

Many coastal tourist cities are facing high vulnerability due to rising sea levels, ecological degradation, and reliance on a single tourism economy. Blue carbon ecosystems, including mangroves, seagrass beds, and macroalgae, play a crucial role in carbon absorption, ecological restoration, and climate adaptation, but their potential as local governance tools and community practice resources has not been fully exploited.

This study takes Cancun as an example and constructs a blue carbon regeneration system which integrates seaweed recycling, mangrove restoration, circular economy, and community participation into a mutually collaborative ecological network.

On this basis, a three-layer blue carbon framework applicable to global coastal tourism cities is proposed: the ecological layer focuses on the restoration and expansion of the blue carbon system, and constructs a basic structure that can adapt to different ecological bases through dynamic, stable, and socially embedded carbon sinks; The economic sector emphasizes the transformation of blue carbon from environmental remediation to a new industrial driving force, promoting biomass utilization, ecotourism, and community circular economy, making the urban economic structure more diverse and resilient; The social layer promotes the transformation of governance models towards co governance through public education, community monitoring, and multi-party collaboration, making blue carbon an ecological practice embedded in daily life.

Comparative analysis with Miami, Phuket, Honolulu, and Bali demonstrates how this three-layer framework can be adjusted and translated locally under different ecological conditions, social structures, and tourism patterns. Findings indicate that the framework has universality in structure and flexibility in policy restructuring in response to local differences.

Overcast skies are defined by diffuse illumination and low luminance contrast, often producing visually flat and uninspiring interior environments in northern climates. This study investigates whether small, low-cost optical components can be retrofitted onto existing windows to enhance the perceptual quality of daylight in north-facing rooms of multi-story buildings. The research examines how reflective, refractive, and diffractive elements—concave mirrors, plano-convex lenses, Fresnel lenses, and hologram sheets—modify diffused daylight to introduce spatial contrast or color under overcast sky conditions.A 1:8 physical model was used to test thirty-eight iterations using these devices, with each configuration assessed under real overcast daylight. Eighteen iterations demonstrating the strongest effects were selected for detailed analysis. Results indicate that concave mirrors clearly outperform lenses in concentrating diffuse light: they produced sharper light patches, cast defined shadows, and generated contrast. Transparent hologram sheets created strong color dispersion but often oversaturated the interior due to transmitted refracted light. Opaque-backed hologram sheets successfully mitigated this issue by eliminating transmission while preserving desirable reflective and diffractive qualities. Together, these findings reveal two distinct pathways for qualitative daylight enhancement in overcast climates: contrast-based strategies using direct reflections, and color-based strategies using controlled diffraction.Building on these insights, the study proposes nine retrofit design solutions that integrate optical elements as adjustable, user-controlled components within existing window assemblies. These add-on systems offer a practical, non-invasive, and cost-effective approach to improving visual interest, occupant experience, and perceived daylight quality in buildings located in predominantly overcast regions.

In terms of Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ), providing sufficient daylight and access to outdoor views is important for occupants’ health and productivity. Consequently, contemporary architectural design increasingly adopts high Window-to-Wall Ratios (WWR) to maximize daylight penetration and visual connectivity. However, high WWR, particularly in office perimeter zones, often results in excessive direct solar penetration and severe glare conditions. Conventional static shading systems exhibit limited capacity to consistently balance daylight admission and glare mitigation under dynamically changing solar conditions. Although dynamic shading systems allow more responsive control strategies, single-axis systems remain insufficient in addressing the simultaneous variations of solar azimuth and altitude angles, while multi-axis kinetic facades often encounter practical limitations due to mechanical complexity and implementation constraints. Within this context, a dual-axis dynamic shading system capable of independently responding to both solar azimuth and altitude angles is proposed as a practical solution to simultaneously enhance daylight regulation and glare control. This study evaluates the proposed dual-axis dynamic system on a room-scale south-facing facade located in Phoenix, Arizona, where high solar radiation and exterior illuminance levels necessitate carefully optimized shading strategies. To comprehensively assess visual environmental performance, an integrated metric Mutual Satisfied Area (MSA) was introduced, combining useful daylight, glare probability, and unobstructed view ratio into a unified performance index. The results indicate that, compared to a conventional static horizontal louver system, both grid-based array scenarios (7×7 and 14×14) achieved higher MSA values. Furthermore, correlation analysis revealed that the most influential design parameters affecting MSA were the shading panel width and height, which determine the inter-panel spacing within the grid configuration, whereas the distance between the facade and the shading system exhibited relatively minor impact on overall performance.

In contemporary cities, tensions persist between legitimized and illegitimized urban art, limiting public participation and artistic freedom. While murals are widely celebrated, graffiti is frequently criminalized, yet few studies examine the design elements shaping this distinction. This gap challenges the democratic urban ideals described by Jane Jacobs and Henri Lefebvre, who emphasized vibrant and inclusive public spaces. Most existing research focuses on controlling graffiti through surveillance or machine learning rather than exploring how street art—both sanctioned and unsanctioned—can function as a participatory civic medium. This study proposes an augmented reality (AR) street art platform designed to democratize urban expression and expand community participation in creating and evaluating urban art. In the first experimental phase, machine learning and electroencephalography (EEG) measure cognitive and emotional responses to 200 images of sanctioned murals and unsanctioned graffiti collected from Manhattan and the Bronx. Participants view these images in a virtual reality (VR) environment while neural activity is recorded. Verbal feedback is analyzed using the BERT algorithm to evaluate semantic relevance and sentiment. These neural and linguistic datasets are integrated into engagement scores used to classify artworks and identify patterns in public perception. Results show that legitimized murals generate higher engagement scores than illegitimized graffiti based on neural and linguistic analysis. Natural Language Processing (NLP) further indicates murals align more closely with public policy priorities and collective aesthetic preferences. The analysis identifies key design features—including color, composition, and subject matter—that influence public acceptance. Building on these findings, the AR platform integrates AI-assisted creation tools (txt2pix and pix2pix) to generate interactive AR street art. Users can visualize, comment on, navigate, and vote on artworks in urban space, enabling participatory curation. By combining VR evaluation, EEG engagement metrics, and AI-assisted generation, this research reframes urban art as a democratic digital-physical medium supporting civic dialogue and cultural expression.

This paper discusses revitalization study for the Liberty Park Greenhouse, located in Salt Lake City, Utah. Liberty Park is the oldest and one of the most prominent historic urban parks in Utah, listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1979. The Liberty Park Greenhouse was originally constructed in 1903, but the main greenhouse was dismantled during World War II and reconstructed in the 1960s as a simplified, utilitarian structure. Additional buildings were added or expanded in the 1920s and 1940s. For decades, the greenhouse played a central role in producing seasonal floral displays and propagating native plant species for use throughout Salt Lake City's parks and civic landscapes. However, the complex has not been operational since 2020s.

The main objective of this research was to investigate revitalization strategies for the Liberty Park Greenhouse, suitable for transforming the complex into a multi-use, accessible, and sustainable community-centered facility. The research methods included archival research, observations and measurements, documentation of the greenhouse’s historical development, modeling and analysis of existing conditions, as well as community engagement efforts for identifying suitable revitalization strategies and design direction. Community engagement included close collaboration with the Salt Lake City’s officials, as well as the wider community (participants from various city departments, neighborhood councils, nonprofit organizations, and community advocacy groups). Results of these efforts were used to develop a buildings program as well as conceptual and schematic design for a revitalized complex. The resulting design envisions a new public conservatory and greenhouse operations facility that can support education, native plant propagation, and inclusive civic programming while honoring the park’s historic legacy. The design reflects both the community’s aspirations and the City’s goals for reinvigorating Liberty Park as a historic and ecological landmark. This research paper documents the research process, as well as revitalization strategies.

Urban growth in the United States has been profoundly shaped by the rise of the automobile, leading to low-density development patterns, fragmented spatial structures, and the phenomenon of urban sprawl. This research examines the morphological evolution of Raleigh, North Carolina, as a representative case of post-2000 American urban expansion. Once characterized by a planned gridiron core, Raleigh has transformed into a sprawling metropolitan area exhibiting fractal-like growth patterns that challenge traditional urban planning frameworks. This study investigates the causes and consequences of that transition, paying particular attention to how automobile dependence has influenced the city’s form, density, and connectivity.

The research adopts a mixed-methods approach, integrating historical maps, census records, and contemporary geospatial technologies such as GIS and remote sensing. By combining archival materials with spatial analysis, the project identifies key phases of growth and assesses how Raleigh’s urban form has changed over time.

One of the study’s core objectives is to evaluate the effectiveness and limitations of both historical and contemporary methodologies in capturing urban morphological change. Historical cartographic analysis allows for the reconstruction of past urban layouts and annexation patterns, while modern tools such as satellite imagery, land cover classification, and space syntax offer detailed, quantifiable insights into spatial organization and accessibility.

Preliminary findings suggest that Raleigh’s expansion reflects not only the infrastructural logic of car-centric planning but also broader socio-economic and policy factors, including zoning regulations, suburban housing demand, and institutional growth. This has led to an increasingly dispersed urban footprint that poses challenges for sustainability, transportation equity, and land-use efficiency.

By focusing on Raleigh as a dynamic case study, this research contributes to the broader discourse on American urbanism and sprawl. It advocates for integrative, historically grounded methodologies that can better inform planning decisions and policy interventions in rapidly growing metropolitan regions.

This paper presents Plastic Reimagined: Material Agency and Circular Design, a graduate design–research studio and public exhibition that situates post-consumer plastics as both architectural substrate and epistemic medium. Responding to the ARCC–EAAE theme “Local Solutions for Global Issues,” the project asks how campus waste streams can serve as testbeds for circular design, infrastructural literacy, and public ecological engagement.

Methodologically, the studio mobilized Georgia Tech’s institutional network—Office of Sustainability, campus makerspaces, materials scientists, local recyclers, and NGOs—to source, sort, and reprocess HDPE and PLA from residence halls, fabrication labs, and municipal waste flows. Students combined waste audits and polymer characterization with voxel-based modeling and iterative thermoplastic forming (sheet-pressing, extrusion, lamination) to develop environmental criteria for fabrication: single-polymer purity, minimized microplastic generation, and future disassembly or re-recyclability. Circularity was framed, following Latour’s compositionism, not as a closed loop but as situated re-routing of damaged materials.

The outcomes include thirteen full-scale seating prototypes that operate as civic micro-infrastructures rather than isolated objects. Installed at the Atlanta Contemporary, the Goat Farm Arts Center, and Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport, the work functioned as what Manzini calls “localized platforms,” where diverse publics encounter campus plastics as vivid, chromatic artifacts of global crisis and local experimentation. These exhibitions extended the studio’s pedagogy into urban space, activating what Mattern terms epistemic infrastructures—material systems that make ecological knowledge legible and discussable.

The paper argues that such institutionally embedded circular practices offer a replicable framework for architectural education. By treating plastics as anthro-materials that archive planetary crisis, the studio cultivates designers capable of reading and reconfiguring material flows, forging links between design pedagogy, campus infrastructures, and broader debates on environmental justice and circular economies.

This paper investigates a methodological framework for mapping that builds on the concept of thick mapping – an approach that combines spatial analysis with contextual narratives to explore the layered relationships between people, places and history – and seeks to uncover spatial narratives within storytelling fields that span both space and time through the iterative practice of making and through community engagement. The research objectives and corresponding methodologies for this work included documenting and visualizing community narratives in Fairview, Alaska utilizing research-intensive qualitative methods, developing a layered representational field of spatial narratives through a narrative-driven approach to iterative modeling, engaging residents and community groups as co-researchers utilizing a community-based participatory research method and producing a public-facing set of architectural futures that communicate community perspectives. This work advances scholarship at the intersection of critical cartography and cultural geography by demonstrating how methods of making and participatory research, as expansions to the framework of thick mapping, can reveal the complex social, cultural and ecological dimensions of northern spaces undergoing rapid change. The resulting storytelling fields and architectural futures provide residents, policymakers and scholars with multifaceted insights into the social and environmental dynamics shaping northern communities, while also creating spaces for community agency and collaborative decision-making.

A worsening affordable housing crisis is affecting nearly every corner of the United States, with small, under-resourced cities acutely impacted. In Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, a decade of suppressed housing construction and steady in-migration from larger metros like New York and Philadelphia has produced a severe regional shortage. Aging housing stock, constrained development, rising prices and interest rates, and rapid population growth have widened the gap between incomes and housing costs. Current estimates place today’s housing shortfall at more than 9,000 units, projected to exceed 50,000 units by 2050.

At the same time, many faith-based organizations in the Lehigh Valley face shrinking congregations, aging facilities, and difficult decisions about their spatial futures. As major property owners in cities such as Bethlehem, Allentown, and Easton, church committees are rethinking how to steward their land and buildings while honoring deeply held beliefs. This moment of institutional transition creates an opportunity to reconceptualize use-value and explore faith-based roles in providing homes and housing-related services.

Drawing on the work of researchers at Lehigh University’s Small Cities Lab, this paper presents a case study of participatory design that engages congregations, neighbors, non-profit, and municipal partners in reimagining underutilized spaces as affordable housing. We demonstrate how spatial analysis, oral history, and participatory design can help long-standing institutions create alignment during periods of transition. We further highlight the role of architects and designers as mediators, bridging the gap between congregations' spiritual and organizational practices and the technical and regulatory demands of the development process.

Refugees, migrants, and displaced communities often become subjected to inhabit makeshift environments shaped by urgency rather than intention. In these unpredictable spaces, children face heightened risks such as poor health, lack of sanitation, exposure to violence, limited education, and vulnerability to abuse. In response, our design lab developed a project called New Tent, a flexible, participatory, and culturally responsive design prototype that reimagines architecture as a tool for social infrastructure. The design’s spatial reconfiguration prioritizes child protection by redefining the spaces in which children play and live, while also creating market opportunities for families to thrive.

The project uses design to address child protection as both a conflict-mitigation and humanitarian response. It aims to provide connected shelter options instead of scattered units, fostering community and protection. A courtyard addresses residents' needs and redefines space hierarchy, emphasizing social needs. The design promotes collective living, creating spaces for individuals, families, and communities to flourish. It balances private and collective areas, enabling mixed-use programming within the New Tent community while considering budget and local building capacity.

The pilot model took place in 2021 as an emergency response to the refugee humanitarian crisis in Reynosa, Mexico, in partnership with the NGO Solidarity Engineering. Through a participatory design process, the authors studied the effects of CVA (Cash and Voucher Assistance) for Protection, funneled through temporary housing that can later be converted into market spaces. The New Tent project examined how displaced inhabitants responded to community-driven shelter design post-construction, collecting data on whether this innovative community-shelter strategy effectively mitigated conflict. Our goal with the project is to amplify its reach and address similar communities across the urban Global South, doubling down as a conflict mitigation strategy and an emergency humanitarian response through the dissemination of architectural solutions.

Rapid urbanization and construction cause significant land cover changes, degraded environments, and the emergence of novel ecosystems that have major implications for biodiversity. There is an urgent need to activate architecture through a multispecies design approach to mitigate the degrading biodiversity. Recent technological advances in architecture such as computational design and digital fabrication techniques offer new avenues for designing free forms and fabricating them in a range of materials. This research brings design and ecology together by designing and fabricating artificial bird habitats for a cavity-nesting bird species, the Northern House Wren (Troglodytes aedon). First, an artificial habitat named Nook was designed informed by preserved nests built inside traditional wooden nest boxes. Second, additive manufacturing of plastic molds for repeatable concrete casting was employed for fabricating ten habitats, which were installed in the field, along with ten traditional wooden nest boxes. By monitoring the nests from 25-June until 2-August during the summer 2025 breeding season, it was recorded that nine concrete nests out of ten were used by the birds, and the success rate (boxes with young/boxes used) was 88.9%. The empirical data confirmed the success of the concrete habitats, benchmarked with wooden nestboxes. Afterward, a second additive manufacturing method, clay 3D printing, was put forth for testing. Initially, the same exact geometry was planned to be fabricated; however, realizing the limitations of the method, the authors concluded that the design needs to have major adjustments for this second fabrication method. The results of this study demonstrate the opportunities and limitations of each fabrication strategy. Future steps include adjusting Nook’s design for clay 3D printing and installing them in the field for evaluation. This article exemplifies the broader impact of innovative technologies on shaping the built environment, towards creating multispecies architectural assemblies.

3D Concrete Printing (3DCP) is a transformative advancement in the building industry that is poised to increase efficiency, reduce labor and waste, and be more resilient to natural disasters. 3DCP utilizes automated layer-by-layer additive manufacturing techniques that can accelerate construction timelines and enhance architectural design flexibility. Despite its benefits and recent advancements, 3DCP technology still has many challenges, including the high carbon footprint mainly attributable to its carbon-intensive nature on cement-based mixtures. Reducing the embodied carbon of cement-based materials employed in 3D printing is crucial to the building industry. This study proposes an innovative strategy to add locally produced biochar to 3DCP mixes to reduce the overall carbon footprint. The biochar, a carbon-rich material used in this study, is generated through the pyrolysis of an agricultural byproduct, corn stover, and added into 3D printable concrete mixtures. A lifecycle assessment (LCA) adhering to ISO 14040 and ISO 14044 standards was performed to investigate the decarbonization capacity of biochar. The results indicated a notable reduction in carbon emissions, with an emission factor of -1.954kgCO₂/kg, suggesting that each gram of biochar added effectively compensates for about two grams of carbon dioxide emissions linked to cement production. Structural tests conducted by our research team, following the ASTM C39 and C293 standards, showed that biochar-infused 3DCP mix can achieve sufficient compressive and flexural strength. All things considered, integrating locally produced biochar is expected to substantially mitigate carbon emissions in the 3DCP process.

The global construction industry faces urgent challenges in reducing embodied carbon while adapting to increasingly extreme climate conditions. Earth-based construction presents a low-impact alternative to conventional materials, but traditional methods are labor-intensive, and skilled labor is increasingly scarce. Digital fabrication, particularly 3D printing, offers an opportunity to modernize these practices while preserving their material and cultural relevance. While 3D printing with earth materials has gained attention as a low-impact alternative, many existing workflows rely on proprietary systems, high-cost machinery, or context-specific soils, limiting broader adoption. This research proposes a replicable, accessible fabrication method for soil-based additive manufacturing tailored to semi-arid regions. The study develops a full soil-to-print workflow using low-cost tools and regionally sourced soils. A series of mixtures incorporating clay, sand, and wheat straw were developed and printed using a paste-based ceramic printer. Each mix was evaluated for print fidelity, compressive strength, and humidity resilience. The workflow includes soil extraction, processing, and recipe development suitable for replication with other paste-based systems. Results show that properly processed local soils can produce cantilevered geometries and resist environmental stress. The resulting workflow demonstrates a scalable, low-cost approach to soil-based additive manufacturing in semi-arid regions. Ultimately, the project contributes to a growing body of research at the intersection of material equity, environmental performance, and digital construction. It underscores how local materials and accessible tools can deliver immediate, climate-adaptive solutions for architectural applications in semi-arid regions.