This paper examines Quanzhou, a historic city in southern China, through its intangible cultural heritage—the Pujing Temple System, which is rooted in local community life. Pu refers to residential units designated by administrative governance, while jing refers to self-organized community groups linked to shared beliefs and expressed through temple jurisdictions. As a combination of governance unit and belief unit, Pujing forms a spatial network that connects temple, neighborhood, and community scales. This system reflects decentralized local governance and integrates social collaboration, ecological adaptation, and cultural practice.

Contemporary Chinese cities promote a planning paradigm of five-minute life circles aiming to enhance the convenience of urban residents' lives. However, in practice, it often becomes visual templates, administrative slogans, or performance indicators. Based on Guy Debord's theory in The Society of the Spectacle, this paper criticizes that as urbanization has progressed, Pujing temples have been transformed from community-rooted spatial institutions into staged heritage attractions, resulting in the demolition of the authentic vernacular landscape and the compression of cultural practice and social relations.

Through historical analysis, spatial investigation, and resident narratives, this paper argues that the decline of the Pujing Temple system is closely related to the current urban challenges in Quanzhou, such as ecological fragility, infrastructure overload, and weakened social cohesion. As a self-adaptive mechanism, Pujing Temples’ spatial logic of the parading ceremony can evolve into a flexible urban strategy model combining community life, cultural participation, and ecological resilience.

The Pujing Temple system offers planning values that move beyond rigid regimes and symbolic urban imagery. Its resilient, locally grounded approach transforms the specialized urbanism to everyday public life, enabling constant community vitality. The spatial wisdom of Quanzhou’s Pujing temples supports the revival of historic cities and informs urban governance and sustainable transformation across diverse contexts.

This paper highlights a collaborative partnership between Georgia Tech and the Westside Future Fund, demonstrating an innovative intersection of architectural research, public health, and environmental performance within a building simulation design practice course. In Spring 2025, students conducted an adaptive reuse study of the historic 1922 English Avenue Carnegie Library on Donald Lee Hollowell Parkway in Atlanta, Georgia. Using advanced computational tools, teams investigated social, environmental, and health determinants and assessed sustainable design interventions with emphasis on energy efficiency, daylighting, water management, health outcomes, and carbon reduction. Grounded in data-driven methodologies, the work applied human-centered design principles and contextual insights to preserve the library’s historical identity while adapting it to contemporary needs. Future-proofing strategies examined long-term resilience and flexibility to ensure continued relevance amid evolving climate conditions and community priorities. The study offers a replicable framework for transforming historic structures into inclusive, high-performing community assets.

In a city where planning is scripted elsewhere, how might a small playground become a tool for agency and urban learning in everyday urban life? Drawing on participatory action research, on-site observation, and visual analysis, this paper examines the Pahlavani Playground in Zahedan, Iran, in a marginalized district. It reads the project as an experiment in claiming the right to the city, critical spatial practice, and rehearsing deep democracy. Zahedan’s rapid, uneven growth has left nearly half its residents in informal neighborhoods with limited public services and little voice in urban decisions. The study draws on co-design with residents, especially parents and children, and interpretation of drawings, murals, and built form. It traces how design emerged through residents’ desires and negotiations within a top-down planning regime, shifting the architect’s role from author to facilitator. Residents’ visions of an “ideal park” became spatial strategies: open edges instead of fences, traffic-calming pavements instead of asphalt, and wooden or earthen elements instead of overheated metal equipment. The paper develops three dimensions. First, it reads the co-designed ground, water channel, and tree-house structures as an enactment of the right to the city and the “right to architecture,” as residents appropriate space through use, imagination, and shared decision-making. Second, it analyzes the “canvas of unity” murals, boundary walls painted by children and families, as a critical spatial practice that re-signifies walls from instruments of exclusion into collectively authored surfaces, later protected by their makers. Third, drawing on Appadurai’s notion of deep democracy, it shows how these processes cultivated forms of self-organization, stewardship, and everyday negotiation with municipal actors. Rather than a solution to structural abandonment, such participatory interventions can open cracks in centralized planning regimes, enabling those long treated as objects of planning to act, however incrementally, as subjects in the making of their city.

"Architecture is the physical form which envelops people's lives in all the complexity of their relations with their environment" Jean Renaudie

The term social cohesion is a far-fetched concept, especially in our cities and public spaces, which are often devoid of opportunities for people of diverse backgrounds to interact through chance encounters and create a cohesive human experience. In a climate of hostility against minorities and immigrants, American cities and their public spaces appear as glass fortresses lacking human spirit and soul.

This paper aims to explore the opportunities that upper-level design students can provide within the context of the Tactical Urbanism elective course, utilizing DIY tactics to create temporary structures that activate public spaces. These structures serve as social interactions generated around the colorful, provocative forms, which act as playful interjections to create meaningful experiences that promote spatial and social equity.

The questions we explore are not limited to:

1. How can small-scale design-build projects become opportunities for delight and public engagement in an otherwise hostile environment of fear of others (anthropophobia)?
2. How can upper-level architecture students be allowed to test their skills to shape the built environment?
3. Why is it essential to use critical pedagogical approaches to sensitize future architects about real-life issues that can be mitigated through design interventions, creating new narratives within our public spaces?
4. How can collaboration with public events such as Parking Day and Streets Alive engage students (the public) in the physical testing of ideas to yield unique insights into the expectations of future users as discerning clients?

Methodology:

Hannah Arendt's assertion that the Agora is a place to see and be seen will be interrogated within the context of Atlanta and its public spaces through the lens of Tactical Urbanism. Richard Sennett's notion of why our cities lack human spirit is that we have let go of the idea of utilizing human faculties with all their emotions.

The paper will address the overarching concepts that guide the design-build approach to how design contributes to the material production of space in all its complexities using design iteration and prototyping tactically at various scales before using the digital tools to finally fabricate the artifacts: urban furniture, playscapes, and shelter, that promote social interactions and playful encounters.

Students in the Tactical Urbanism elective have implemented this approach since 2014. Data generated over the years will be analyzed in terms of design, materiality, and deployment. Upper-level students apply their skills to design and test, acting as architects with the agency to shape the built environment and promote interaction, thereby fostering social cohesion among people of diverse ages and backgrounds.

"Architecture can't force people to connect; it can only plan the crossing points, remove barriers, and make the meeting places useful and attractive." Denise Scott Brown

What happens when architectural education replaces central authority with a shared set of rules? The project Hz explores how a decentralized, rule-based fabrication system can foster emergent collaboration, autonomous learning, and scalable local making. Through a wall-scale installation composed of laser-cut, rolled tubes, students enacted a design-build process guided not by top-down scheduling, but by structured constraints, peer support, and the logic of participation.

The pedagogical framework behind Hz positioned fabrication as a distributed, team-based activity rooted in situated learning. Students collaboratively designed the project, after which a finalized digital model, paired with a set of instructor-defined assembly rules, was distributed to all participants to guide preparation, fabrication, and installation. These included specific constraints on material scoring, alignment, and fastener placement. With a limited build-time window, students organized into ad hoc teams and self-regulated their progress, negotiating access to shared tools, helping one another troubleshoot, and adapting dynamically to shifting timelines. The success of the installation relied on careful spatial coordination, transforming the act of building into a test of mutual accountability.

The result was a form of emergent pedagogy, where agency, interdependence, and real-time problem-solving were not side effects, but primary learning outcomes. The project moved fluidly between digital modeling and physical execution, requiring students to toggle between technical precision and collective improvisation. In this way, Hz exemplifies how rule-based systems can scaffold participatory fabrication and localized, yet globally relevant educational practices.

This case study describes the development and deployment of Hz as a framework for rethinking fabrication pedagogy. It examines the project’s rule-based methodology, shares student-driven outcomes, and reflects on broader implications for architectural education, particularly within contexts that value scalable design systems, collaborative authorship, and site-responsive learning.

What if the future of digital fabrication isn’t only about more automation, but smarter, more adaptable tools used with care? A design-build project, El Baile, explores how a simple tube roller, refined through calibrated analog techniques, can serve as a powerful local technology for digital precision in making. Developed as part of an experimental design-build process, the project demonstrates how low-cost tools and rule-based workflows can produce geometrically complex results consistent with the computational model, offering a resilient and inclusive approach to place-based fabrication.

Rather than relying on expensive CNC or robotic systems, students worked with a manual tube roller, thermal bending, and sand filling techniques to shape copper pipe into thirty unique segments. This analog process was guided by a parametric digital model and calibrated techniques, rolling charts, full-scale print alignments, and step-by-step bending guides, ensuring that compound curves met strict tolerances. The final assembly, installed on-site, demonstrated near-perfect correspondence between digital intent and physical result.

What emerged was not just a technical success, but a model for localized innovation. Students collaborated in a flexible, non-specialized workshop, using iterative testing to substitute for high-end automation. Their work shows how analog-digital integration, supported by clear methods and local materials, can empower broader participation in advanced fabrication.

This case study presents El Baile as a framework for resilient, context-responsive design methods. It highlights the analog rolling technique, student-driven fabrication process, and the project’s implications for global challenges in economic constraints, and education and fabrication equity. By sharing this locally tested and transferable workflow, the project contributes a concrete example of how architectural knowledge can scale from a specific place to a broader global significance, demonstrating how a local solution has the potential for a global impact.

Deployable polyhedral structures offer significant potential for emergency shelter systems in post-disaster contexts, where rapid deployment, compact transportability, and scalable spatial coverage are critical for protective infrastructure. Disaster risk is increasing globally, with hazard events becoming more intense and frequent. However, existing design approaches for deployable emergency shelters lack systematic computational frameworks for generating and controlling tetrahedral-octahedral configurations with telescopic actuation, thereby limiting the exploration of deployment strategies for emergency response applications. This research develops a parametric framework for the automated design of deployable tetrahedral-octahedral systems that transform from compact stowed configurations to expanded operational states through the adjustment of telescopic elements. The Rhino/Grasshopper computational framework automates both geometric generation and telescopic rod length control throughout deployment sequences, validating three deployment strategies through differential telescopic control where octahedral members deploy to shorter lengths than tetrahedral members for arch configurations. This research establishes a systematic foundation for exploring deployment behaviors and scalability in emergency shelters and other rapidly deployed structural applications.

The escalating demand for high-performance buildings necessitates the rigorous integration of interdependent systems, including structure, envelope, and environmental services. However, the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry continues to rely on fragmented, sequential workflows that fail to manage complex interdisciplinary trade-offs. This disconnect creates a critical barrier to achieving aggressive sustainability goals, as ad-hoc communication cannot substitute for mathematical system coordination. This paper proposes a formal systems engineering framework based on Analytical Target Cascading (ATC) to bridge the gap between architectural intent and engineering optimization. ATC is a hierarchical, decentralized optimization method that decomposes complex systems into manageable subsystems (System → Subsystem → Component). Unlike traditional "All-at-Once" (AAO) centralized optimization, which seeks a global optimum by solving all variables simultaneously, ATC allows subsystems to optimize locally while negotiating targets and responses to ensure system-level consistency. We validate this framework through a computational pilot study involving the structural optimization of a steel frame. The study benchmarks a sequential ATC workflow against a centralized AAO Genetic Algo-rithm. The results demonstrate a fundamental trade-off: while the AAO method theoretically identifies the global optimum, it is computationally prohibitive and prone to constraint violations in high-dimensional spaces. In contrast, the ATC framework converged on a fully feasible solution with a 98% reduction in computational cost. Although the sequential implementation of ATC introduced path dependencies that led to a local optimum (a slightly heavier structure), the method’s superior efficiency and robustness confirm its potential for scaling. The paper concludes that ATC provides a viable alternative to the industry’s disjointed design processes, paving the way for future parallelized coordination strategies that integrate structure, energy, and life-cycle costs.

This paper examines how artificial intelligence can support the detection and analysis of urban informality, spaces that remain partially or entirely invisible in official urban datasets. Focusing on three distinct sites, Dharavi in Mumbai, the self-built peripheries of Lima, and Skid Row in Los Angeles, the study investigates how AI can help uncover spatial patterns that challenge normative assumptions about how cities are planned, monitored, and governed.

Using image segmentation applied to high-resolution satellite imagery, the research identifies visual indicators of informality such as irregular lot configurations, ad hoc construction patterns, and infrastructural gaps. In Dharavi, high-density layering complicates the segmentation process, requiring careful contextual calibration. In Lima, the informal expansion along urban edges illustrates how topography and land tenure shape visual markers of exclusion. Skid Row presents a different case altogether: here, the issue is not physical informality but the visibility of social precarity within a hyper-surveilled urban core. These case studies reveal both the strengths and limitations of AI when applied across different types of informal conditions.

By comparing how informality manifests across three urban regions, the study highlights the uneven geographies of invisibility and the risks of flattening local complexity through global tools. At the same time, it shows how AI, when used critically, can support more nuanced understandings of spatial inequality, illuminating gaps in data, policy, and recognition. This research contributes to ongoing conversations on the ethics of machine vision, and how localized insight can inform the global development of urban AI tools.

Existing research rarely examines how school campus spatial distributions relate to children’s physical activity in the Global South. We recorded the time schoolchildren in four randomly selected public elementary schools in Arapiraca, Brazil spent on moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA), light physical activity (LPA), and sedentary behavior (SB) using ActiGraph® GT3X+ accelerometers, and derived precise spatial and density ratios from architectural drawings and school records verified with photographs. Age-adjusted multiple regressions indicated that higher indoor-to-outdoor ratios were associated with less MVPA (β = –0.07, p = .040) and LPA (β = –0.08, p = .022) and with more SB (β = 0.12, p < .001). Larger patio-to-indoor ratios were positively associated with MVPA (β = 0.11, p < .001) and LPA (β = 0.10, p = .003), while greater courtyard-to-indoor ratios were associated with more LPA (β = 0.08, p = .042). Density ratios, i.e. schoolchildren per unit area, also had significant correlations: greater total outdoor density with less MVPA (β = –72.62, p = .050), less LPA (β = –84.70, p = .024), and more SB (β = 65.49, p < .001); higher courtyard density with more MVPA (β = 43.76, p = .049) and LPA (β = 51.06, p = .023) and less SB (β = –43.47, p < .001); and greater patio density with less MVPA (β = –42.81, p < .001), more LPA (β = 54.87, p = .024), and less SB (β = –42.81, p < .001). These findings underscore the potential importance of spatial distributions in supporting movement opportunities.

This paper examines how in-situ redevelopment in Indian urban informal housing is associated with women’s everyday social networks, with implications for social support and community resilience. While redevelopment initiatives aim to improve housing quality and infrastructure, they often reconfigure neighborhood layouts and patterns of interaction that have long underpinned women’s informal safety nets. The study investigates how women’s social ties, particularly help networks, differ as residents transition from densely knit informal settlements to vertically structured, formalized housing.

Drawing on structured social network surveys conducted in two urban communities in western India, the study assesses differences in network size and composition, including gender, kinship, age, and neighborhood homophily. Social network mapping techniques are used to compare the diversity and spatial reach of networks in two communities, one waiting to be redeveloped and second already redeveloped. Findings indicate that women in redeveloped housing report smaller, more kin-centric networks and reduced opportunities for informal exchange, whereas residents of informal settlements maintain broader, multilayered ties anchored in shared public and semi-public spaces. These findings could reflect consequences of redevelopment redesign with reduction in incidental interactions and compressing of historically open and gendered social spaces. The paper argues that redevelopment processes, when executed without attention to everyday social infrastructures, risk eroding the relational ecosystems essential for women’s well-being. By foregrounding women’s social networks as a critical lens, this research contributes to debates on gender, urban transformation, and the design of inclusive housing policies in South Asia.

Limited access to quality healthcare remains one of the most pressing global challenges. This issue affects not only rural or crisis-prone areas but also urban populations who face barriers such as provider shortages, affordability, and logistical constraints. In response, telehealth has rapidly expanded, particularly after COVID-19, as a scalable strategy for improving care access. However, the growing reliance on remote services has raised concerns about the quality of care, especially in relation to the nature of patient-provider interaction in non-physical settings.

This study addresses a critical gap by focusing on the often-overlooked influence of spatial and environmental design on virtual healthcare experiences. This qualitative study examines how architectural elements at the room and interface scale influence patient-provider interaction quality across four telehealth modalities and traditional in-person appointment. Simulated sessions included both physical and mental health appointments to capture diverse care contexts. The study involved ten wellness participants and ten healthcare providers, each completing five different appointment conditions, allowing for a rich comparison of environmental experiences across varied scenarios.

The study identified twelve environmental design factors that affect the effectiveness of telehealth spaces. The most impactful factors include camera placement that supports eye contact, acoustic clarity and soundproofing, and ergonomic seating arrangements. Additional variables such as video display quality, visual and functional aids, lighting, background composition, and color were also important. These elements were assessed using post-session interviews, thematic coding, and cross-modality comparison techniques. The findings revealed subtle but meaningful differences in contributing factors between mental and physical health visits, reflecting the unique environmental requirements of each care context. For example, physical health appointments emphasized visual clarity and functional layout, while mental health sessions placed greater weight on emotional comfort and privacy.

These findings provide evidence-based design criteria that can be applied to a variety of telehealth environments, from hospital rooms and provider offices to community-based telehealth hubs. Designers and healthcare planners can use these insights to optimize spatial conditions that support presence, empathy, and clarity in virtual care delivery. The results are globally relevant and offer guidance for strengthening care delivery, particularly in underserved areas and during public health crises. These findings contribute to key theoretical frameworks, including social presence theory, cognitive load theory, and biophilic design theory, and position environmental design as essential to achieving equitable, high-quality telehealth care. By integrating spatial awareness into telehealth infrastructure planning, this work reinforces the role of architectural research in addressing systemic healthcare inequities through locally informed, design-driven solutions.

Accurate prediction of overall thermal comfort (OTC) in radiant heating systems is essential for creating energy-efficient and user-centered environments. Radiant heating systems have emerged as a promising heating system that can provide uniform thermal comfort for building occupants by reducing temperature asymmetries in indoor environments. This study investigates the application of machine learning (ML) to predict OTC using experimental data on local body parts' thermal comfort. Measurements of local body parts’ skin temperatures and subjective comfort votes were collected using radiant heating devices. Traditional indices, such as Predicted Mean Vote (PMV), often fail to account for localized discomfort caused by non-uniform radiant heating. This work builds on prior chamber experiments to present an advanced machine-learning (ML) framework for predicting overall thermal sensation (o_sensation) and overall thermal comfort (o_comfort) from local physiological and perceptual inputs collected under directed radiant heating. Leveraging an expanded dataset of 100,000 samples produced from the KIT LOBSTER chamber experiments (original pilot ≈12,000 samples), we evaluated seven ML algorithms—Random Forest, XGBoost, LightGBM, CatBoost, Gradient Boosting, Ridge Regression, and K-Nearest Neighbors—within a multi-output architecture. Models were assessed with MAE, RMSE, and R² and interpreted through node–performance maps, normalized radar charts, network graphs, histograms, boxplots, and feature-importance analysis. Tree-based ensemble models, particularly Random Forest and XGBoost, consistently outperformed linear and instance-based methods, showing tighter error distributions and higher explanatory power. o_sensation proved more tightly coupled to skin temperature signals than o_comfort, which exhibited higher variance likely due to cognitive and contextual influences. We discuss practical implications for adaptive radiant HVAC control, limitations due to chamber conditions and data modalities, and future directions including multimodal sensing, temporal modeling, and validation. The integration of physiological and environmental parameters offers a personalized approach, bridging gaps in traditional methods.

Legacy Charter School is slated to move from Greenville’s walkable Berea Mill District to a parcel fronting White Horse Road—an auto-oriented, six-lane arterial with one of South Carolina’s highest pedestrian-injury rates and summer surface temperatures 4–6 °C above surrounding neighborhoods. Before the first classroom is relocated, this study interrogates how the corridor’s spatial, climatic, and experiential qualities are likely to shape pupils’ future mobility and health. It asks: How do the micro-climatic, geometric, and perceptual characteristics of the road influence adolescents’ sense of safety and willingness to walk or cycle, and how can architectural analysis articulate design pathways toward healthier post-relocation travel?

Grounded in research linking street form, thermal comfort, and children’s independent mobility, the Health Equity + Environmental Design Lab will use a mixed methodology that centers user experience in public space. Spatial diagnosis will present the spatial status of the school campus after relocation to identify environmental problems, and participatory visual ethnography will show students' daily travel habits before relocation to understand their actual needs. Combining the two allows for a more comprehensive analysis of the pre-relocation school environment on White Horse Road from the perspective of adolescents, thus enabling more thorough preparation for the school relocation.

The stakes are twofold. Locally, the project will produce a “Vulnerability and Opportunity Atlas” and a suite of concept-level interventions—arcade extensions, shade groves, median refuges—ready for discussion with Bike Walk Greenville, LiveWell Greenville, and Furman University’s Shi Institute. Disciplinarily, the paper demonstrates how user-centered, climate-responsive diagramming can translate public-health metrics into architectural propositions transferable to Sun-Belt corridors facing similar heat-and-traffic synergies. By foregrounding adolescent perspectives and embedding them within rigorous environmental analytics, the study positions architects as vital mediators between global challenges of warming and inequitable access and the local design of streets that sustain daily health and well-being.

Interstitial spaces, such as narrow gaps, leftover parcels, and micro-corridors, matter within the urban milieu. While Western cities increasingly experiment with pocket parks, laneway activations, and adaptive reuse, these interventions typically occur as exceptions within planning systems shaped by zoning setbacks, risk-averse regulation, and historical preference for defined, programmatic space. As a result, many spatial margins still emerge as byproducts of infrastructure rather than intentional sites of social or atmospheric value. Tokyo offers a compelling counterpoint: its urban environment demonstrates how cultural logics of compactness, coexistence, and attentiveness can transform interstitial spaces into distinctive, functional, and sensorially rich micro-places embedded within everyday urban life. This paper analyzes Tokyo’s interstitial spaces through four typological lenses, namely compressed architecture, whispering alleyways, the city of signs, and sacred leftovers, then critically compares with selected Western precedents. Rather than presenting Tokyo as an idealized opposite, the study situates both contexts within broader planning histories to reveal how diverse cultural frameworks interpret constraint, visibility, and public presence. Guided by the theories from Tanizaki, Böhme, Imai, and Williams, this study investigates how Tokyo’s built environment is shaped by principles of blurred spatial boundaries, atmospheric depth, and layered coexistence. The authors consider how light and shadow are not only used for illumination, but also contribute meaningfully to atmosphere, guidance, and rhythm. Furthermore, consideration is extended to how it reflects and expresses broader themes of safety, identity, and sensory experience. The methodology integrates site-based observations in Tokyo, case studies, spatial analysis, photography, critical literature review, and logical argumentation. The paper argues that Tokyo’s treatment of interstitial space offers transferable lessons for designers seeking to elevate residual urban areas beyond service functions. The proposed framework provides planners and architects with practical criteria for identifying, evaluating, and activating interstitial sites as contributors to social connection, urban vibrancy, and atmospheric depth.

The rise of the internet, cloud storage systems, cryptocurrencies, and artificial intelligence has created a growing demand for larger computing infrastructures among companies and organizations, housed in specialized buildings known as Data Centers (DCs). These DCs vary in size and require substantial amounts of power and water to support the numerous servers they contain. Increasing concerns have emerged regarding the energy consumption, water usage, and pollution associated with DCs. These impacts include increased energy bills, heightened noise levels from backup generators, and exposure to air pollution caused by electricity generation. With the demand for DCs projected to increase by 160% by 2030, further research into their impact on our lives is crucial.

The environmental impacts of DCs are documented in various articles, websites, and mainstream media, with some addressing global and general social, economic, and health impacts on local communities. However, few studies examine how DCs integrate into local contexts or affect the immediate community. Additionally, no architectural or urban design studies on this topic have been found, except for one or two theses written abroad.

While this is a global issue, this comparative study evaluated several DCs in three distinct areas of Atlanta and their connections to the surrounding communities to assess their impact on human experience. It examined various factors, including the DCs’ contextual characteristics (e.g., general experiential character of the context, zoning, and density), site design (e.g., layout, size, setbacks, impervious surfaces/ecology, backup generator location), and building characteristics (size, massing, energy source, façade porosity, etc.). The results of this study are expected to contribute to a better understanding of the DCs’ impact on local contexts and immediate communities, whether they constitute an architectural typology or merely an engineering solution, and how DCs should be integrated into urban environments—if they should be integrated at all.

While modular, panelized, and container-based construction are frequently touted as solutions to the U.S. housing crisis, their comparative efficacy is rarely tested under controlled field conditions. This paper addresses this gap by offering a comparative analysis of four recently-completed single-family homes built simultaneously within a three-block radius by the same construction team using four distinct, and innovative, construction systems: container-based, panelized, flat-pack, and volumetric modular.

Based upon documentation from the developer and construction team, as well as billing data from energy service provider, this study measures and compares the performance of the four construction typologies used in terms of cost, time-to-completion, and energy consumption, evaluating them in comparison with each other, and to the industry at large. Results indicate that while all the systems included in this study outperformed industry averages by at least 25%, performance varied significantly between each approach. Notably, a hybridized approach, which combined panelized envelope systems with generative design and digital fabrication, emerged as the most efficient, while the volumetric modular (manufactured) approach significantly underperformed the others.

Because these results were realized within a controlled environment, this paper offers empirically grounded insights regarding the specific impact of each of these construction approaches in the creation of cost-effective, eco-friendly, and high-quality housing. More broadly, the study demonstrates how small-scale, locally implemented studies can generate grounded strategies for the delivery of affordable and energy-efficient housing.

The construction industry is among the most environmentally impactful sectors, characterized by high levels of resource consumption, waste generation, and ecological degradation. Addressing these challenges requires the adoption of renewable, biodegradable, and low-energy materials (Camere & Karana, 208). Mycelium-based composites, grown from fungal mycelia on organic substrates, represent a promising alternative (Elsacker et al., 2020). Lightweight, insulating, compostable, and energy-efficient to produce, these materials exemplify the convergence of biological processes and architectural innovation (Elsacker et al., 2021; Stelzer et al., 2021). However, despite their technical and environmental potential, their integration into mainstream construction remains limited due to technical uncertainties, aesthetic perceptions, and cultural stigmas (Van den Broek et al., 2024; Wang et al., 2024).

This study explores the acceptability and perceived identity of mycelium-based materials among construction professionals through focus groups. These included comparative material analyses, pre- and post-exposure assessments, and speculative design exercises designed to evaluate participants’ sensory, cognitive, and symbolic responses. This methodology provided a comprehensive understanding of how professionals perceive and assess this emerging biomaterial within the broader context of sustainable construction practices.

The results reveal ambivalent attitudes, ranging from appreciation to reservation. Although participants acknowledged mycelium’s environmental benefits and its alignment with circular economy principles, they expressed concerns related to its unfamiliar organic appearance and its association with decay and contamination. These perceptions reflect a persistent cultural bias: fungi, historically viewed as agents of deterioration, are rarely recognized as constructive materials. The findings highlight the need for aesthetic reframing, technical validation of material properties, development of implementation strategies compatible with existing practices, and broader cultural recontextualization to foster greater acceptance.

Mycelium-based composites represent a paradigmatic shift of construction materials from inert to living matter, from waste to regeneration, and from the fear of decay to the embrace of natural cycles as a foundation for sustainable architecture.

Solutions to complex problems in architecture can be found in small, unusual items. Advances in design solutions are also seen in material innovations. Steel and reinforced concrete allowed for new building types like skyscrapers. A small, unusual item that can be used as an innovative building material is mycelium. Mycelium is the network of roots for mushrooms. This organism is found globally. It breaks down waste, sequesters carbon, is a rapidly growing renewable resource, and is biodegradable.

More examples show the benefits of mycelium. Ecovative Design uses it in their Mushroom Packaging. The Living built a tower using mycelium blocks, the Hy-Fi, in New York City. These examples fueled the curiosity to conduct experiments in this emergent material, labeled MycoMasonry in this research. The goals were to 1) research mycelium as a viable alternative material, 2) understand construction methods that could be utilized in the classroom and studio, and 3) seek potential applications for the marketplace.

A research grant provided the opportunity to conduct experiments on the mycelium bricks and how the addition of clay brick dust affected its performance. The MycoMasonry bricks made were tested based on their compression strength, fire resistance, water absorption and durability.

This study describes the process of creating baseline bricks, ‘recipes’ for adding brick dust, and the four testing methods, plus a durability test.

The goal of utilizing this research in the classroom has already been realized and is expected to grow. The next goal of technology transfer has also materialized with a local manufacturer of structurally insulated panels (SIPS) interested in researching the replacement of Styrofoam in their products.

The applications of mycelium as a building material are growing to address complex global issues using local solutions and this research is adding to this growth in a unique manner.

Concrete remains one of the most environmentally impactful materials in global construction; however, emerging strategies can mitigate its environmental footprint and even enable the creation of carbon-sequestering concrete elements. Soft Shells is a design research project that explores the integration of digitally controlled fabric formwork and CO₂-sequestering concrete mixes to develop low-carbon, high-performance architectural elements. As an initial exploration into sustainable alternatives, this work proposes a locally implementable and globally relevant approach for reducing embodied carbon while expanding the expressive potential of concrete architecture. The formwork system uses stretchable textiles whose knitting patterns are designed computationally to deform predictably under the gravitational hydrostatic pressure of wet concrete. By adjusting local material properties via CNC knitting or incorporating localized reinforcement, we can guide how the fabric stretches, sags, and reacts under load. This digitally informed form-finding process generates complex, doubly curved shell geometries that are structurally efficient and formally intriguing. Crucially, these geometries increase the exposed surface area, significantly enhancing the rate of CO₂ absorption during and after curing. Fabric formwork improves fabrication efficiency and sustainability because it is lightweight, reusable, and uses minimal material, reducing both waste and casting costs. Its flexibility and compatibility with digital workflows make it well-suited for resource-limited construction settings, as well as customizable or modular systems such as panels, vaults, and compression shells. To evaluate environmental performance, we tested a series of carbon-absorbing concrete mixes, each employing a distinct sequestration additive. Each additive represents a unique approach to CO₂ uptake. Multiple concrete shell specimens were fabricated using these additives, along with a set of control specimens using traditional mixes without additives for comparative evaluation. We conducted CO₂ absorption tests using calibrated CO₂ meters. The results confirm the hypothesis that surface-area amplification through fabric-formed geometry, in combination with targeted additive use, measurably improves post-cure carbon sequestration.

Thin concrete shells are efficient with their capabilities to carry loads through geometry rather than material mass. However, they are rarely built today due to the costly, wasteful formwork. This paper tests a simple, CAD/CAM-friendly alternative that programs a standard woven textile. The main goal is to cast shells that become thick where demand is high and thin elsewhere. We start from a 2D structural field (topology regions) indicating where material should accumulate. Those regions are converted to stitch paths and stitch densities. Then they’re sent to a CNC lock-stitch machine. The stitched textile is tensioned on a bending-active plywood frame and used as the casting surface. Stitches locally stiffen the fabric and steer wet concrete during the pour. Areas with few or no stitches sag and thicken, while dense stitched areas stay thin. We fabricated one unstitched control and three stitched one-way shell strips at different stitch densities (1:20 scale; expansion cement (Rockite) mix held constant). After curing, each piece was captured with a mobile, image-based 3D scan. Five transverse sections and one longitudinal section per prototype were captured to check whether thickening occurred under the intended stitch regions. Results show that stitching can guide section changes. The medium-density specimen produced a clear mid-span rib that matches the analysis band and remains continuous along the span. It supports pocket-controlled pooling without blocking flow. The low-density specimen showed weak ribs (stiffness too low), while the high-density specimen sometimes bridged over stiff bands (stiffness too high). Overall, the method provides results for repeatable, analysis-aligned thick-thin sections using inexpensive equipment and standard fabric. Limitations include qualitative thickness reads and the need to tune base-fabric elasticity versus stitch density. Future work will add quantification, refine stitch spacing to avoid bridging, and couple section control with load testing and vaulted-slab components.

Concrete is the most widely used construction material globally. Despite its versatility, it is typically poured into stiff, rectilinear formwork that restricts formal exploration and leads to considerable material waste and higher carbon output. Fabric formwork offers an alternative in which flexible textiles shape fresh concrete into structurally efficient geometries such as thin shells and catenary arches. However, a persistent challenge remains that forms optimized in tension under gravity often crack when rotated into their final compression orientation. Previous research has focused on form-finding and fabrication workflows, with little attention to damage-free reorientation. This paper addresses this gap through two contributions: a CNC-milled repositionable frame with soft-to-rigid connection details enabling controlled tilt-up reorientation without damage, and a scalar reframing that embeds small repeating catenary units within larger building components such as walls and slabs. The research pursues three objectives: (1) to design and refine compatible textile–concrete combinations, with particular focus on non-woven geotextiles; (2) to develop a CNC-cut, repositionable frame system that redistributes stresses during reorientation; and (3) to devise robust soft-to-rigid connection details that permit safe demolding and handling. Through material testing and iterative prototyping, the study identifies concrete paste–geotextile pairings that produce high-quality surface finishes. A tilt-up method was developed where the frame rotates with the arch, minimizing tensile stress. Results demonstrate that catenary arches can be cast, released, and reoriented without cracking or damage. These findings advance fabric-formed concrete toward low-tech, materially efficient structures with reduced environmental impact.