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.

Solar photovoltaic (PV) generation now lies at the heart of the most decarbonization plans. Policy and decision makers need more than energy forecasts, like clear estimates of the annual economic value of each plant in particular market context. This study examined a harmonized solar-to-grid dataset from the U.S. Department of Energy for distributed photovoltaic systems. The study applies machine learning methods to model and interpret the economic value of distributed photovoltaic systems using two value-based performance metrics: Energy_Value_MWh and Total_Value_MWh. By framing PV systems as socio-technical infrastructure, the analysis integrates physical generation characteristics with temporal and regional market context. Three regression models: Support Vector Regression (SVR), Random Forest, and Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) are evaluated using operational, temporal, and spatial features, including annual generation, installed capacity, year, balancing authority, and geographic identifiers. Model performance is assessed through coefficient of determination (R²), root mean square error (RMSE) and predicted-versus-actual visual analysis.

Results indicate that ensemble tree-based models substantially outperform SVR across both targets. Random Forest achieves the strongest overall performance, with R² values exceeding 0.88 and consistently lower prediction errors, while XGBoost demonstrates comparable accuracy with slightly higher dispersion at extreme values. Feature importance analysis reveals that temporal evolution and regional grid structures dominate PV economic outcomes, whereas physical generation alone plays a secondary role. These findings highlight the importance of contextual and system-level factors in PV valuation and demonstrate the potential of machine learning as a planning-oriented tool for evaluating renewable energy performance within architectural and urban energy systems. The proposed framework supports more informed decision-making in PV design, deployment, and policy evaluation across diverse built environments.

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.

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 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.

This study evaluates the annual daylight performance of solid and perforated exterior shading devices across two contrasting climates, San Antonio, TX, and Seattle, WA. Using a standardized 10 × 10 × 10 ft testbed and a parametric simulation workflow in Climate Studio, the analysis compares vertical fins and overhang-based strategies with perforation ratios of 20%, 40%, and 60% across south, east, and west orientations. Daylight performance is assessed using LEED v4.1 climate-based daylight metrics, Spatial Daylight Autonomy (sDA300/50) and Annual Sunlight Exposure (ASE1000/250).

Results indicate that shading performance is strongly climate and orientation dependent, and perforation does not universally outperform solid shading. In San Antonio’s sun dominant conditions, solid shading and low perforation (approximately 20%) provide the most reliable ASE control while maintaining daylight availability, whereas high perforation (60%) increases overexposure and is not recommended. On east façades in San Antonio, ASE reductions are largely insensitive to perforation level, while west façades remain most sensitive to low angle afternoon sun, favoring solid fins or low perforation for limiting ASE. In Seattle’s diffuse dominant context, low perforation (approximately 20%) most consistently matches solid shading in ASE control while preserving high sDA, whereas higher perforation ratios (40–60%) are more façade dependent and can reduce the ASE benefits achieved by solid or low perforation devices, particularly on the south and east façades. Overall, the findings position perforated shading as a climate responsive alternative to solid shading that can preserve daylight access while controlling overexposure when perforation ratio and orientation are selected in alignment with local sky conditions.

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.

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 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.

Urban residential outdoor spaces (UROS) offer opportunities for rest, recreation, and social interaction, but reliable tools to measure their provisions are limited. This study developed and validated a comprehensive UROS provisions scale for higher-income apartment residents in Mumbai, India. Survey data were collected from 142 adult married women with children, covering greenness, walkability, exercise opportunities, children’s play, and social/cultural activities. The scale demonstrated excellent internal consistency (Cronbach’s α = 0.88), high inter-item correlations, and strong sampling adequacy (KMO = 0.86). Exploratory factor analysis supported a unidimensional structure explaining 55% of variance, with meaningful factor loadings for all items. Bartlett’s test confirmed adequate inter-item correlations, and “alpha if item deleted” analyses indicated all items contributed meaningfully to the construct. These results indicate that the scale is both reliable and valid for assessing perceived UROS provisions. To illustrate its application, the scale was used in a regression model examining psychological distress, highlighting its potential for research on mental health and urban well-being. The UROS provisions scale provides a robust, survey-based tool for assessing access to and variety of outdoor spaces in urban settings. Further research could refine it for greater generalizability and international relevance.

How can architecture students learn to apply design solutions informed by local knowledge to problems of global scope? A design studio pedagogy based in cross-cultural exchange offers opportunities for transfer of local knowledge to address global issues. The joint studio brings together US and Iraqi students to explore sustainable architecture and urban design solutions for a warming planet. The underlying hypotheses are (1) designing for one another’s local sites will enable students to both learn from and teach one another, (2) distance, both literal and philosophical, will foster critical perspective.

Methodology: First, students exchange local knowledge via a research component designed to introduce place, people, problems, building materials, technologies, and traditions of the two sites. Next, students engage in quick tactical urbanism design interventions to test their understanding of one another’s sites and receive rapid feedback. Finally, students engage in an extended design project with a shared program located in each other’s’ cities. Throughout the project, students engage one another with questions, requests for information, photos, videos, and critiques.

Findings: The most vivid lesson for the US students is that the Iraqi students regularly live with ambient temperatures higher than we have ever experienced. There is a dawning realization that this project affords those in the US a window into their own future. There is also a wealth of traditional passive design strategies for shading interiors, creating urban shadows, and ventilating buildings. For the Iraqi students dealing with the effects of war, disinvestment, and escalating global warming, the studio experience offers fresh ideas about how to transform cities into sustainable places for human life.

Conclusions: The project arms both Iraqi and US students with tools to design for the future of their own cities as well as a methodology for discovering and addressing local impacts of global issues around the world.

The early 20th-century open-air school movement offered a spatial model grounded in natural ventilation, daylight, and continuous environmental exchange. These schools employed permeable construction and semi-exposed learning spaces to support respiratory health and psychological well-being. Although this approach declined with the rise of antibiotics, mechanical conditioning, and risk-averse building codes, its core principles have renewed relevance as sealed educational environments face growing climatic, health, and pedagogical limitations.

This paper revisits the open-air school as a model for rethinking classroom design in the 21st century, one that resists the fully sealed enclosure in favor of more responsive, breathable building envelopes. Through a typological analysis of three hybrid institutions in Brazil, Burkina Faso, and Vietnam, the study examines how controlled porosity - implemented through breathable envelopes, ventilated voids, and open-air circulation - supports three critical dimensions of learning environments: thermal agency, social resilience, and pedagogical engagements. These precedents demonstrate that modest, well-designed forms of environmental exchange can reduce heat loads, strengthen community stewardship, and transform building operations into daily, embodied opportunities for environmental learning.

Building on these insights, the paper proposes a Pedagogy of Porosity, advocating for school environments that are neither fully sealed nor fully exposed but calibrated to mediate airflow, temperature, and social interaction. By repositioning the envelope as an adaptive interface rather than a rigid barrier, the study argues that air itself can become a central architectural medium - one capable of advancing comfort, health, and educational experience in a warming world.

This paper investigates the Public–Private–Philanthropic–Provider (P⁴) model as a historically grounded, multi-sector governance framework for scalable non-market housing in Canada. It asks: (1) What institutional and civic conditions enable P⁴ to emerge? (2) How do the four sectors interact to produce durable housing outcomes? (3) Under what conditions can P⁴ be adapted in jurisdictions with varying nonprofit or philanthropic capacity?

Using a qualitative comparative methodology, cases were selected based on: (a) explicit involvement of public, private, philanthropic, and nonprofit “provider” actors; (b) documented long-term affordable or below-market housing outcomes; and (c) geographic diversity within Canada, supplemented by at least one international example. Data sources include organizational and government documents, publicly available reports, and peer-reviewed literature. Analytic methods combine institutional analysis — tracing governance arrangements, funding flows, and risk allocation — with design and spatial evaluation examining how land tenure and ownership structures reflect multi-sector alignment.

Drawing on the 2023 Canadian Network of Community Land Trusts (CNCLT) census and documented activity of the Community Land Trust Foundation of British Columbia (CLTFBC), the paper situates P⁴ within an expanding non-market landscape. As of 2023, at least 13 Canadian CLTs steward nearly 10,000 units nationally, with projected growth of approximately 24% by the end of 2024. In British Columbia, CLTFBC manages approximately 2,000 homes with roughly 1,000 additional units in development.

Findings suggest that P⁴’s primary contribution is institutional rather than architectural: it stabilizes land tenure, redistributes early-stage risk, and enables nonprofit providers to operate at portfolio scale. While P⁴ does not inherently reduce construction costs or guarantee architectural innovation, it restructures incentives across sectors and extends the time horizon of housing governance. Positioning housing as a “wicked problem” (Rittel and Webber 1973), the paper argues that institutional alignment — rather than technical novelty — emerges as the critical lever for durable affordability.

Houses 14 and 15, designed by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, were part of the Weissenhof Estate, a 1927 housing exhibition organized by the Deutscher Werkbund and financed by the City of Stuttgart. Under the artistic direction of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the exhibition showcased designs that aimed to provide innovative solutions for urban housing. The buildings were rented to the public after the exhibition concluded.

Despite their architectural significance, Houses 14 and 15 remained unoccupied for approximately eight to nine months following the exhibition, distinguishing them from other Weissenhof structures that transitioned to inhabited residences. Inspired by railroad sleeping and parlor cars, Le Corbusier designed the duplex with transformable spaces through sliding partitions and convertible furniture, embodying “programmatic superimposition.” Following painter Anton Kolig’s occupancy (1928–1932), the building underwent extensive modifications in 1932–1933 that altered its spatial organization, eliminating multifunctional features and conventionalizing room arrangements. While substantial scholarship documents Le Corbusier’s theoretical contributions, limited research examines the relationship between spatial design features and occupancy patterns in this experimental housing project over its 79-year residential lifespan.

This study examines how spatial organization and subsequent modifications influenced occupancy patterns across the duplex’s 79-year residential lifetime, employing a mixed-methods analysis integrating floor plan analysis, occupancy documentation, and primary-source examination. The research reveals a stark pattern: the original design attracted one tenant over five years, while the modified design sustained multi-family residential use for decades. Analysis demonstrates that Houses 14–15 achieved flexibility. The sliding partitions, convertible furniture, and transformable spaces functioned as Le Corbusier intended, but the design lacked adaptability for diverse user needs, appealing primarily to artistic occupants while deterring general-market tenants. The study extracts historically grounded lessons for contemporary transformable housing by identifying how operational complexity and spatial legibility affect acceptance of innovative residential architecture.

ABSTRACT: This paper examines Josef Albers’ abstract works as deeply informed by his visual and tactile engagement with Mesoamerican architecture. Across fourteen trips to Mexico and Central America between 1935 and 1967, Albers photographed and analyzed ancient pyramids, carved reliefs, and stepped motifs, not simply as historical artifacts but as models of integrated design, in which sculpture and architecture coexisted in spiritual and constructive unity. This paper argues that Albers’ abstractions, far from being formalist or detached, operate as transpositions of spatial intelligence: a grounded visual technology adapted from ancient architectural insight.

Central to this investigation is the xicalcoliuhqui, or stepped-fret motif, which Albers encountered at Mitla and later deconstructed across drawings, collages, and chromatic compositions. More than decorative, the motif embodied a layered cosmology of descent and return. Albers internalized this geometry not merely as form but as method, refining what he termed a decade earlier as the “activation of the negative,” a principle that dissolves traditional figure-ground hierarchies and instills equal agency in void and mass. His graphic constructions serve as perceptual gateways: ambiguous thresholds that invite the viewer into a visual descent into the picture plane, akin to a ritual journey to the pyramid’s center.

This sensibility also shaped Albers’s architectural interventions, notably his America mural (1950) at Harvard. Created entirely through the subtraction of bricks rather than their projection, America exemplifies what Albers learned in Mexico: that voids are not passive absences but structuring presences. As Neal Benezra notes, Albers viewed the equivalence of figure and ground as “a very valuable social philosophy, namely real democracy: every part serves and at the same time is served” (Benezra 1983, 23). This relational ethic, rooted in Mesoamerican aesthetics and Gestalt theory, underpins his broader visual pedagogy.

Today’s urgent discussions on the Anthropocene and climate change are reshaping human perspectives on our role in producing profound planetary transformations. Many of these changes have unfolded within the last 500 years, coinciding with European colonization and industrialization—processes that objectified nature and human life at unprecedented scales. These systems accelerated the loss of cultural diversity and ecological richness while embedding extractive practices into building, land use, and urbanization. Together, these forces have produced what Mary Annaïse Heglar (2020) describes as a “crisis conglomeration”—a convergence of social, ecological, political, and economic crises that cannot be addressed in isolation.

This paper responds to these urgencies by examining overlapping and entangled systems—social, economic, ecological, geological, territorial, and infrastructural—across multiple scales and temporal frames. It introduces and analyzes a pedagogical research tool developed by the author: Field Notes Cartographic Papers. Tested through work produced by students in Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Planning, this method draws inspiration from the radical counter-mapping practices of U.S. geographers in the late 1960s and early 1970s, particularly the Field Notes Discussion Papers (1969–1972).

Through this framework, students develop a critical position toward a chosen site by mapping environmental harm, colonial histories, social oppression, Indigenous experiences, and other layered conditions that shape both long and short temporal histories. The resulting Cartographic Paper hybridizes a foldable cartographic artifact with visual documentation and a written essay, capturing a site-specific instance of crisis conglomeration while speculating on alternative futures.

The paper outlines the origins, structure, and pedagogical value of this format and presents selected student artifacts to demonstrate how local spatial analysis can engage broader global challenges in architecture, urbanism, and landscape design.

Energy use and economic growth are inherently linked, with many economists predicting a nation’s GDP based on the amount of energy it burns. While this may lead to major profits for energy companies, the coupling of energy and economic growth has negative consequences for society and the environment. This article investigates a pedagogical method focused on forecasting—predicting and envisioning the future—as a method to subvert economic and energy paradigms at the Plant Scherer coal powerplant in Juliette, Georgia. Taught in the Fall of 2023, this graduate studio focused on creating architectural futures that decouple energy from economic growth. Plant Scherer is one of the largest coal-fired power plants in the world, and when this studio was taught, it was scheduled to close by the end of the decade. Although the plant employed countless members of Juliette and had an immense economic impact on the town, Plant Scherer also created a public health crisis in the region through the pollution of local groundwater supplies with improperly stored coal ash. Considering this economic and health crisis, students were asked to envision a future scenario in which the town could thrive economically without its ties to a highly dangerous and harmful energy source. Through a method of site analysis based in economic and energetic readings of both present and future, students developed “forecasting machines” in the process of projecting alternative architectural-energetic scenarios for Juliette and the surrounding region. Students used this exercise to aid in the design of architectural interventions that addressed both the present and future of the town. In this manner, the studio embraced emerging technologies to grapple with pressing issues related to fossil fuel production in the design of a more just economic future.

Though European architecture academics cited integration being "one of the key issues" of architectural education more than 15 years ago, “integration” continues to be a hot-topic word in our contemporary context, both within and outside of Europe. The statement’s relevance to American architectural pedagogy, particularly to the teaching of Integrative (also known as Comprehensive) Studio, is no exception. In recent years, NAAB accreditation reports reveal that “SC.6 Building Integration” continues to be the most cited criteria in which US architecture programs are found to be deficient. A category of pedagogical research that addresses this deficiency by identifying and focusing on innovative methods to support “building and design integration” has clearly emerged over the last 15 years.

This paper positions itself within this body of research, arguing that taking students to sites of innovative building construction holds pedagogical value by contributing to higher rates of knowledge and design integration. Through the author’s three years of teaching Integrative Studio, and by incorporating visits to active, innovative construction sites into the studio curriculum, the author argues that such exposure to the physicalized dialogue between design and its resolution in construction is an effective way of teaching integration, interdisciplinary problem solving, and the interconnectedness of architectural design with its local building culture.

The author outlines the critical framework for how construction sites were determined in Fall 2022, 2023, and 2024, its relationship to NAAB criteria SC.6, and its pedagogical relevance in strengthening the outputs of student work to meet the new accreditation standards of “integration.” This preliminary research demonstrates that incorporating construction site visits into the Integrative Studio curriculum is a topic worthy of further study, opening-up compelling pedagogical avenues for architectural education not just in America, but in other contexts as well.

Early-stage architectural design requires balancing multiple and often conflicting objectives such as structural stability, high environmental performance, material efficiency, low cost, and carbon footprint. While computational tools and search-based optimization methods—particularly Genetic Algorithms—have advanced the capacity to evaluate large design spaces, many of these methods remain difficult to use. They often require text-based coding, rely on rigid workflows, and restrict designer interaction to the beginning or end of the optimization process. As a result, the potential for continuous feedback, qualitative assessment, and adaptive reformulation during the design process remains underexplored.

This paper presents Morpho, a multi-objective, designer-in-the-loop design exploration framework implemented as an open-access Grasshopper (GH) plugin. Built on a Genetic Algorithm, Morpho introduces an interactive workflow that supports both quantitative and qualitative evaluation of design alternatives. Its core features include: (1) seamless integration with diverse GH-based simulation tools; (2) dynamic reformulation of objectives and constraints during runtime; (3) continuous visual feedback through real-time data visualization and image capture; (4) a non-destructive population database that preserves all generated solutions for re-evaluation; and (5) prioritizing visual programming instead of text-based scripting. Together, these features allow designers to explore, assess, and refine design solutions without restarting the optimization process or losing prior data.

In this paper, a case study on a folded-plate CLT toroidal dome examines Morpho’s capability to manage both divergent and convergent search phases while evaluating structural performance, life cycle assessment, and fabrication waste. The study highlights how Morpho enables designers to incorporate both objective metrics and subjective preferences within the same exploration workflow.

The findings position Morpho as an advancement in interactive, performance-informed design—bridging the gap between automated optimization and creative authorship. By lowering technical barriers, integrating multiple performance domains, and emphasizing designer agency, Morpho contributes a practical and adaptable framework for early-stage architectural decision-making.

Post-disaster housing demands solutions that balance speed, cost, and environmental responsibility; however, the long-term sustainability of Modular Construction (MC) remains insufficiently quantified. This study addresses this gap by integrating simulation-based Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), parametric energy modeling, and multi-objective design optimization to evaluate the environmental performance of modular housing systems used in disaster recovery. Using a workflow that integrates Parametric Environmental Simulation Tools such as Rhino-Grasshopper, Ladybug/Honeybee, and BIM-based LCA, the research assesses embodied carbon, material efficiency, operational energy use, and construction duration for modular units compared with conventional construction. The findings show that MC can substantially reduce embodied carbon and material demand relative to traditional building methods, with reductions generally ranging from 20% to 35%, depending on unit type and material configuration. Multi-objective optimization (MOO) further identifies modular design options that balance rapid assembly with improved environmental performance, revealing that optimized modules can achieve lower emissions while maintaining competitive construction timelines. Energy simulations indicate that modular units perform comparably to, or in some cases better than, conventional buildings in operational energy use, particularly when envelope parameters are adjusted to reflect local climate conditions. The results also highlight key trade-offs common in post-disaster reconstruction, such as the tension between rapid deployment and long-term carbon performance, or between standardized modular design and the need for climate-responsive adaptation. These findings align with broader net-zero debates that emphasize the need to reconcile speed, cost, and carbon reductions within urgent reconstruction timelines. By integrating the Parametric Environmental Simulation Toolkit into a unified workflow, this study provides a replicable framework that supports evidence-based decision-making for designers, policymakers, and emergency response agencies seeking low-carbon, climate-adaptive housing solutions.

The construction industry has traditionally been slow to adopt new technologies, largely due to the scale of projects and the challenges of integrating emerging systems into established workflows. Rather than rethinking the design process from the ground up, many conventional approaches apply new technologies to existing design paradigms. In structural design, beam members have been a central focus of optimization efforts; however, most studies address isolated parameters, such as material efficiency, structural performance, or fabrication constraints, without unifying them within a comprehensive multi-objective optimization (MOO) framework.

This study introduces a metric-based design method grounded in a MOO framework aimed at optimizing concrete beam members. Unlike prior work, the proposed approach incorporates equations that governs the geometry of the beam, generated through the use of flexible formwork. These equations serve as the core design variable in the optimization process, enabling a continuous and parameterized exploration of beam shapes that balance multiple objectives. The method targets the simultaneous minimization of material use and fabrication complexity while maximizing structural efficiency.

By providing a direct solution that informs formwork design and integrates into the MOO model, this research offers a practical and adaptable tool for construction professionals. The approach lowers the barrier to adoption by emphasizing simplicity and ease of implementation, supporting the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry’s broader transition toward more sustainable, high-performance, and digitally integrated design practices.

Embodied carbon encompasses the greenhouse gas emissions resulting from all stages of a building’s life cycle, including the production, transportation, installation, maintenance, and disposal of construction materials. As operational emissions decline due to energy efficiency improvements, embodied carbon has become a growing share of total emissions in the built environment, making it a critical target for climate mitigation. However, the implementation of embodied carbon policies remains limited worldwide, shaped by a complex interplay of environmental, economic, institutional, and trade-related factors. This research examines policy adoption across 37 countries using structural equation modeling to test ten hypotheses grouped into four thematic areas. The results show that countries with higher exposure to climate risks and stronger institutional capacity are more likely to implement embodied carbon regulations. In contrast, economies with significant trade exposure often face constraints, as they must navigate the tension between environmental responsibility and maintaining economic competitiveness. Additional model testing reinforces the influence of global trade dynamics and economic structure. The study suggests several key policy directions: enhancing institutional readiness, supporting vulnerable nations through targeted mechanisms, and promoting international coordination to integrate embodied carbon into broader climate and trade policies. These insights offer practical guidance for accelerating decarbonization in the construction sector.

Across the Southeastern United States, many families live on inherited land passed down through generations, legally known as “heirs’ property”. This occurs when land transfers without a will, creating a “tangled” title among multiple heirs. Nationally, about .5% of land is heirs’ property, and similar challenges in preserving land tenure appear globally. In the rural southern United States, this percentage is much higher. Despite its prevalence, heirs’ property remains largely invisible to formal institutions, leaving families vulnerable to exploitation and unable to access financing or adequate housing.

Despite legal and policy barriers, these communities have developed informal systems of land and social managements. Yet, lack of legal recognition of shared ownership continues to erode landownership. This paper proposes rural housing cooperatives to formalize and protect what already exists. These cooperative models reflect the communal nature of heirs’ property settlements, offering legal structures that promote affordability, democratic governance, and mutual ownership. In doing so, they present an opportunity for designers to innovate and help address the complex intersection of housing, land access, and community resilience.

Through a series of built case studies in the Black Belt, this paper aims to demonstrate how long-term community investment and the hands-on process of designing and building homes are serving as models in the partnership with larger institutions, bridging the gap between policy, law, and architecture. This implementation-based approach brings abstract challenges into tangible solutions. Our work engages directly with families, not only as researchers and designers, but as advocates and collaborators. Though our approach is grounded in our locale, the issues being faced can be found on much larger scales as informal land tenure and housing insecurity affect communities worldwide. By supporting local, culturally rooted solutions, we can contribute to more inclusive and adaptable models for equitable land access and sustainable housing.

As climate change intensifies the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect, cities worldwide are adopting mitigation strategies to reduce temperatures and enhance outdoor thermal comfort. However, most interventions are planned and evaluated at the city scale, often overlooking the finer-grained microclimatic, spatial, and social variations that exist within neighborhoods. This oversight creates a critical knowledge gap in understanding how effective UHI mitigation can be tailored to the localized context where the heat variation is most acutely felt, at the neighborhood level. This research addresses that gap through a comprehensive literature-based study that identifies and evaluates heat mitigation strategies applicable at the neighborhood scale. Drawing on peer-reviewed case studies, simulation-based research using environmental modeling tools, and applied urban design interventions from diverse global contexts, the study synthesizes an evidence-based typology of neighborhood-level strategies. These include green infrastructure (e.g., urban greening, green roofs, green walls), blue interventions (e.g., misting systems, fountains), and albedo modifications (e.g., cool roofs, reflective pavements, road color change). The study analyzes how emerging research can inform localized policy tools. Using a policy translation lens, the findings are framed to generate urban design guidelines and performance-based environmental standards that reflect neighborhood-specific needs. The review highlights how simulation outputs can be integrated into design regulations to inform vegetation coverage or surface reflectivity thresholds, ensuring outdoor thermal comfort during summer. The findings reveal that neighborhood-scale interventions demonstrate measurable cooling potential. Compared to top-down, citywide implementations, these strategies can be co-designed with local stakeholders and adapted to distinct urban morphologies, demographic needs, and infrastructural realities. Therefore, the study proposes a knowledge-to-policy framework that bridges scientific modeling with real-world applications. By elevating neighborhood-scale heat resilience as an actionable planning domain, this research contributes to the development of place-based solutions. This approach provides a scalable model for translating hyperlocal interventions into broader urban resilience strategies.

Biophilic design that is inspired by natural forms is visually complex and can be abstracted into its fractal pattern features. Fractal patterns are a cascade of self-similar patterns over a range of magnification scales, building visual stimuli that are inherently complex. The complexity varies between the fractal objects based on the relative contributions of the coarse and fine-scale patterns. Previous studies discovered that low-to-mid-range complexity fractals, which are particularly prevalent in scenes of nature, are aesthetically preferred and processed more efficiently by occupants. However, these studies have not adequately tested occupants’ perceptions of fractal patterns in architecture as they are applied to architectural materials, such as flooring, ceiling, and partitions, or as objects in space. This problem is magnified by the complexities of replicating and testing fractal-based architectural components in real environments due to financial and methodological constraints of producing and applying them. This study aims to test alternative methods of simulating fractal-based patterns in virtual environments (VR) and compare occupants’ perception of them to real physical environments. In a within-subjects experimental design, the study tested the different perceptions of participants (n=19) of fractal patterns applied as carpets on the basement floor for a public lobby space of a laboratory building. Each participant was asked to rate their perception of both environments in terms of their excitement, stress, engagement, boredom, and appeal in space. The initial findings suggest that participants found fractal-based patterns in surfaces with the complexity dimension of D=1.6 to be appealing and exciting. Paired Samples t-tests revealed no significant differences between Real and VR ratings for all five judgment types. This finding suggests that VR environments--when well designed and simulated to match real spaces--can provide a high factor-of-reality and are similarly perceived to real settings when studying fractal-based architectural materials and objects in space.

This study investigates how three-dimensional spatial configuration and lighting jointly influence occupants’ emotions and productivity in an immersive virtual reality environment. A within-subjects design was used in which forty-two participants experienced eight virtual rooms created by combining four spatial configurations (Base, Wide, High, Deep) with two lighting conditions at correlated color temperatures of 2600K (warm) and 5200K (cool). Participants reported emotional responses using State-Trait Anxiety Index items and completed cognitive tasks, including the Stroop Test, the Operation Span Task, and Tetris. Workload was evaluated using selected NASA-TLX items. Results revealed that calmness and relaxation were significantly lower in the High room, and worry ratings were significantly higher, indicating that increased vertical height reliably reduced emotional comfort and heightened perceived tension. Warm lighting significantly enhanced positive emotional responses across several spatial configurations relative to cool lighting. Cognitive performance also varied across room types. Stroop accuracy was significantly lower in the High room than in the Wide and Deep rooms, suggesting impaired attentional control in vertically enlarged spaces. In contrast, OSPAN math accuracy was significantly higher in the High room than in the Wide room, indicating improved cognitive processing under vertical expansion. This effect was more pronounced under Cool lighting, which produced significantly higher math accuracy than Warm lighting within the same spatial conditions. Tetris performance was significantly higher in the Deep room than in the Base room, reflecting stronger spatial reasoning in deeper configurations. Workload responses were generally stable, though irritation was significantly higher in the High room than in the Deep room, showing that room geometry shaped frustration levels. Overall, the findings demonstrate that spatial configuration and lighting produce significant differences in emotional comfort, cognitive performance, and perceived workload. These outcomes highlight the importance of evaluating architectural features as integrated components within immersive virtual design processes.

Hemp-lime composite research has grown 19% annually since 2007, yet social dimensions account for just 2.92% of the literature. Questions about occupant experience—factors that drive market adoption—remain unanswered. This study addresses that gap through phenomenological interviews with twelve occupants across eight households in the UK, France, and Netherlands, each with at least five years of occupancy. Analysis of over 1000 coded segments across nine categories produced unambiguous findings. Comfort and Wellbeing achieved a perfect score. Thermal performance proved consistent across climate zones. The substrate required virtually no maintenance over 10–15 years. Most significantly, 100% of participants would choose hemp-lime again—unprecedented consensus in building material research. Each dwelling represents a hyper-local response to a global materials challenge. This research lifts those local stories to a global scale, translating tacit knowledge into structured findings—making lived experience as visible as technical metrics for the adoption decisions that the construction industry's decarbonization agenda urgently requires.

Feng shui and geobiology are two traditions of environmental diagnosis rooted in different cultural contexts. Practiced in China for over three millennia, feng shui interprets mountain forms and water flows to achieve environmental harmony. Geobiology, developed by Hartmann and Curry, examines underground water veins, geomagnetic fields and electromagnetic fields to understand their influence on human health. Although geomantic theory is based on qi and geobiology relies on physical measurements, both assume that invisible energies influence well-being and perception. Today, neuroscience and quantum biology, without directly referring to these models, provide a conceptual foundation that helps clarify hypotheses concerning the links between the physical environment and the internal state.

These perspectives invite a dialogue between ancient knowledge and scientific approaches. In this spirit, this article proposes a comparative framework combining feng shui, geobiology and international scientific standards. It draws on fieldwork conducted in three villages: Hongcun, Xidi and Chengkan. The methodology combines three approaches: geomantic analysis examines principles of site selection; geobiological analysis studies the Hartmann and Curry grids; finally, measurements of light quantity, air quality and acoustic comfort are conducted using classical scientific instruments such as lux meters and CO₂ sensors. The data are integrated as layers within a Geographic Information System (GIS) to enable spatial overlay and comparison.

The results show that feng shui functions as a form of vernacular spatial intelligence grounded in sensory experience and symbolism. Areas defined as comfortable, often near water and well ventilated, coincide with areas perceived as auspicious. This correlation echoes the identification, in geobiology, of balanced or pathogenic points. By articulating a comparative framework that juxtaposes symbolic, sensory and scientific diagnostics, this study contributes to clarifying how different epistemic traditions evaluate spatial health while maintaining the epistemological distinction between them. It draws on the relevance of traditional knowledge in heritage and design.

Emerging technologies have continually challenged the limitations of traditional glassmaking and expanded the material’s potential in architecture and design. Despite other glass forming methods reaching acceptable tolerances for architectural integration, ‘Frit Lace’, a Kilnworking technique that involves fusing crushed glass particles, has remained limited due to its reliance on a labor-intensive manual arrangement of finely ground glass. This research questions how digital fabrication might meaningfully integrate into the traditional craft of Frit Lace. In doing so, this paper explores how digitally fabricated deposition masks might balance maintaining an acceptable tolerance in the final form while allowing the organic nature of molten glass to corrupt and enhance the artifact.

The technique developed during this research offers a method of kilnforming glass that does not require the use of a refractory mold during firing, instead allowing the glass to remain unconstrained while molten. By allowing freedom of movement during the firing process, this technique reveals consistent behavioral patterns that can be analyzed to study the shape behavior and movement of the glass relative to its digitally designed pattern and loose frit arrangement.

Through a series of tests, a recurring phenomenon emerged: angular shapes consistently softened, forming rounded corners as the molten glass settled into a stable shape. This behavior led to the development of the term ‘radius of repose’ which serves as a conceptual counterpart to the ‘angle of repose’ used to describe the stable shape of granular materials. Once understood this ‘radius of repose’ can be predicted and designed for, resulting in a process that offers predictable outcomes and repeatable results. This digitally enhanced frit lace method could help close the gap between the dynamic movement of molten glass and computational control, creating a path for further integration of this historically delicate craft within the world of architecture.

Museum visitors are usually guided along specific routes and given specific information. This pre-determined information can limit visitors' understanding of how the artifacts relate to each other and to the broader context. While museum design efforts aim to create coherent narratives, spatial layouts often restrict interpretive experiences. This paper explores reimagining museum experiences using a design-led research approach based on Jane Rendell’s Critical Spatial Practice (Rendell 2006).

A spatial design intervention developed for the Rezan Has Museum in Istanbul is presented. In this project, the connections between the original layout and the exhibited artifacts were analyzed and then reorganized thematically using graphic mappings. These mappings used visual elements such as directional arrows, line types, and color-coded connections to express conceptual relationships implicit in the museum's original display. Drawing on Jane Rendell’s interpretation of the Site/Non-Site dialectic, the resulting spatial configuration was transferred to a new architectural context, a gallery space, where the logic of the museum was reconstructed as an open topography (Rendell 2011). This displacement created a layered experience, allowing for a changing form of interaction where the participant reconstructs spatial memory through embodied movement. The transition from observation to active experience challenges the conventional concept of the visitor, revealing their transformation into a participant.

The research proposes an alternative model that can be applied on a global scale, based on local museums with spatial limitations or low visitor numbers. The aim is to increase both the sustainability and accessibility of cultural heritage through its flexibility, portability, and context sensitivity. Thus, the museum is transformed from a static repository of the past into a living and participatory public platform where social relations and collective memory are constantly renewed.

This study presents an interdisciplinary and multi-university project-based learning (PBL) framework that integrates three courses—Sustainable Construction, Methods of Inquiry, and Life Cycle Assessment—to address four pressing environmental challenges: wildfires, hurricanes, tornados, and extreme heat. Grounded in evidence-based design, the model emphasizes real-world data and case studies to inform sustainable and resilient architectural solutions. At its core is a collaborative workflow where 8 student teams of 89 students analyze residential buildings that uniquely survived catastrophic events. These “sole survivor” structures form the basis for comparative analysis across three dimensions: architectural design, construction methodology, and life cycle performance. Each team selects a case study aligned with one hazard and investigates resilience strategies, material choices, and environmental impact.

The workflow fosters interdisciplinary collaboration and systems thinking. Undergraduate students in Methods of Inquiry lead research and data collection using qualitative and quantitative methods. While graduate students in Sustainable Construction students evaluate structural and material systems for durability, adaptability, and environmental impact. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) graduate students quantify environmental performance using LCA tools, offering a cradle-to-grave perspective on sustainability. This triadic approach reinforces course-specific learning outcomes while encouraging synthesis across disciplines. Real-world survivor structures provide a tangible foundation for rethinking and prototyping scalable solutions responsive to local vulnerabilities and global climate adaptation needs. Preliminary results from a pilot implementation indicate four student projects, sentiment analysis, pluses and delta of student engagement, critical thinking, and the ability to translate empirical evidence into actionable design strategies. Students reported greater confidence in interdisciplinary collaboration and a deeper understanding of how design decisions affect long-term environmental performance and human safety. Ultimately, this framework offers a replicable model for embedding climate resilience, sustainability, and evidence-based sustainability education, cultivating future designers and builders prepared to lead in an era of environmental uncertainty.

The confluence of climate crisis and resource depletion demands a fundamental shift in architectural practice from extractive to regenerative paradigms that respond to finite planetary limits. This research addresses the critical gap between global environmental imperatives and locally responsive material solutions, investigating how architectural education can cultivate practices that are simultaneously place-based and globally conscious. The paper presents a pedagogical framework that examines circular construction assemblies using regionally sourced materials, positioning material ethics as foundational to this approach.

The study employs two complementary design research methods across multiple scales and geographic contexts. Un-Stacking interrogates stereotomic systems through reclaimed building materials, developing protocols for dismantling and reassembling salvaged stone, brick, concrete, CMU, and rubble. This method evaluates existing built environments as material repositories rather than waste streams, comparing environmental and economic impacts to conventional demolition practices. Re-Framing explores tectonic systems designed for complete disassembly using regional biomaterials. This method investigates modular assembly strategies that embed lifecycle sustainability from conception, developing innovative joinery and connection systems that enable architectural adaptability while ensuring complete component recovery and repurposing.

Student research projects demonstrate these methodologies through comprehensive material mapping, prototype development, and proof-of-concept assemblies. Through these projects, students developed protocols for ethical material sourcing that reduce dependence on energy-intensive manufacturing and long-distance transportation. These protocols were tested through physical prototypes that validate both technical feasibility and pedagogical efficacy. The research contributes: (a) pedagogical models for integrating material ethics into design education, (b) methodological frameworks for evaluating material provenance and lifecycle impacts, and (c) design prototypes and proof-of-concept assemblies demonstrating regional circular construction systems. By reconnecting local material opportunities with planetary ecological imperatives, this work offers practical pathways toward a post-extractive architectural practice that serves both regional communities and global environmental stewardship.

Climate-induced migration is increasingly reshaping global settlement patterns, creating urgent demands for adaptable housing and urban design strategies. This paper proposes Adaptive Modular Urbanism (AMU) as a framework for examining temporary and resilient settlement approaches supporting climate-displaced populations. The study investigates how flexible spatial systems and modular construction methods can respond to environmental uncertainty while maintaining social and cultural adaptability.

The research employs Participatory Action Research (PAR), integrating semi-structured interviews (n=45), field observations over two years, and GIS-based spatial mapping conducted between 2019 and 2025 in migrant settlements in Mexico and modular container-based housing communities in the United States. The comparative framework examines two distinct settlement production models: informally constructed migrant encampments developed through resident-led adaptation and institutionally planned modular communities utilizing container architecture. Settlement performance was evaluated using participatory assessment metrics addressing cultural responsiveness, durability, scalability, environmental comfort, and spatial adaptability.

Findings indicate that informal settlements demonstrate strong cultural adaptability and community agency but limited environmental resilience, with notable progress over time in spatial organization and social spaces. Container-based modular communities provide structural stability, and rapid deployment may constrain cultural personalization. The study suggests that resilient migration settlements benefit from integrating socially generated adaptive practices with modular technological systems. Adaptive Modular Urbanism contributes a design framework supporting participatory, flexible, and climate-responsive settlement strategies applicable to evolving migration conditions.

Global climate challenges often manifest as localized discomfort within buildings, including overheating, glare, and excessive energy consumption. Conventional solar control systems—such as large awnings or mechanical louvers—tend to be rigid, visually dominant, and disconnected from occupants’ experiences. This project proposes an alternative approach through a distributed system of small-scale shading devices composed of knitted textiles, 3D-printed scissor mechanisms, and Arduino-controlled servos.

Rather than relying on large monolithic interventions, the system operates through multiple modular shading units positioned across a window surface. Each unit combines the elasticity of knitted textiles with lightweight scissor mechanisms fabricated through additive manufacturing. The knitted membranes expand and contract seamlessly, while micro-controlled servos actuate the mechanisms in response to environmental sensors or user input. Together, these components enable dynamic adjustments to solar angles, local microclimates, and occupant preferences throughout the day.

Parametric design tools guide the development of textile patterns with localized elasticity, allowing the membranes to form volumetric geometries when deployed and collapse softly when retracted. This patterning produces shading elements that move beyond flat surfaces, introducing tactile and decorative qualities that contribute to the spatial experience of interior environments.

Within broader discussions of architecture’s role in climate action, this research explores how softness, adaptability, and distributed small-scale interventions can support environmental performance. By reducing reliance on mechanical cooling and encouraging passive solar control, the system promotes both thermal comfort and occupant agency. Its modular structure and accessible materials allow adaptation across diverse climates and building types.

By integrating textile craft, digital fabrication, and responsive technologies, the project demonstrates how small architectural devices can contribute to broader conversations on sustainability and climate-responsive design.

Buildings are often designed as static shelters; it’s time they became active participants in our everyday environment, responsive to climate, occupant needs, and real-time data. The built environment presents an opportunity for global decarbonization, yet approaches to building management lack proactive structures that allow AEC professionals to support climate adaptation. While architects and engineers have mastered comfort through mechanical control, the next age of design demands re-grounding design through awareness. Reyner Banham termed the “Well-Tempered Environment” to articulate how architects engage with the conditioning of built spaces. This research positions sensed data as an essential tool in this relationship, bridging between design intent, lived performance, and long-term climate goals. This investigation proposes a “Well-Sensed” framework: a system for integrating sensor networks, digital twins, and strategic system modelling into the lifecycle of existing buildings. The scheme enables continuous environmental feedback, turning building operational data into a dynamic tool for decision-making across maintenance, retrofit, and operational design. Establishing a network of awareness, the system supports AEC service providers in assessing and acting on live performance data through the accurate contextualization of degrading assets. Engaging with built typologies at live, contextualized and quantitative levels, this aims to enable design practitioners to develop individualized life cycle pathways to manage aging building stocks across diverse and complex design contexts. Contributing value-additive and intelligent investment tools, this framework engages with building owners and occupiers to quantify asset value and realize shifting potential through design intervention. This exploration contributes a conceptual and technical bridge between data, design, and behavior, redefining the architect's role in responsive and evidence-based design practices to maintain and promote stewardship and agency of the built environment. Transforming sensing into a tool for understanding rather than control, the Well-Sensed approach offers a scalable path toward more intelligent, adaptive, and climate-conscious building management.

This interdisciplinary research investigates the spatial relationship between Urban Heat Island (UHI) effects and the potential for photovoltaic (PV) solar energy generation on the North Carolina State University (NC State) campus in Raleigh, North Carolina. As urban campuses face rising energy demands and climate challenges, understanding where to integrate renewable infrastructure is critical (Santamouris,2015). This project combines geospatial analysis, remote sensing, and energy simulation to identify locations with elevated surface temperatures and high solar potential,key indicators for PV deployment.

Satellite-derived thermal imagery and land surface temperature (LST) data were used in ArcGIS Pro to map UHI intensity and locate urban "hotspots" (Voogt&Oke, 2003). These were overlaid with solar irradiance maps generated using NREL’s PVWatts Calculator (Dobos,2014) to model PV energy potential on rooftops and open spaces. Cooling degree days and building-level energy consumption were integrated to assess the link between thermal stress and energy demands, especially for buildings in high-UHI zones.

Results show strong spatial correlations between high surface temperature areas and high solar irradiance, highlighting optimal zones for PV installation. Buildings most affected by UHI also exhibited elevated cooling loads during peak summer months, emphasizing the need for renewable energy offsets. Comparative analysis between denser, developed areas and more vegetated or open zones demonstrated that urban buildings experience stronger UHI effects while offering greater solar energy capture potential due to reduced shading and higher irradiance.

This study contributes to campus sustainability by providing a replicable, data-driven framework for evaluating UHI intensity and identifying solar-ready zones through integrated geospatial and energy modeling (Zhou et al.,2011). Findings support NC State University’s sustainability and climate resilience initiatives by guiding strategic investment in renewable infrastructure and demonstrating how co-analysis of environmental stressors and energy potential can inform equitable, integrated campus planning.

This research was supported by the Sustainable Futures Fellowship at NC StateUniversity.

This proposal investigates how community-driven maker activities and digital fabrication techniques can be woven into the adaptive reuse of postindustrial sites across West Texas. Through situated case studies around the former Reese Air Force Base in Lubbock, Texas, particularly the transformation of the base into a technology center now operating as Reese Technology Center, the inquiry considers how embedded workshops and participatory design labs invigorate underused infrastructure, promoting both economic growth and cultural resilience. Utilizing a mixed-methods strategy that pairs archival review of redevelopment records with semi-structured interviews of local partners, participatory mapping sessions, and field observations of active fabrication labs, the study will produce a Tech-Enabled Reuse Toolkit. This resource will distill step-by-step fabrication workflows, community engagement protocols, and policy guidance crafted for mid-sized postindustrial regions eager to replicate Reese’s model. The core research questions are as follows: In what ways do tech-supported maker labs strengthen neighborhood skills while reimagining local industrial legacies? What tangible impact do these labs have on diversifying the economy and energizing cultural life? How might the lessons learned at this scale shape city planning codes and architecture courses nationwide? By connecting these local efforts to the worldwide discussion on urban resilience, the proposal suggests that innovations specific to a place can create solutions for reducing economic downturns, environmental dangers, and the fading of industrial history on a larger scale that can be applied elsewhere.

Middle Housing regulations have a great potential to increase housing production to address Oregon’s anticipated shortfall of 29,522 dwellings. Medium-density forms, such as Townhouse and Cottage Cluster, are now allowed in formerly low-density zones. The aim of this study was to understand how this recent legislation is translated to design and development standards, and how those standards influence feasibility and production. We analyzed the development and design standards for two Oregon cities, Eugene and Bend; contextualized these findings through the analysis of interviews with planning officials and from each city; and created analytical drawings from those standards to assess potential housing production. The results indicate that while there is no individual design and development standards that cause impediments to production, the application of the standards in infill lots creates challenges for cottage clusters and townhome production. This research closed the visualization gap between regulation and implementation by leveraging an interdisciplinary collaboration between architecture and planning. This analysis of Oregon’s specific Middle Housing reform, unique to the state and hyper-localized by each of its cities, provides a model for other regions experiencing the two crises of housing deficits and scarce developable land.

Housing shortages in small American cities demand place-specific solutions that honor local building traditions while addressing contemporary needs. This paper presents the Alley House Program in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania as a model of collaborative, technology-enabled housing research that revives historic secondary housing units to expand affordable supply. Through participatory processes, such as oral histories, citywide surveys, and design workshops, the Program documented over 7,000 potential development sites and engaged residents in visioning new construction. An interactive web-based guide translates this knowledge into an accessible tool enabling homeowners and civic leaders to explore site-specific development possibilities through a structured decision tree and site-tailored design templates. The Program demonstrates how "technologies of consensus,” both participatory processes and digital tools, can democratize housing knowledge, build community support, and unlock infill capacity within the existing urban fabric. This approach offers a replicable framework for small cities confronting housing crises with limited resources, demonstrating how place-based strategies grounded in local spatial conditions can generate scalable, adaptable responses.

A growing body of research has demonstrated that access to fresh air indoors is closely linked to improved cognitive function, reduced absenteeism, and greater overall workplace satisfaction. Yet, the consequences of inadequate ventilation are often difficult to isolate in occupied office settings. This paper draws on a unique, naturally occurring experiment in a high-performing Atlanta office building, where a mechanical failure in the dedicated outdoor air system (DOAS) resulted in a complete loss of mechanically ventilated air for two months during the winter of 2024.

Continuous environmental monitoring over the course of the year revealed that, during the HVAC malfunction period, indoor carbon dioxide (CO₂) concentrations routinely exceeded the ASHRAE recommended threshold of 1000 ppm and, on several occasions, rose above 2000 ppm during working hours. These values contrast with an average of 557 ppm when the system was operating normally, highlighting the magnitude of the deviation.

To explore the broader implications, air quality data from the malfunction period is compared alongside anonymized financial productivity metrics provided by the firm, as well as occupant satisfaction surveys. Preliminary survey results suggest a marked decline in perceived air quality, comfort, and satisfaction during the malfunction period, reinforcing the critical role of ventilation in supporting a healthy and effective workplace.

This case study offers compelling evidence of the tight coupling between ventilation, occupant experience, and workplace performance. It highlights the vulnerability of even high-performing buildings to system failures and the need for continuous monitoring and resilient HVAC design. These findings underscore the importance of treating air quality not only as a health factor but also as a vital asset for organizational productivity and wellbeing.

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.

Thermal alliesthesia is a psycho-physiological mechanism that governs the conditions of thermal pleasure in architectural spaces. It includes thermal pleasure arising from physiological reactions in non-steady and non-uniform environments, defined as temporal and spatial alliesthesia, respectively. Recent studies have outlined that this concept can be expanded to include non-sensory and broader cognitive processes, such as acquired pleasure from previous memories and architectural experiences, acknowledging both the psychological and physiological impacts of thermal stimuli. It is essential to understand the parameters that impact occupants’ perception of thermal alliesthesia to develop a comprehensive approach to designing built environments that not only maintain thermal comfort but also promote thermal pleasure and occupants’ well-being. However, the parameters governing thermal alliesthesia in architectural settings remain unclear. In addition, an integrated framework that incorporates both the physiological and psychological dimensions of this mechanism is still lacking. This gap in the literature limits opportunities to design spaces that are both thermally engaging and comfortable to occupy.

This paper reports on a systematic literature review to deduce a comprehensive framework illustrating the mechanisms of the three aspects of thermal alliesthesia: temporal, spatial, and phenomenological. A bibliometric analysis conducted using CiteSpace examines the evolution of research, disciplinary fields, and emerging fronts. This is followed by a theoretical development of the parameters that govern thermal alliesthesia in historic buildings, as an example for applying the alliesthesia mechanism in architecture. This application focuses on identifying the architectural parameters of thermal alliesthesia associated with both the physiological dimension of temporal and spatial alliesthesia and the psychological dimension of phenomenological alliesthesia. The paper concludes by identifying the gaps in the literature that warrant further investigations of thermal alliesthesia in architecture. In addition, it develops a comprehensive framework that details the mechanisms and architectural parameters for managing thermal comfort and thermal pleasure in architecture.

This research paper investigates the use of knitting as a site-specific architectural intervention in post-conflict urban environments, specifically focusing on the city of Mostar in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Once celebrated for its diversity, Mostar faced devastating destruction during the Bosnian War, resulting in the loss of sixty to seventy-five percent of the city’s infrastructure[1] and marking it as one of the most contested urban landscapes in the former Yugoslavia. Today, Mostar stands as a symbol of ethnic division, with urban sites still visibly and symbolically marked by the conflict. These remnants of war, such as fractured façades and abandoned structures, serve as enduring scars in the collective urban memory of post-war Mostar.

Our project engages with these remnants of war through the development of an architectural textile and covering that both acknowledges and responds to the trauma embedded in the built environment. The project reimagines Gottfried Sempers’ notion of “dressing” (Bekleidung)[2] in architecture as a retroactive act, applying a literal garment (Gewand) that wraps the existing structure. The project explores the integration of computational tools toward the development of context-responsive textile patterns and designs using digital knitting machines. Historically rooted in domestic labor and intergenerational knowledge, knitting carries both symbolic and material weight. Its strength and flexibility allow for adaptable forms that can wrap damaged architectural surfaces, reactivating them without erasing their historical significance. Using a variety of knitting techniques to control stitch density and placement, the project creates customizable textile patterns with varying degrees of porosity, while referencing design elements that have been lost because of the wartime destruction. By integrating traditional knitting techniques with computational design tools, the project creates a structural and cultural system that responds to the complexities of post-war reconstruction.

The paper situates this intervention within broader discussions on memory, heritage, and architectural agency in post-conflict environments. It explores the relationship between the individual envelope of clothing and the collective envelope of architecture, framing knitted coverings as a second skin that mediates between past and present, destruction and renewal. Through this lens, knitting becomes a generative methodology for healing—transforming static ruins into dynamic spaces for reflection, engagement, and repair.

Historic religious buildings are dense vessels of cultural memory whose artworks and fabrics are increasingly threatened by unstable indoor environments. Fluctuations in temperature (T) and relative humidity (RH), varying light, and airborne pollutants drive deterioration mechanisms from fungal growth and varnish failure to thermal shock and wall disaggregation. These risks are shaped by local climate and control practices and are amplified by extreme weather and long-term climate change. This study examines preservation and climate resilience through the 18^th-century Mission Nuestra Señora de la Purísima Concepción de Acuña (San Antonio, TX, USA), part of a UNESCO World Heritage site. Built of locally quarried limestone with ~1 m thick walls, the church typifies high-thermal-mass vernacular construction, offering a testbed for how traditional envelopes buffer indoor climates under stress. Objectives were to: i) evaluate current and projected indoor environmental performance in a high-mass church; ii) test the role of natural ventilation (NV); and iii) assess adaptive performance across ASHRAE climate zones 2A (hot-humid), 1B (very hot-dry), and 3B (warm-dry). A year-long monitoring campaign from May 2023 until May 2024 recorded hourly indoor/outdoor weather conditions, informing a calibrated DesignBuilder model. Future weather files were produced with CCWorldWeatherGen, and scenarios were simulated in EnergyPlus for two cases: NV (all windows open) and no NV (all openings closed). Results show thermal mass delays and attenuates outdoor T swings but cannot alone maintain conservation-appropriate conditions under extremes or projected climate warming. NV strongly impacts RH and thus conservation risk, with especially adverse moisture exposure in hot-humid contexts like San Antonio. Projections indicate rising cooling demand and heightened RH-related degradation. Integrating historical material knowledge with calibrated simulation, the study argues for climate-specific, hybrid strategies that respect cultural heritage while improving resilience: controlled NV schedules, targeted air-sealing and moisture management, and minimal, reversible conditioning to supplement mass-based buffering.

Urban furniture, often dismissed as a minor or strictly utilitarian component of the built environment, plays a decisive role in shaping behavioural patterns, social dynamics and public life. This paper examines how everyday urban objects - including vending machines, benches, smoking booths, tactile surfaces, and makeshift resting points – function as cultural and governance interfaces within four global cities: Tokyo, New York, London, and Berlin. The aim is to analyze how small-scale infrastructural elements vary in their spatial regulation, cultural meaning, and levels of behavioural tolerance. To investigate three categories of objects (formal and informal seating, micro-functional fixtures, cultural-aesthetic elements), this study employs a comparative qualitative methodology drawing on field observation, photographic documentation, typological analysis. Neighborhoods in each city were selected based on the intensity of public life and the diversity of street objects. Through this approach, the paper examines how people occupy, adapt, or avoid specific elements within street life. In the analysis, it uncovers how Tokyo’s streetscape enables a high degree of informal occupation and multifunctional use due to its behavioural norms as well as cultural acceptance of spatial ambiguity. In contrast, Western cities operationalize urban furniture by emphasizing standardization, regulation and durability – though some notable exceptions include New York’s food carts and Berlin’s community-built benches showcasing structured informality. The study focuses on developing a nuanced comparative framework where it shifts from uncovering the East-West binaries towards highlighting how social norms, governance cultures and design traditions shape everyday public life through seemingly ordinary objects. The findings reveal how everyday objects shape micro-public life and rethink the design of public furniture, which opens pathways for more inclusive, culturally expressive and responsive streetscapes. Overall, this paper encourages Western contexts to reflect on the value of ambiguity, multi-functionality, and micro-scale cultural specificity.

As populations in urban areas now exceed half the global total, many rural areas face serious challenges, including population decline, aging demographics, and deteriorated infrastructure. These issues are intensified by climate change and global economic pressure, making rural communities around the world more vulnerable. Many of these places are now struggling with insufficient public services, land insecurity, and the disruption of traditional ways of life. In response to these challenges, this paper explores how design can function not merely as a product or service, but as a collaborative process that empowers rural communities to create more equitable, healthy, and resilient environments. Based on several years of our research and community-based design projects in rural Senegal and Kenya, this paper presents participatory design and planning strategies that respect and incorporate local knowledge, cultural values, and spatial contexts. Rather than relying solely on outside expertise, these approaches prioritize the lived experiences and social values of communities. While these methods may not be new to design and planning practice, they are carefully curated as part of an inclusive framework for developing spatial interventions that directly respond to community needs. These tools are not intended as one-time events or symbolic gestures of participation, but as critical entry for ongoing dialogue, trust-building, and collective decision-making. The paper further challenges architects and designers to rethink their roles within such processes. In rural communities where institutional planning capacity may be limited or does not exist, architects and designers are encouraged to look beyond the role of service providers and embrace that of advocates and leading collaborators. This includes initiating and supporting fundraising efforts, facilitating inclusive planning processes, and maintaining long-term engagement beyond project completion. In this context, design becomes an ongoing act of care and commitment to working with communities, not simply delivering design solutions for them.

Community Resilience describes a community's ability to withstand, adapt to, and recover from challenges such as natural disasters, economic hardships, and social disruptions. It involves bouncing back from adversity while reducing long-term negative effects on daily life, the economy, and overall community well-being.

This paper documents the initial steps in creating a comprehensive strategy to revitalize a cotton mill workers’ village in rural Alabama. By leveraging the historical significance of the cotton mill community, the project seeks to foster sustainability and resilience within the community. One of the primary objectives is to reimagine the legacy of workers’ housing, transforming it into a modern, sustainable environment that meets the needs of 21st-century residents. Prefab 21 is an ongoing research project by the author that encourages students to interact with stakeholders while creating design-build opportunities. This iteration of the Prefab 21 project focuses on replacement housing in the Workers Village, providing functional and attractive housing for current and future generations. This involves designing and building new housing that reflects contemporary architectural standards while honoring the historical context of the area.

This project is a collaboration with Kennesaw State University, Auburn University, EARTH, Difference Architecture, and the community of Sylacauga, designing prototype small house units for affordable replacement housing in the Avondale Mills Workers’ Village. The construction of these prefab houses will be part of the workforce training program being developed in Talladega County at the high schools, community college, and the EARTH campus. Creating a collaborative strategy with these stakeholders optimizes the building process and replacement strategy. Developing the workers’ village masterplan explores density strategies for small-house development and creates new approaches for affordable housing, new economic models of ownership, and evaluates new strategies, with smaller lots, higher density, and microvillage concepts. The goal is to create sustainable communities integrating housing, jobs, and economic development.

This paper examines a multidisciplinary, service-learning design studio conducted in collaboration with a community-based organization in Santiago, Dominican Republic. Positioned at the intersection of design education, critical pedagogy, and global engagement, the project sought to cultivate students’ cultural competence, socio-environmental awareness, and ethical design practices through direct, community-centered collaboration. The studio foregrounded the design of a public space, a Plaza in the Tropics, that responded to the cultural, ecological, material, and spatial dynamics of the Caribbean context, while advancing a pedagogy of reciprocity. Drawing upon Paulo Freire’s (1970) model of critical pedagogy, the course was structured as a praxis-oriented learning environment in which students engaged not merely as designers but also as co-learners embedded within a collaborative, multi-disciplinary process. Through field immersion, participatory workshops, and sustained dialogue with Fundación Red de Misericordia, students co-developed architectural proposals rooted in the expressed needs, cultural practices, and aspirations of the community. This reciprocal model disrupts traditional hierarchies of knowledge production and design authorship, reflecting Freire’s vision of education as a collaborative act of liberation. bell hooks (1994) further enriches this framework through her notion of “education as the practice of freedom,” where engaged pedagogy demands the full presence of students and teachers alike. This studio embodied that call by integrating emotional, intellectual, and ethical dimensions into the design process. This paper will offer insight as to how research into environmental and spatial justice, vernacular building knowledge, passive climate strategies, and material systems of tropical design created a foundation for the design work. Emphasizing shade, cross-ventilation, and the use of locally sourced materials, student proposals embodied climate-responsive strategies that resonate with the indigenous modes of dwelling exhibited by the Taino Indigenous peoples. In this way, the studio operated within a decolonial framework, in favor of pluralistic, place-based knowledge.

Energy infrastructure facilitates modern occupation of buildings – with electricity comes the ability to heat and cool spaces for comfort, to keep food refrigerated, and to complete tasks safely after the sun has set. However, in times of changing climates and increasing natural disasters, electrical access is not guaranteed in many contexts; when the power is out following a severe weather event, the spaces of daily life are compromised, no longer safe and functional in the ways they are with electricity.

In the mountain town of Adjuntas, Puerto Rico, homes and businesses were left without power for up to a year following Hurricane Maria in 2017. Following this disaster and the subsequent recovery process, the local community organization Casa Pueblo realized the need for energy independence and developed a microgrid that unites the buildings around Adjuntas Square to power local businesses, including the pizzeria. While the aesthetics and spatial qualities of Lucy’s Pizza remain largely unchanged by this intervention, the power grid enhances the ability to occupy the restaurant. In this way, architecture has been made more versatile and more resilient through an infrastructural project that has unified the community.

The example that is the Adjuntas Plaza microgrid and how it has allowed ordinary architectures like that of Lucy’s Pizza to adapt is local in its realization, spearheaded by a homegrown institution and responding to specific problems faced in the context. However, there are lessons that can be extrapolated and applied to vulnerable communities. How can existing architectures be made more adaptable through relatively simple infrastructural systems and technologies? How can sustainable infrastructure unite a community? This paper, utilizing site visits, documentation, and interviews with participants in the Adjuntas microgrid project, will analyze the project and discuss how places in a community can be made more resilient through energy infrastructure.

This paper presents an open source framework that converts block level travel demand outputs into building level electric vehicle charging load profiles through a three stage stochastic simulation process. The workflow connects activity based travel behavior, temperature adjusted trip energy estimation, and probabilistic charging dynamics to generate hyperlocal EV load profiles tailored to different building types.

We describe this workflow as a technology of place. It is locally calibrated using city specific mobility patterns, building stock data, and charging infrastructure, while remaining transferable to other urban contexts. A case study in the City of Ithaca demonstrates the framework’s ability to reproduce realistic daily charging patterns across activity categories and to reveal significant spatial and behavioral variation in EV demand.

Using Ithaca as a testbed, we evaluate three scenarios. The first represents present conditions, with approximately one percent EV adoption and existing charging infrastructure. The second projects a ten year scenario with twenty percent adoption and thirty additional charging locations. The third models a 2050 future with eighty percent adoption and a mix of Level 2 and DC fast chargers. Scenario based load intensity maps show how neighborhood scale infrastructure decisions can either concentrate or redistribute charging demand across the city.

Clustering analysis identifies representative daily load profiles that can be integrated into Urban Building Energy Modeling workflows. By explicitly linking travel behavior, spatial context, and charging dynamics, the framework provides a stronger basis for evaluating building and district scale energy performance under transportation electrification. The open source release supports transparency, replication, and adaptation by researchers and practitioners seeking to translate local design and policy interventions into broader energy planning insights.

Puerto Rico’s fragile energy landscape is marked by fossil fuel dependency, climate vulnerability, and infrastructural inequities that present a critical opportunity for place-based transformation. The interdisciplinary graduate landscape architecture studio, Energy Landscapes: Puerto Rico, examined how landscape architecture can guide a transition to renewable energy systems that are not only technically viable but culturally and ecologically grounded.

Focusing on Puerto Rico’s southern coast, the studio investigated the spatial legacies of extractive industry, including the decommissioned Aguirre power plant and the remnants of the sugarcane economy. These post-industrial territories were reimagined as generative landscapes capable of supporting decentralized, community-based energy systems. Students developed design strategies that integrated solar energy production with habitat restoration, public space, food systems, and civic infrastructure.

The pedagogical framework emphasized systems thinking and multi-scalar design, linking energy infrastructure to the social, ecological, and material realities of local communities. Studio activities included site visits, stakeholder engagement, expert lectures, and the use of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as an evaluative framework. Students engaged the island’s energy challenges through community-based research, spatial analysis, digital modeling, and speculative design.

Proposals explored agrivoltaics, landscape-based carbon strategies, adaptive reuse, and participatory planning. Emphasizing resilience and flexibility, the projects envisioned energy landscapes as living systems in which technical performance is inseparable from cultural meaning and ecological health that serve educational, social, and environmental purposes.

Informed by research from organizations such as Cambio, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), the studio addressed tensions between centralized grid models and the island’s growing movement toward distributed, community-owned energy.

By situating renewable energy within a broader landscape narrative, the studio demonstrates how design can reshape energy infrastructure as a catalyst for ecological repair, cultural memory, and community resilience.

Transportation network expansion has accelerated landscape fragmentation, disrupting ecological connectivity across regions. While wildlife crossing structures offer significant ecological and safety benefits, strategic siting decisions remain largely reactive rather than evidence based. This study presents an integrated geospatial and machine learning framework to predict wildlife crossing suitability at landscape scale and identify areas of unmet demand where ecological need is high, yet infrastructure is absent. We developed a methodology combining five national datasets (species density, population density, natural trails, road networks, and existing WCS inventory) standardized into a unified 10 × 10 km grid covering Spain. After applying ecological assumptions to filter zero-presence cells and outlier variable ranges, we trained four supervised machine learning algorithms (Linear Regression, Random Forest, Gradient Boosting Machine, and Support Vector Regression) using spatial cross-validation on 1,573 grid cells representing 28% of the complete dataset. Model performance was evaluated using RMSE, MSE, MAPE, and residual diagnostics. The Gradient Boosting Machine emerged as the optimal model, achieving test RMSE = 3.113 and MAPE = 2.103%, with homogeneous error distribution across prediction domains. Applied to Spain's complete territory, predictions identified critical and high-priority zones requiring immediate crossing infrastructure investment. Results demonstrate that fragmentation in Spain exhibits two distinct patterns: structural vulnerability forming continuous barriers in the northern plateau, requiring large-scale corridor restoration; and dispersed fragmentation in the south and east, demanding targeted micro-interventions. This framework provides policy-ready spatial guidance for infrastructure investment prioritization, translating predictive models into actionable design and conservation decisions. The methodology is transferable to other regions with comparable open-access geospatial data, supporting transdisciplinary and landscape-scale connectivity planning.

This paper develops, tests and expands a conceptual framework for digital placemaking tailored to the complex realities of informally structured cities in the Global South. As digital tools become increasingly prominent in urban planning, their deployment often reflects technocentric models rooted in Global North contexts. These approaches tend to prioritize optimization and datafication, neglecting the informal spatial practices and limited civic trust that shape many urban environments.

Grounded in participatory urbanism, this study proposes approaching digital placemaking as a relational and ethical process. To operationalize this framework, a layered, mixed-methods study was conducted with two groups: design-literate students and everyday users of informal micro-public spaces.

Findings reveal that despite near-universal smartphone access, everyday users' engagement with digital civic platforms remains low. This highlights that primary barriers are not technical but rather stem from poor platform legibility and a lack of institutional trust. Furthermore, the data confirmed a persistent epistemic divide: while students overestimated public readiness for digital tools, everyday users engaged more openly in familiar, informal settings.

To address these gaps and operationalize hybrid engagement models, the framework is refined with four new dimensions: participatory legibility, spatial immersion for designers, feedback visibility, and the integration of embedded intermediaries. This research contributes to a contextually grounded, empirically tested model for designing inclusive civic technologies responsive to Global South realities.

University campuses function as daily living environments where the built environment shapes physical activity, mental well-being, and social connection. Yet most campus planning systems lack explicit public health performance criteria that link environmental quality to measurable health outcomes. OBJECTIVE: This paper develops the Outdoor Wellness–Oriented Design Strategy (OWODS), a measurable and scalable preventive-health framework that integrates Logic Model (LM) causal reasoning with the Health-Oriented Environment for Active Living Score (HEALS) to evaluate and guide outdoor environments as components of preventive health infrastructure within campus planning systems. The study addresses three questions: (1) how campus environments can be assessed using standardized health-oriented indicators; (2) how LM clarifies causal pathways linking environmental quality to health outcomes; and (3) how integrating HEALS and LM within OWODS creates a scalable framework for guiding campus planning and preventive health design. METHODOLOGY: A case study at a large public university (>70,000 population) applied HEALS scoring across seven outdoor locations, evaluating shading, safety, pedestrian accessibility, noise exposure, and social-support infrastructure, and mapped findings onto the LM pathway to examine alignment between environmental performance and preventive-health objectives. ACHIEVED OUTCOMES: OWODS demonstrates how measurable built-environment performance patterns correspond to defined behavioral pathways associated with active living, mental well-being, and chronic disease prevention. By integrating HEALS indicators with the Logic Model’s outcome and impact stages, the framework clarifies how environmental design, planning standards, and institutional governance can be systematically aligned to support preventive health objectives. The model shows strong transferability across university campuses and adaptability to broader community outdoor environments, offering a locally actionable framework with global relevance for advancing preventive-health strategies through the built environment.

This paper presents a comparative study of two evaporative cooling systems, an open-air configuration and an enclosed wall-integrated configuration, constructed from 3D printed porous ceramic modules. The objective is to evaluate how geometry, airflow, and enclosure conditions interact to produce microclimatic cooling effects in hot arid and semi-arid climates, where low humidity and high summer temperatures make evaporative strategies particularly effective. While historic precedents such as mashrabiya screens, jali perforations, and wind catchers demonstrate the long-standing value of evaporative cooling in dry regions, contemporary adoption is limited by material constraints and construction infeasibility.

Two ceramic block designs were developed iteratively and tested. One relies on exposed surface channels that promote rapid evaporative cooling under airflow. The other contains internal, semi-closed geometries that store water within ceramic mass compartments and release it slowly. Both geometries were tested under open and closed conditions using identical material mixes, irrigation strategies, and environmental sensing. Results show that enclosure significantly enhances evaporative persistence. Closed configurations maintained temperature differentials of 8 to 15 °F and humidity increases of 10 to 20 percent, while open configurations produced faster but shorter-lived cooling of 3 to 5 °F with rapid humidity spikes after irrigation. Design 1 performed best when exposed to airflow, while Design 2 achieved its strongest results when shielded from wind.

Together, the findings demonstrate that digitally fabricated ceramics can function as modular, climate-responsive cooling systems that adapt to airflow and enclosure. By linking material design, geometry, and environmental performance, this work positions ceramic 3D printing as a practical strategy for increasing thermal comfort in regions where mechanical HVAC is inaccessible or energy intensive.

Material efficiency in building construction must increase to avoid the depletion of natural resources. This paper reports on the development of a novel paperless design-to-construction workflow that facilitates the use of reclaimed fired bricks by generating brick patterns that can adapt to existing material stocks. Fired bricks are widely available and, due to their durability, are often ready for repurposing after their first service life. While in computational masonry research, material efficiency is often the sole objective, we present a framework rooted in a holistic approach: In traditional brick construction (i.e., using mortar), the builder’s tactile experience is still indispensable. The bonding pattern of structural masonry heavily influences its structural performance. Therefore, our framework focuses on the balance between material efficiency, structural soundness, and constructability from a human’s standpoint. Our ultimately geometrical approach constrains the solution space by enforcing a minimal ¼ brick overlap between layers and considers the trade-off between the simplicity of a pattern and its ability to adapt to different material stocks. In this paper, we present the results of a systematic parameter analysis in a contrast experiment. The first scenario assumes fully automated construction (and prioritizes material efficiency) while the second assumes human-machine collaboration (AR-assisted construction) and aims at a reasonable trade-off between efficiency and complexity. Our results suggest that simple, easy-to-follow patterns can be achieved with little compromise in material efficiency. We demonstrate this on the masonry dome, where the curved shape adds a level of complexity to the patterning challenge. By keeping the patterns simpler, we transfer much of the agency back to the builder. Therefore, the presented approach informs contemporary, human-machine collaborative construction where the emphasis is on amplifying rather than controlling the mason’s craft.

Seokguram Grotto, built in the 8th century, is a UNESCO World Heritage site located in South Korea. This Buddhist grotto is well known for its monumental Buddha statue sitting in a circular chamber with a hemispherical dome. Along with its cultural significance, the environmental strategies employed at Seokguram Grotto have successfully preserved the statue and chamber despite the region's hot and humid climate. However, the grotto has undergone several renovations that have altered its original structure, resulting in a current environment that differs significantly from the original form. Given the absence of mechanical systems at that time, examining the environmental strategies of this grotto could provide valuable insights into passive building design in similarly challenging climates. This study investigates the lighting and ventilation strategies of Seokguram Grotto, focusing on how its design adapted to the local climate without relying on mechanical systems. While numerous studies have examined the grotto's original configuration, quantitative analyses of its original environment remain limited. In response, this study provides a quantitative analysis that can serve as a reference for restoring the original environment of the grotto, helping to preserve its cultural heritage and advance passive design research. To achieve this, precedent studies on the spatial composition and environmental characteristics of the original grotto were reviewed, and a 3D model was developed based on these findings. The model was subsequently simplified for simulations. The lighting environment was assessed using four daylight metrics: Illuminance, Daylight Factor, Spatial Daylight Autonomy, and Useful Daylight Illuminance. Indoor airflow was simulated using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to identify the distribution of air velocity throughout space. Based on the findings, this study assesses the environmental quality of the original Seokguram Grotto and considers its application in a global context.

As Virtual Reality (VR) technology becomes increasingly accessible, it offers powerful opportunities for controlled investigation of environmental and lighting effects on human behavior. VR enables precise manipulation of spatial and photometric variables, allowing researchers to evaluate human responses without the constraints of physical settings. Although prior studies show that well-calibrated VR can approximate real spaces for visual perception, evidence remains limited regarding its validity for assessing behavioral and cognitive outcomes, particularly among older adults. This study examines whether a VR-based lighting environment can serve as a reliable surrogate for a real-world setting when measuring perceptual appraisals and cognitive performance in aging populations.

Thirty-seven older adults were recruited, and thirty-two met the inclusion criteria and completed both experimental sessions. Using a within-subjects, counterbalanced design, participants performed a three-dimensional Trail Making Test–inspired task in a physical environment and in a matched virtual replica. The virtual scene was generated from a calibrated high dynamic range image of the real setting, tone-mapped, and rendered as an immersive 360-degree environment in Unreal Engine. Illuminance and correlated color temperature were closely matched across conditions using spectrometric and luminance measurements.

Subjective responses indicated comparable ratings of pleasantness and comfort in both environments. However, excitement, stress, and confusion were significantly higher in VR, suggesting elevated emotional arousal and cognitive load during immersive exposure. Despite these perceptual differences, no statistically significant differences were observed in completion times or error rates. Cognitive outcomes remained strongly associated with Mini-Mental State Examination scores across both settings, supporting the stability of the assessment. Overall, the findings demonstrate that a carefully calibrated VR environment can reproduce key lighting characteristics and support valid cognitive assessment in older adults, while highlighting the need to address spectral discrepancies and affective responses in future VR-based lighting research.

The heightened vulnerability of older adults during public health emergencies, particularly those involving respiratory pathogens, has renewed attention to the role of the built environment in shaping psychosocial well-being in long-term care settings. Social isolation, already prevalent among older adults, was intensified during recent crises due to prolonged distancing, restricted visitation, and disruption of therapeutic routines. These impacts were especially severe for residents of memory care facilities living with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD), who are highly sensitive to changes in spatial organization, routine, and social cues. This paper examines the spatial consequences of health-related disruptions in congregate care environments and proposes evidence-based design strategies to strengthen social engagement and psychological resilience in memory care settings.

Through a systematic interdisciplinary review spanning environmental gerontology, healthcare architecture, public health, and behavioral science, the study identifies six immediate environmental interventions: meaningful communication, therapeutic engagement, integrated health screening, reduction of contact-related transmission, accessible outdoor environments, and calibrated spatial density to enhance personal comfort. These short-term strategies are complemented by ten long-range design guidelines to promote resilience, including spatial zoning and activity clusters, decentralized layouts, intuitive circulation and wayfinding, biophilic integration, multisensory engagement, flexibility in use, embedded infection-control strategies, personalized spaces, community integration, and technology-enhanced environments. Together, these recommendations advance a shift from reactive institutional responses toward adaptable, person-centered care models.

The analysis is framed by environmental press theory, person–environment fit, and salutogenic design to illustrate how spatial configurations influence cognitive function, emotional regulation, and social agency in individuals with ADRD. Ultimately, the paper argues that memory care facilities must be reconceptualized as infrastructures of social health, spaces that safeguard dignity, autonomy, and connection while remaining adaptable to future public health emergencies.

Tokyo is celebrated and known for its spatial efficiency and technological advancement, yet beneath this pragmatism is a pressing demographic challenge: over 29.1% of Japan’s population is aged 65 and older. As Japan becomes one of the world’s fastest-aging societies, its urban environments must increasingly support elderly well-being. Nowhere is this ethos more evident in Japan than Tokyo, the world’s largest city with densely populated metropolitan areas. Using a qualitative methodology emphasized in literature review, supported by site observation, case studies and logical argumentation, the study examines three urban conditions that contribute to senior isolation: high-density housing typologies, fragmented public spaces, and large-scale redevelopment. The research illustrates how design decisions prioritizing efficiency and commercial value will often overlook the urgent relational needs of seniors, resulting in diminished neighborhood familiarity, weakened social networks, and increased physical and emotional disconnection from the city around them. However, the study also examines design strategies that begin to foster inclusion, community, and autonomy for older adults. Drawing on contemporary planning practices, these positive ‘typologies’ include transit-oriented development and mobility access, micro-scale public realms, and intergenerational shared housing models. Furthermore, the authors propose several innovative interventions that create spaces for connection, such as memory-friendly wayfinding, care-integrated public spaces, and low commitment social infrastructure.

Ultimately, the paper argues that Tokyo’s response to senior isolation exposes core tensions between density and intimacy, growth and care, and efficiency and empathy. Drawing on literature by Gehl, Cullen, and Almazan and supported by studies from Matsumoto (2011), Drilling et al. (2025), and Raikhola & Kuroki (2009), this study reveals how spatial design of the city has the power to enable or withdraw social connection, instill or erode dignity, and reinforce or weaken agency in later life. The insights extend beyond Tokyo, offering a framework for global cities grappling with aging populations.

Computational thinking has become central to contemporary architectural practice, yet its integration into architectural education remains fragmented and uneven. While recent advances have expanded the computational design landscape, architecture students often enter these environments with limited programming experience and without the conceptual scaffolds needed to navigate algorithmic reasoning. Existing curricula frequently emphasize tool proficiency or isolated software workflows rather than developing computational literacy that supports multi-objective design exploration and informed decision-making. At the same time, research rarely employs systematic qualitative methods or iterative curriculum development frameworks to understand how architecture students learn computation and how pedagogy can be shaped in response.

This study addresses these gaps through a three-term Design-Based Research (DBR) investigation, grounded in the learning science literature, conducted in a graduate-level visual programming course. The curriculum was iteratively designed, implemented, analyzed, and refined using empirical evidence from semi-structured interviews, classroom observations, and thematic analysis. Thematic analysis revealed six major cognitive and metacognitive challenges: difficulties with abstraction, a lack of prior programming experience, time constraints, debugging challenges, unclear alignment with career goals, and insufficient early exposure to computational tools. These challenges directly informed targeted revisions, including explicit conceptual instruction, progressive scaffolding through incomplete recipe exercises, expanded collaborative learning structures, and differentiated self-paced instructional videos.

The refined curriculum culminated in a structured three-module sequence—parametric modeling, performance simulation, and evolutionary design exploration—supported by lectures, recorded tutorials, guided practice, and student-led discussions. Results demonstrate that when computational pedagogy is grounded in cognitive evidence and connected to students' design contexts, learners develop stronger agency, improved problem-solving strategies, and a deeper understanding of computation as a design medium rather than a technical requirement. The study contributes a replicable DBR-based model for computational design pedagogy, offering transferable strategies for architecture programs seeking to cultivate computational literacy that meaningfully supports multi-disciplinary design decisions.

Together, architects and engineers develop solutions while navigating complex design problems, resource limitations, and social interactions. However, differences in their disciplinary goals and training can influence how they approach collaboration. Understanding how designers approach cooperative strategies when negotiating their own disciplinary goals is useful in identifying opportunities for better collaboration and recognizing gaps in their understanding of cross-disciplinary design. In response, this study uses a game theory approach to measure and compare cooperative behavior and strategies of architects and engineers when engaging in collaboration. Thirty participants from architecture and engineering, and at the experience level of student or professional, played an established game within game theory, the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and a new game, made for the study, that documented their focus on disciplinary design goals or cooperation outcomes. Participants played the games online over a video meeting platform with a pre-programmed computer opponent and after playing as their own discipline, they played as the other discipline. Between each game, they verbally reported their strategies to the researcher. Disciplinary strategies, perceptions, and scoring outcomes were compared using a Chi Square analysis, and content analysis was used to code their reported strategies. Disciplinary identity related to differences in score outcomes and level of experience influenced different reported strategies. The results of the study support the varied assumptions between the disciplines and suggest an exploratory approach to study architect and engineering cooperation through strategic interaction. This research contributes to the understanding of interdisciplinary collaboration strategies through the context of game theory, which has not previously been explored in architect-engineer teams.

Architecture education seeks to prepare students for a rapidly changing profession. How can curricula and courses be structured to help students thrive in an interdisciplinary field? This study addresses that question by examining the Design the Future podcast. Since its 2020 launch, hosts Lindsay Baker and Kira Gould have interviewed more than 100 leaders across built environment fields.

To understand how narratives are shaped, we are conducting an AI-assisted pilot analysis of interviews. Our analytical lens is Legitimation Code Theory (LCT), a sociological framework that builds on Pierre Bourdieu’s work to explain how individuals and their knowledge gain recognition. LCT includes three dimensions called Specialization, Semantics, and Autonomy.

Our project has three aims.

1. Apply Specialization to investigate leaders’ paths across built environment fields. Interviewees describe diverse trajectories through and between disciplines. For example, Angie Brooks speaks of “breaking down the silos… creating these horizontal links between people and between what you might normally think are disparate disciplines.” Specialization reveals patterns in how ideas move across domains.

2. Apply Semantics to examine how leaders frame and communicate complex concepts. Interviewees often use concrete examples to illuminate abstraction. For example, Eden Brukman uses the case of an office chair to explain circularity, noting that it can be cheaper to discard surplus furniture than return it to a manufacturer. Semantics clarifies how complex ideas are made accessible.

3. Apply Autonomy to analyze how the podcast links built environment leadership to broader cultural and professional influences. For example, Marta Schantz cites inspiration from political figures and fictional characters such as Leslie Knope, who combines civic commitment with personal connection. Autonomy explains how external ideas are integrated into a field.

By analyzing narratives, this study shows how forms of knowledge shape broader patterns in design education. LCT offers a structured approach for addressing change.

Accurate building geometry is fundamental to neighborhood-scale building energy modeling because it directly shapes conditioned volume, envelope area, and resulting energy use patterns at both the building and district scales. Improving geometric fidelity is especially important when modeling small residential buildings in low-income communities, where reducing uncertainty in baseline simulations is necessary to support equitable planning and energy-burden aware decision making. Prototype, archetype-based building stock datasets (e.g., ORNL Model America) enable scalable neighborhood modeling; however, because they are developed for broad coverage, geometric representation can remain uncertain for small residential buildings, motivating community-specific calibration of key geometric features.

This study develops and tests a geometry-correction workflow that updates archetype-based residential prototypes using local spatial data and quantifies the impact on simulated energy performance. Two geometric updates are implemented: (1) replacing default footprints with building outlines extracted through deep-learning segmentation of high-resolution aerial imagery in a GIS environment, and (2) correcting building height using LiDAR-derived elevation differences. The workflow is applied to 22 single-family homes in a low-income Arizona neighborhood. For each home, three EnergyPlus models are simulated; baseline, height-only, and full-geometry, while holding constructions and schedules constant to isolate geometric effects.

Results show that correcting height alone increases annual site energy by an average of 16%, reflecting underestimated conditioned volume in prototype models. Incorporating both footprint and height further increases total site energy at the neighborhood scale, while moderating or reducing EUI at the building scale. These findings demonstrate that geometric inaccuracies in prototype datasets propagate to district-level estimates, highlighting the need for morphology-aligned models in energy analysis for low-income communities.

Contemporary energy-efficient building design often relies on standardized assumptions about household energy use, assumptions that do not reflect the diverse ways people consume energy across social, climatic, and cultural contexts. This study addresses this limitation by analyzing the 2020 Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS), a nationally representative dataset containing detailed information on household energy use, building characteristics, and operational behaviors. Drawing on descriptive assessment, end-use analysis, and mixed-data clustering, the study develops intensity-based energy-use typologies that characterize demand heterogeneity at the residential scale.

Results reveal pronounced variation in total consumption and energy use intensity (EUI) across states, climate zones, and housing forms, with space and water heating energy demands emerging as the dominant contributors to annual household consumption. The study also underscores the significant but frequently overlooked contribution of the “Other” end-use category, small appliances and electronics, which is often missing from conventional energy modeling practices. In addition, the results highlight the influence of building form and thermal exposure, suggesting that design strategies such as shared walls and compact massing can meaningfully reduce energy intensity.

Clustering identifies 13 statistically distinct household clusters, which are subsequently interpreted as energy-use typologies based on their distinctions in energy profiles. These typologies provide a structured framework for differentiated architectural decision-making, archetype selection informing energy simulations, retrofit prioritization, and performance target setting without asserting specific causal drivers. By translating empirical energy segmentation into design-relevant categories, the study advances a performance-informed approach to residential energy analysis that supports more context-sensitive and scalable architectural strategies.

Implementation researchers typically refer to the gap between knowing what should be done and current best practice as the "Know-Do Gap." However, in the field of residential energy efficiency, architects have long recognized the importance of reducing energy consumption through passive design strategies before offsetting energy use with renewable sources. In an era of mechanical conditioning and ventilation, however, thermal comfort can easily be provided independent of envelope design. This creates a divide where high-performance design is reserved for custom residential projects, and cost of construction dictates design decisions for the vast majority of “typical” residential new construction. This focus on initial cost seemingly precludes consideration of operations and maintenance costs, and rather than leveraging energy efficiency measures that reduce the total cost of homeownership, minimum performance baselines dictate envelope and system efficiencies. In non-profit affordable housing development, where resources must be allocated judiciously to extend impact to the greatest number of clients, the authors see a strong opportunity for beyond-code construction to be incentivized.

Using initial findings from a study measuring energy savings attributed to energy efficiency improvements in affordable, single-family housing, the paper seeks to identify data points beyond initial construction cost that can inform decisions affecting building performance. The larger study tracks how changes to physical characteristics influence the energy use of a house by measuring circuit-level consumption in eight pairs of houses constructed by non-profit affordable housing developers in a range of climate zones across the US. Initial interviews with the construction teams provide insight into their decision-making processes, and additional feedback will be gathered once energy monitoring study findings are shared with those teams. This paper documents how nonprofit affordable housing developers choose to invest in performance improvements, and results of the study will serve to inform the motivation for incentives offered moving forward.

Loneliness is debilitating and can significantly affect health outcomes, yet its underlying causes vary significantly across cultural, physical, and policy contexts. This paper compares Tokyo and Calgary as representative urban settings within Japan and Canada, recognizing that national demographic trends, governance structures, and cultural norms shape social isolation differently in each place. It is important to acknowledge the cultural and structural differences between Japan and Canada (and between Tokyo and Calgary specifically) that produce isolation beyond the influence of built form alone, and that simultaneously shape how urban environments are organized and interpreted.

Using a literature-based methodology that synthesizes OECD reports, sociological studies, planning scholarship, and urban theory, the paper examines how built environments, cultural expectations, and policy regimes interact to shape social connection and perceptions of safety. In Tokyo, chronic loneliness is closely tied to demographic aging, neoliberal labour reforms, and a ‘long-hours’ work culture, where time scarcity and norms of restraint constrain the social potential of dense, walkable neighborhoods. Shotengai shopping streets and fine-grained residential lanes exemplify Jane Jacobs’s principles of “eyes on the street,” yet their sociability is moderated by cultural expectations of efficiency and limited lingering. In Calgary, by contrast, suburban expansion, single-use zoning, and automobile dependence create spatial fragmentation that directly restricts opportunities for unstructured social encounters, disproportionately affecting seniors and low-mobility populations. This paper compares how urban form functions not as a universal cause of loneliness but as a mediator that amplifies or buffers the dominant structural drivers within each city. By critically mapping these distinct conditions, the study argues that built form must be understood within broader cultural and policy systems. The paper concludes by suggesting how each context might learn from the other: Calgary from Tokyo’s human-scaled, transit-oriented neighbourhoods, and Tokyo from Calgary’s emerging focus on social infrastructure and inclusive place-making.

With rapid urbanization, rural migration, and growing economic pressures, cities across developing countries face extreme health problems for surging populations, exacerbated by a lack of habitable, hygienic housing, drinking water, sanitation, consistent electricity, and food security. This paper presents community-engaged spatial and health focused research to connect the above domains through an evaluative framework — a Habitable Index (HI) based on collaborative research between partner institutions in the UK and Ghana. The HI model is presented as a locally tested approach to better inform transdisciplinary efforts to tackle inequity in investment, policy, planning and design that impact land-management, infrastructure and quality of life for the most vulnerable, frequently marginalized populations in developing urban and rural environments. The proposed Index, a pilot mapping tool, has been developed through internationally funded projects in two phases that address wider socio-economic and health-driven evaluations of sustainable development across academic, industrial, policy-making, and local community contexts. The paper focuses on project outcomes in the Ghanaian capital, Accra, combining quantitative and qualitative data, including drone-supported GIS mapping of existing infrastructure, surveys from government representatives, and in-situ observation with local partners and community hosts from one of Accra’s poorest and most densely populated inner settlements, Nima. The research compares Nima to an adjacent, more affluent Airport Residential Area, focusing on inequities in planning with contaminated water and waste impacts from incomplete infrastructure resulting in poor health conditions. Discussions include different spatial mapping overlays addressing both built environment and epidemiological data. Conclusions argue for the Habitable Index as an effective tool to guide future wellbeing-informed planning and urban research with transferable lessons from Nima about engaging with complex physical, social, and economic conditions for underserved settlements at local and more global scales to address shared sustainable development challenges.

Social isolation has emerged as a global health and urban design challenge, intensified by the decline of informal social spaces, rising populations, and rapid modernization. Tokyo offers valuable insight into how urban environments can balance efficiency with dignity by acknowledging the quiet undercurrent of loneliness woven into daily life. Yet public spaces—from expressive, sticker-covered passageways to intimate Yokocho lanes and expansive waterfront edges—encourage lingering, visibility, and belonging. Vancouver, by contrast, strengthens social engagement through community murals, alley revitalizations, and waterfront redevelopment. This research shows how both cities employ spatial strategies that cultivate belonging and community connection, shaped by their distinct geographies, histories, and social cultures. Tokyo’s dense urbanism reflects centuries of cultural continuity, social harmony, and small-scale adaptation, while Vancouver’s development has been shaped by waves of migration, an Indigenous past, and extensive planning initiatives. These differences create a productive foundation for comparing how context informs approaches to social connection. Findings reveal that Tokyo’s informal, culturally layered spaces—stickered-covered nooks, Yokocho alleys, and contemplative waterfronts—foster authentic interactions rooted in history and cultural memory. Vancouver’s policy-led murals, reactivated alleys, and redeveloped waterfronts reclaim public space and invite active engagement, even when less organically formed. Both cities demonstrate that social connection flourishes when design responds to local culture, history, and lived experience. By reimagining urban typologies through a culturally-grounded lens, this study offers a comparative model for understanding how cities can design more inclusive, context-responsive, and emotionally connective public spaces. The findings underscore a broader implication: addressing urban loneliness requires not only new public spaces, but new ways of designing that honor the informal, the intimate, and the culturally specific.

Sea-level rise and recurrent flooding threaten millions in urban coastal communities, yet residents remain excluded from environmental monitoring and decision-making that shapes adaptation strategies. While participatory sensing networks (PSNs) promise to democratize environmental knowledge, most implementations struggle to achieve institutional integration or sustained community engagement. This paper examines PSNs as distributed systems for community-based environmental data collection and investigates what design considerations enable them to function as integrated civic infrastructure rather than isolated interventions. Drawing on architecture's capacity to mediate between technical systems and public experience, we used Design-Based Research to develop three PSN prototypes across scales and institutional contexts. Water Wand is a mobile hydrometry system that captures water depth and quality through structured workflows with geotagged documentation during flood events. SMARTblox integrates coastal protection with ecological monitoring through modular seawall tiles combining bio-enhancing geometries, solar-powered IoT sensors, and open data platforms for continuous shoreline observation. In Deep Water is a mixed reality installation overlaying NOAA sea-level rise projections, real-time sensor data, and community narratives onto familiar geographies, evaluated with 200 participants across two coastal cities. Cross-case synthesis reveals that PSNs succeed not as standalone deployments, but as configured assemblages of devices, data infrastructures, and civic interfaces positioned within existing governance ecologies. We present the Civic Ecology Mediation Framework (CEMF), identifying four dimensions for PSN viability: 1) credibility pathways bridging citizen and institutional data practices; 2) participation models sustaining ongoing engagement; 3) public legibility making sensor systems interpretable to non-experts; and 4) governance integration without institutional capture. Our findings demonstrate that PSNs achieve greatest impact when designed to complement rather than replace institutional monitoring, filling gaps in coverage, resolution, or community engagement. We conclude with design principles for embedding participatory sensing within coastal adaptation infrastructures, including how collected data can inform stormwater design, seawall specifications, and neighborhood-scale floodplain management.

This paper presents a multi-studio investigation into how architectural pedagogy can respond to inequity, exclusion, and spatial precarity through community-engaged, site-based design research. Across four advanced design studios, students explored “safe space” as a design framework and civic responsibility. Three studios were grounded in Atlanta-based partnerships and sites, while one studio extended the model to cities nationwide. Together, the studios addressed LGBTQ+ youth and affirming educational environments, intergenerational and multi-family housing, and public maker spaces through mixed-use programs, adaptive reuse, and speculative prototypes. Each studio framed architecture as advocacy by asking what should be built—not only what is feasible within conventional typologies. In collaboration with partners including The Pride School Atlanta and Mudfire Studio & Gallery, students tested alternative spatial organizations and public–private thresholds, using making and material experimentation as a central method of inquiry. Through interviews, fieldwork, and iterative prototyping, students learned from lived experience and local cultural and ecological contexts while developing design proposals that prioritize belonging, visibility, connection, and dignity. By positioning these studio outcomes as local responses to global challenges, the paper argues for architectural education as a critical site for cultivating civic design intelligence and expanding inclusive spatial practice.

This research investigates the first phase of a two-year experimental collaboration supported by the Mellon Foundation, centered on the 2024 DMU Summer Institute Freedom Ride. Designed as a mobile, place-based workshop across Georgia, Florida and Alabama, the initiative convened 25 students and 25 educators in architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design from institutions across the U.S. and Canada. Drawing inspiration from the Civil Rights-era Freedom Rides, the journey served as both a logistical and pedagogical framework, transforming travel itself into a critical site of reflection and knowledge exchange. Participants engaged with historically marginalized sites exploring histories of enslavement, segregation, racial violence, and Indigenous resistance. Framed as a process of unlearning and relearning, the program emphasized design justice and invited participants to reconsider the architect’s role in addressing systemic inequities. Through activities outside the traditional classroom setting, such as site-responsive workshops, narrative reflection, peer-to-peer learning and peer interviews, the experience fostered themes of resilience, identity, and solidarity. The second phase—outside the scope of this essay—entails a stationary residency in a single historically significant location. Together, the two phases aim to compare mobile versus place-embedded models of experiential learning. The outcomes will culminate in a public exhibition and publication in Fall 2027, contributing to discourse on immersive, justice-oriented pedagogy in architectural education. The Summer Institute asserts that architectural knowledge is not merely taught—it develops through dialogue, critique and shared experience. This paper explores the thesis that peer-to-peer experiences have a more lasting and meaningful impact than traditional learning methods, drawing on qualitative reflections and insights gathered through peer interviews and field-based observations. Together, these reflections underscore the importance of collaborative and experiential models for cultivating deeper, more lasting forms of knowledge.

It is time to move away from a dependence on imported, industrialized materials such as concrete and steel and reconnect with the potential of earthen construction. This study addresses the divide between contemporary building practices and the sustainable, culturally rich methods traditionally used throughout Latin America. Rooted in natural materials, a diverse set of regional techniques has evolved since pre-Hispanic times, visible today in iconic examples of earthen architecture shaped by climate, culture, and place.

However, the dominance of concrete and steel has led to the rejection of traditional aesthetics and techniques. Earthen buildings are often associated with poverty, despite once forming the most sacred structures of ancient civilizations. This study challenges that perception by exploring how traditional methods can be revitalized to support sustainable, culturally grounded design.

Focusing on school construction in Chiclayo, Peru, the research evaluates how regionally sourced materials can reduce costs, limit reliance on imports, and reinforce cultural identity. Prefabricated earth wall panels inspired by the traditional wattle and daub method were developed using only local materials, offering efficiency, adaptability, and cultural value.

A wooden mold was created for consistent panel fabrication. Each panel uses a mix of earth (silt, sand, and clay) combined with local fibers such as hay and reinforced with a bamboo lattice for stability. Multiple prototypes were tested, adjusting material proportions to achieve structural durability and visual quality. By comparing traditional and contemporary practices, this study demonstrates how natural, locally sourced materials can be effectively integrated into modern construction. The resulting panels show that efficient, cost-effective, and regionally meaningful designs are possible, offering a model that can inspire similar initiatives across Latin America.

This paper traces connections between theoretical and practical frameworks of ecological architecture. In the 1990s, the understanding of ecological architecture as rooted in bioclimatic and vernacular responses to place and culture began to fold into conceptions of "green" and sustainable design. A global exchange of ideas led to the introduction of green building standards such as those developed by the Building Research Establishment in the UK and the United States Green Building Council. In 2000, the Architectural League of New York’s Ten Shades of Green exhibition curated by London-based architect and journalist Peter Buchanan highlighted the growing breadth of ecological architectural thinking. The exhibit presented a holistic view of ecological architecture including not only technological efficiencies related to energy, water, and materials but also the social, cultural, psychological, and economic dimensions of environmentally responsible design.

Twenty-five years on, this paper examines the architectural history of ecological architecture. It posits that the Ten Shades of Green represents a pivotal milestone in cross-Atlantic and global architectural discourse. It establishes the plurality of ecological architecture and examines the shared themes and divergences across environmental discourses. Noting key strands that have emerged since the 2000s, it draws inspiration from Charles Jencks’ taxonomical thinking on the evolution of architecture and situates Jencks and Buchanan within the broader eco-logics outlined by Guy and Farmer (2001). A comparative study links Buchanan’s framework to the global proliferation of green building rating systems and awarding organizations. Grounding this discussion in post-2000 building examples, including work by women architects, community-led initiatives, and projects in non-Western contexts, the paper uses a comparative lens and inductive reasoning to highlight emerging societal values shaping ecological practice. Revitalizing the Ten Shades of Green today offers a relevant philosophical guide to practice in an era of continued social and environmental crisis.

This study examines the design and construction of housing for the Tebughna people of the Native Village of Tyonek, Alaska. While there are well-documented strategies to provide basic economical housing in the United States, there is very little work that has been done to address the extreme challenges facing native villages and remote communities of Alaska. The existing houses in the Native Village of Tyonek are struggling under the weight of snow and the probing rivulets of water that have gradually found their way through untended assemblies. The structures leak air and water, requiring immense amounts of energy to be only barely habitable through the long winter months. The situation is tenuous and dire, as the community ages and loses its youth to opportunity elsewhere. Working within this context, explicit research questions include: How can academic research support culture and community in extreme climates? How can research help to amplify the voices of a people and their cultural practices through genuine support and service? What are appropriate architectural responses to the complex and competing demands of environmental performance, culture, and climate? How can researchers better listen to the people and their native lands, recognizing the limitations of pre-formed research questions and common academic research structures? Over the last four years, we have worked alongside the people of Tyonek to address the critical housing needs in the village and to address these research questions. Our methodology has involved numerous community meetings and a robust, consensus-driven approach to building trust with the elders of the village. We conducted detailed surveys of existing housing, created proposals for new and renovated housing, and tested proposals by evaluating life cycle costs and energy efficiency. The work serves as a useful model for community-based work with remote native communities, especially those in cold climates.

Designing K-12 classrooms with proper daylighting is imperative to the educational enrichment of children. Out of all design parameters in the classroom, including temperature, acoustics, and air quality, daylight has consistently shown to have the highest impact on overall student progress. Daylight supports focus, the stability of the circadian cycle, and overall mental health. While daylight alone is a great element that supports biophilic design within classrooms, it can also be utilized in creative ways to introduce other natural phenomena that exist in nature, such as fractals. Despite the growing interest in incorporating fractal patterns in architectural spaces, few studies have explored their impacts on daylight performance in spaces.

This study evaluates the performance of fractal patterned screens on students' visual comfort and daylight performance in a typical K-12 school classroom. The goal is to demonstrate the impacts of daylight fractal patterns on students’ visual comfort and to add to the body of knowledge related to biophilia in architecture and its performative benefits. The simulation model used in this study was determined based on average K-12 classroom sizes in the U.S. A total of 3 varying perforated solar screens were modeled along with a standard glazed opening as a base case for comparison.

The results of this study suggest that fractal patterned screens offered the best performance for daylight exposure in classrooms. Fractal patterns applied to solar screens have been proven to be a practical solution for providing good quality of daylight. It also created a more enriching educational experience as the patterns of light create appealing biophilic characteristics. This study suggests that the perforation geometry of a solar-screen matters when aiming for specific daylighting performance. The performance examined from the fractal patterned screen in this study encourages the use of daylight and fractals as biophilic design elements within classrooms.

This paper examines how hemp-based materials could offer a alternative to conventional components in Virginia residential construction, exploring a potential shift to construction norms that adopt biomaterials and scalable fabrication methods. To understand the feasibility of combined hemp-based alternatives, the paper conducts a comparative case study of 3 different wall section designs that are constructed using commercially available products. The first is a conventional vinyl siding wall assembly made using standard materials, the second substituted standard materials with direct hemp-based alternatives such as hemp-batt insulation and hemp-based lumber, and the third used hemp-based products that were not direct replicas of conventional products such as hempcrete. The models are compared based on presence of VOC emissions, embodied carbon, fabrication requirements, material sourcing, and material cost. Materials are sourced by collaborating with industry leaders and American companies manufacturing hemp-based products. The paper uses Virginia as a case study, as it is in a mixed climate zone. Findings from this region can be scaled across the country. Additionally, Virginia’s temperate climate and established agriculture industry make it an ideal region for cultivating hemp. Given the legalization of industrial hemp growth with the 2018 farm bill, identifying local opportunities for industrial hemp usage is economically relevant. The comparative study found that hemp-based wall assemblies are more expensive than traditional wall sections and are more challenging to source and fabricate. On the other hand, the hemp-based wall assemblies have lower embodied carbon and VOC emissions that contribute to better indoor air quality. The findings suggest that having more sources for locally grown hemp-hurd, as well as more manufacturers for hemp-based products, could reduce costs and embodied carbon as well as increase availability for hemp-based products. This paper provides the foundation for future investment and research efforts to establish increased availability of hemp based building materials.

This multidisciplinary initiative explores the potential of a site-built stress-skin panel, the Vaulted Insulated Metal Roof Panel (vIMRP), to facilitate low-cost residential roof assemblies. This paper complements full-scale construction of the proposed roof assembly with computational modeling and analysis of the structural and thermal efficacy of the system. The proposed vIMRP incorporates corrugated galvanized metal sheets as an exposed vaulted ceiling surface to increase the structural capacity of the panel and eliminate additional costs due to Finishing Trades. This paper presents two cycles of a recursive action research sequence that weave together faculty from the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering and the School of Architecture. Findings from the research include key techniques in the sequence of construction, deflection tables, along with thermal insulation analysis and strategies for roof and eaves details.

This paper investigates strategies for re-localizing food production to mitigate inequitable access to fresh produce through polyvalent structures that address overlapping urban needs. An analytical mapping framework identifies critical and viable zones for architectural intervention, addressing how existing hydroponic typologies overlook opportunities to operate within underutilized urban conditions shaped by environmental risk and infrastructural fragmentation.

Atlanta serves as the case study due to its legacies of infrastructural disinvestment, exclusionary zoning, and stormwater vulnerability. GIS-based mapping reveals compounded stress zones—where food insecurity, transit inaccessibility, socio-economic marginalization, and flood risk intersect—informing an adaptable framework for situating hydroponic interventions as tools for urban metabolic repair.

Applications are modular. They range from small-scale hubs on flood-prone residential infill lots to vertical farming units integrated into highway bridge extensions, activating areas rendered functionally or symbolically inert by water-related issues or infrastructural neglect. Architecturally, soil-less cultivation is repositioned from concealed industrial interiors to hybrid structures with a civic interface, reframing agriculture as a public and spatial encounter. Scalable modular systems support incremental development, gradually replacing extractive supply chains. By treating water and food production as community assets, the proposal offers agencies a replicable strategy to advance public health, climate resilience, and spatial equity in 21st-century cities.

This paper presents a comparative analysis of energy-efficient retrofit strategies across three historically significant Brutalist buildings in the Western Balkans, each representing a distinct typology and climate condition: a residential complex in Sarajevo (cold climate), a civic cultural center in Kolasin (cold climate), and a multi-use congress center in Belgrade (mixed climate). The study investigates how context-specific design strategies can inform broader frameworks for sustainable retrofitting of culturally significant modernist architecture. Methods combined archival research, fieldwork, and computational performance modeling. Environmental response, envelope performance, and full-building Energy Use Intensity (EUI) were evaluated using Revit, WINDOW, THERM, WUFI, and IES-VE under both existing and proposed retrofit scenarios. Retrofit strategies prioritized improved passive thermal performance through envelope upgrades and the replacement of fossil fuel–based systems with high-efficiency electrified mechanical systems. Across all three case studies, projected whole-building EUI reductions ranged between 53–56%, demonstrating that minimally invasive retrofits can substantially improve performance while preserving architectural character. However, envelope-only interventions proved insufficient to meet energy reduction targets, yielding highly variable savings between 7–33%. Significant performance gains were achieved only when envelope improvements were combined with decoupled and upgraded mechanical systems. Findings highlight the importance of localized decision-making, as climate, construction typology, and original material assemblies directly shaped retrofit priorities and outcomes. By comparing diverse building types and urban contexts, the study demonstrates that modernist architectural stock, which is often perceived as inefficient, can be transformed into high-performing assets. The research proposes a scalable, culturally responsive retrofit framework grounded in climate-specific and typology-driven analysis, with future work extending this methodology to additional building types and regions.

This paper contributes to emerging scholarship in the design disciplines on how the built environment adapts to align with contemporary economic structures and climate impacts, particularly in post-industrial settings experiencing population decline. Using Baltimore as a case study, the paper posits a method for adapting the built environment through widespread retrofit and reuse in support of housing affordability. Combining geospatial analysis and computational design tools, the research addresses both urban and architectural scales, identifying an archipelago of intervention sites amid existing infrastructure. The research consists of two phases. First, we developed a geospatial algorithm to lend specificity to the physical characteristics of the approximately 15,000 abandoned buildings in Baltimore. Second, the newly created dataset featuring volumetric details of abandoned buildings informed a more detailed data collection phase geared toward understanding existing conditions at the architectural scale. Using a combination of aerial photogrammetric and ground-based laser scanning, we created detailed digital models that captured the as-built qualities of abandoned building shells. Whereas the geospatial algorithm enabled estimates of total numbers of unit types, the digital scans revealed minor variations among samples within each unit type. With these data, we designed the kit of parts to integrate with offsite construction processes, aiming for an economy of scale through mass retrofit. With additional testing and research, the process for modifying standardized components or adjusting mass customizable features will be combined with semi-automated systems for design and production.

ABSTRACT: As the global construction industry confronts the challenges of climate change, resource depletion, and waste generation, adaptive reuse offers a practical and culturally sensitive pathway to reduce embodied carbon in the built environment. This paper presents a comparative life‑cycle assessment (LCA) of three development scenarios for Building 12 at Pier 70 in San Francisco: demolition and new construction, adaptive reuse, and low‑carbon adaptive reuse. Using One Click LCA and a cradle‑to‑grave boundary, the analysis quantifies Global Warming Potential (GWP) and biogenic carbon storage for each scenario and links outcomes to material choices, preservation constraints, and design strategies. Results indicate that adaptive reuse (retaining structural components and façade cladding) reduces embodied GWP by 44% relative to new construction, and that combining retention with low‑carbon material substitutions—engineered timber, optimized concrete mixes, recycled steel, and bio‑based insulation—in summary, biogenic materials and circular economy practices, can further lower emissions by 65% while increasing biogenic carbon storage. The low‑carbon adaptive reuse scenario approaches a net‑negative material balance over the assessed service life (50 years), functioning as a carbon sink rather than a carbon emitter. Pier 70 thus serves not only as a redevelopment project but also as a living laboratory that illustrates how heritage structures can be transformed into environmental assets that both avoid emissions and contribute to carbon sequestration. The findings advocate for embedding adaptive reuse within evaluation frameworks, planning incentives, and design standards across the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) sectors. By shifting from demolition to reuse, the industry can honor the past while designing for a low-carbon future. The study concludes with recommendations for practice and policy to mainstream reuse as a central decarbonization strategy in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) sector.

Additive manufacturing (AM) of wood composites enables the reuse of sawdust, a byproduct of the wood industry, and offers potential reductions in construction-related carbon emissions, supporting a circular economy. Although material researchers have examined the material formulation of 3D printed wood, focusing on binder selection and mechanical characterization, there is a gap in exploring the design possibilities of 3D-printed wood. In contrast to traditional orthogonality of wood structures, this paper presents a systematic workflow for exploring topologically optimized (TO) structural wood-composite slabs for 3D printing, benchmarked against cross-laminated timber (CLT). Although the current mechanical properties of 3D printed wood are inferior to CLT, this study evaluates structural adequacy under present conditions and explores the role of TO in achieving material efficiency. To validate the simulation approach, we recreated the Gatty Wool Factory slab designed by Nervi in a CAD environment (Rhino) and analyzed its deformation and stress behavior in ANSYS, establishing a baseline for slab design and structural performance analysis. Next, a CLT slab was modeled using the same dimensions and boundary conditions as a benchmark. Methyl-cellulose (MC) was selected as the binder for the 3D printed wood-composite slab, and a set of topology-optimized wood-MC slabs was generated using the Topos plug-in in Grasshopper and evaluated in ANSYS. Several variants demonstrated structural performance comparable to the CLT benchmark. The lightest design has an average depth of 303mm, using almost twice the mass of CLT but less than half the material of an equivalent concrete slab. Its cradle-to-gate global warming potential (GWP) is estimated to be 1.3 times that of CLT and 0.45 times that of concrete, indicating that 3D-printed wood composites can provide a structurally viable and environmentally competitive alternative. This study contributes a validated methodology for linking material innovation, computational design, and structural benchmarking in support of sustainable construction.

Generative diffusion models have rapidly entered architectural practice, producing visually persuasive imagery through statistical inference over vast datasets. Yet these models remain fundamentally representational systems whose outputs frequently lack disciplinary specificity, tectonic logic, or environmental reasoning. This paper introduces a methodological framework for fine-tuning generative AI within architectural design workflows through curated datasets, Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) training, and Midjourney AI mood-boards. Rather than treating AI as a mere image generator, the research positions it as a specialized design collaborator trained through domain-specific visual knowledge. The study proposes a multi-scale generative workflow in which architectural design tasks are structured across four levels of spatial reasoning: material scale, modular unit scale, architectural element scale, and spatial system scale. At each stage, generative models are guided through curated datasets and fine-tuned models to ensure that AI outputs progressively transition from material articulation to spatial organization. The framework was implemented within an experimental elective course in architectural design, where students developed Midjourney mood-board datasets, trained LoRA models, and employed Midjourney-based generative processes to produce design artifacts across these scales. The pedagogical experiment demonstrates that fine-tuned generative AI can move beyond stylistic speculation toward structured design reasoning when guided through scale-aware workflows. The study contributes to emerging discourse on AI in architectural design by proposing a model of computational authorship grounded in dataset curation, model calibration, and multi-scale spatial reasoning, reframing the architect as an orchestrator of generative intelligence.

Deep Pixels presents a two-phase design research project that tests the use of generative AI for design ideation on building surfaces, particularly facades. This exploratory work asks how AI-generated images relate to the production of geometry that can be aligned with real buildings, rationalized, and translated into physical prototypes, with the goal of outlining how AI might contribute to a conceptual framework of facade tectonics.

Phase 1 focuses on 2D-to-3D translation through two methods that are directly compared. The first tests a NeRF and Gaussian splat point-cloud reconstruction pipeline capable of producing meshes from AI-generated video inputs. Although conceptually robust, this pipeline introduces frequent reconstruction instabilities such as irregular point densities, topological discontinuities, and view-dependent artifacts. The second method employs a direct image-to-mesh workflow using Midjourney for image generation and ComfyUI with Hunyuan 3D-2.0 for mesh synthesis. The comparative evaluation shows that the mesh-native workflow is more stable and computationally efficient and becomes the primary pipeline for further exploration.

Phase 2 applies these insights at the architectural scale, focusing on facade design. ChatGPT structures context-specific prompts that encode structural information, site conditions, and references to Detroit-based artists. These prompts are combined with elevation and section drawings in Midjourney to generate oriented facade images. Selected images are converted to meshes, registered to the building grid, panelized, thickened, and 3D-printed as sectional fragments, while attachment strategies are examined through exploded axonometric diagrams.

The results indicate that generative AI can serve as a meaningful collaborator in facade design when paired with mesh-native workflows, contextual prompts, and physical prototyping. As these tools advance and gain greater capacity to interpret multi-material assemblies, their collaborative potential will grow. The tested pipeline shows the potential for GenAI to contribute to facade design in ways that are both conceptually and materially coherent.

Current tools for AI-enabled urban design, including Digital Twins, smart-city dashboards, and sensor networks, often optimize infrastructure and predict risk. What they often miss is harder to quantify but decisive: the drainage path a neighborhood has managed informally for decades, the market that anchors a block’s economy, the ritual site that has no address. Henri Lefebvre called this the gap between conceived space, the abstract city of experts and models, and lived space, the city as people actually inhabit, remember, and sustain it (Lefebvre 1991).

This paper introduces the Cultural Twin (CT) to address that gap. The CT is a model in which community knowledge, including vernacular practices, informal systems, and cultural memory, carries equal authority in scenario generation alongside engineering performance targets. We call this civic-encoded design: community claims are formalized as constraints the generative system must respect, not suggestions it can ignore.

Methodologically, the CT proceeds in three steps. First, civic and cultural data are gathered via fieldwork: story pins, walk-alongs, mapping exercises, and oral histories. Second, this material is translated into a Conflict Ontology, a set of Boolean, boundary, and relational constraints that govern what the model may or may not propose. Third, an Assumption Ledger records data sources, interpretive decisions, and trade-offs so outputs remain contestable and revisable.

We demonstrate the logic through a flood-prone district vignette. A conventional Digital Twin tends toward levees, floodplain compaction, and relocation, reducing risk on paper while erasing informal systems communities depend on. CT scenarios pursue comparable risk reduction while keeping markets, ritual spaces, and local housing typologies intact. The difference is not better data, but whose knowledge counts as binding constraint. The CT scales not by exporting forms but by sharing translation protocols, constraint-encoding methods, and governance structures. What works in one context becomes a template, not a blueprint.

The Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry is undergoing a transformative shift with the integration of AI-supported computational co-design tools. These platforms foster real-time, cross-disciplinary collaboration among architects, engineers, fabricators, construction professionals, and clients, enabling early-stage design processes that account for spatial, regulatory, material, and social factors. As a result, design outcomes are becoming increasingly innovative, context-sensitive, and construction-ready. This study investigates the practical implementation of co-design methodologies across disciplinary boundaries within the AEC sector. Using a combination of contemporary case studies and survey data from AEC professionals, the research examines how computational platforms and generative modeling tools facilitate more accurate, integrated, and efficient design workflows. Key findings indicate that computational co-design frameworks have potential to improve project timelines, cost-efficiency, stakeholder communication, and overall design quality. The research also identifies a broader industry trend: a departure from traditional, siloed design models toward iterative, collaborative processes. In addition, the study addresses the pedagogical and institutional challenges of embedding co-design into design and construction education. It suggests that overcoming these barriers is essential for the future adoption of more sustainable, efficient, and human-centered design practices in the AEC industry.

The global demand for rapid, sustainable post-disaster housing requires solutions that leverage local resources like bamboo. While deployable bamboo structures offer resilience and flexibility, their design is complex and computationally expensive, often requiring hours of parametric simulation. This research presents a data-driven artificial intelligence (AI) surrogate model that replaces slow optimization with instantaneous prediction, democratizing access to safe design. To identify the optimal tool, we conducted a benchmark of three machine learning algorithms—Enhanced Neural Network, Random Forest, and XGBoost—across two datasets: a general design space and a specific architectural application case. The benchmark identified XGBoost as the optimal predictive engine. The results revealed a critical "Complexity Gap": while the general unconstrained model successfully predicted geometric properties, it struggled to capture structural safety (R² ≈ 0.72). However, by constraining the problem to a specific topology, the application model achieved a R² of 0.982 and a reliability index (a20) of 0.936. Furthermore, analysis of the optimization frontier revealed a beneficial conservative bias, where the AI consistently underestimates the safety of hyper-optimized designs, acting as an implicit safety buffer. These results confirm that an empirically-tested, typology-based AI tool can provide local builders with structural assessment in real-time.

Climate change has become a critical ecological and social issue in the twenty-first century, contributing to rising sea levels that increasingly endanger coastal cities around the world. In the United States, rising sea levels have increased the frequency and severity of flooding events, particularly in Gulf Coast cities such as Corpus Christi, Texas. The city of Corpus Christi currently has over 60% of its buildings at flood risk. Further, approximately 16% of the city’s area falls within the United States government’s Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) special flood hazard area. There is a pressing need for flood-resilient architectural interventions for this city and several others that face a similar situation. This research study seeks to address this need by proposing a comprehensive research-backed set of guidelines that can be used for the design of flood-resilient buildings in the city. The process for the development of the guidelines involves several steps, including systematic reviews of the literature, critical analyses of previously completed flood-resilient buildings, and analyses of the city’s local vernacular architectural strategies. The newly developed guidelines are then subjected to a Delphi validation process, following which they are deployed in the design of a mock community center building for a site selected within the city. The building design is then tested for its resilience to flooding through a critical evaluation of the design solution relative to the design guidelines. While the proposed guidelines for the design of flood-resilient buildings are implemented in the city of Corpus Christi as part of this study, they offer adaptable solutions for similar coastal regions worldwide.

• Problem / Global Context
  In the face of global issues like climate change, cultural erasure, and material waste, architecture too often defaults to standardized, cost-driven solutions that ignore local identity and community voice. At the same time, the enormity of global challenges can obscure the power of small-scale, place-specific architectural work to generate meaningful, lasting change.
• Case Study
  This paper examines the adaptive reuse of a 100-year-old grain elevator and flour mill into housing in Livingston, Montana. Once abandoned and destined for demolition, the structure was reimagined through a collaborative effort between architect, builder, and local stakeholders. The project resisted templated models in favor of an iterative, community-centered approach that prioritized cultural resonance and long-term sustainability. The logistical and funding challenges were met not through off-the-shelf solutions, but through creative alignment of local resources, regulations, and partnerships.
• Framework
  Rather than promoting a replicable design product, the project offers a locally embedded design methodology rooted in critical regionalism, community collaboration, and respect for the existing built environment. This approach centers process over product, allowing architectural practice to become a responsive and regenerative act.
• Impact
  By preserving a culturally significant landmark and adapting it for contemporary use, the project demonstrates how architecture can support ecological, social, and cultural resilience. It challenges the notion that adaptive reuse is only viable in large urban centers or high-budget contexts.
• Model and Conclusion
  While the physical solution cannot be universally applied, the principles and processes behind it offer a model for other communities facing similar challenges. By treating design as a conversation between past and present, people and place, this work suggests that small-scale, deeply contextual interventions can serve as catalysts for broader global change.

This paper examines how computational design methodologies can meaningfully bridge global design frameworks and local architectural conditions in historic neighborhoods. While concepts such as critical regionalism, vernacular modernism, and high-style versus popular architecture have long framed debates on architectural hybridity, they offer limited means for systematically identifying or operationalizing hybrid design languages. To address this gap, the paper advances shape grammar as a methodological tool for analyzing and generating hybridity in contexts where heritage preservation intersects with contemporary urban development.

The study focuses on Duranguito, a historic neighborhood in El Paso, Texas, whose threatened demolition for a proposed arena ignited citywide activism and national attention. Building on previous work comparing architectural grammars, the research develops a composite grammar that integrates modernist principles with vernacular patterns documented in Duranguito’s building stock. The resulting methodology enables formal analysis, generation of design alternatives, and evaluation of how global design ideas can be adapted into site-specific interventions.

Beyond its theoretical contributions, the project functions as a pedagogical model that introduces undergraduate students to computational thinking, cultural analysis, and socio-political awareness. Ultimately, the paper argues that shape grammar offers a rigorous and culturally grounded approach for advancing local architectural futures while addressing global concerns of displacement, heritage loss, and environmental change.

ABSTRACT: We present an innovative pedagogical framework implemented in a college sophomore-level architecture design studio that combines podcasting, peer review workshopping, and visual storytelling to deepen engagement, collaboration, and intellectual development. The central inquiry guiding this study asks how a multimodal framework—combining voice, text, and image—can enhance reflective practice, collective learning, and conceptual rigor in architectural education. Positioned as a manifesto of action and discovery, the framework promotes an “in-between” mode of learning that operates across disciplines, media, and voices. Drawing on architecture, literature, and performance, the studio environment emphasizes narrative, conversation, and experimentation, redefining architectural education as a space for intellectual exploration, dialogic exchange, and collective learning. The methodology follows a repeating three-phase cycle applied to each of three major design projects over one semester. First, students create group podcasts as tools for brainstorming, critical inquiry, and self-reflection, encouraging them to think through sound and voice as generative design media. Second, these audio narratives function as prompts for in-class peer-review workshops, where students engage critically with one another’s written ideas, strengthening collaboration, empathy, and dialogic exchange. Third, students translate their reflections into hybrid visual narratives termed drawdels, a neologism adapted from sculpture that merges drawing and modeling. These representations synthesize spatial thinking with conceptual and narrative development. Repeating this cycle across projects enables students to iteratively deepen their reflective and representational capacities. The framework is evaluated through pre- and post-surveys. Results indicated higher levels of student engagement and reflection as compared to the baseline. Students reported improved communication and collaboration skills, heightened empathy through peer exchange, and increased ability to critically assess their design processes. By integrating accessible technologies and cyclical, multimodal practices into studio pedagogy, this framework offers a robust model for advancing reflective and collaborative learning in architectural design education.

Learning from precedents on ‘mapping’ in architecture, we saw the opportunity in mapping as a means to rethink and re-engage with the built environment in our city of Atlanta. Mapping as a way, method, and procedure for documenting built and natural environments, is a form of cognition of our surroundings. Further, we seek to explore intersections between ideas of mapping with techniques, tools and procedures. We set studios that inquired into the everyday built environment, one at the scale of buildings and the other at the urban level. These studios explored ways to map form, space, atmosphere, materiality, and activities, and to record visible and invisible aspects through intersecting and mashing up media and techniques of representation. These mapping process served not only as ways to describe forms of everyday Atlanta and relationships within it and with the world, but also, as a means to think designerly about the everyday. They were design speculations that act as re-readings of the built environment to open alternative conditions, to re-engage with locality, and to engage with locals and the global. This paper documents and analyzes the process and findings from our studios and reflects on the findings on the capacities of mapping in architectural design.

Architectural education is increasingly challenged to equip students with the digital and critical capacities needed for sustainable design. BIM has emerged as a central tool for visualization, coordination, and data-driven decision-making. However, its role in curricula often remains limited to software operation rather than conceptual engagement. This narrow focus restricts students’ ability to connect digital workflows with the experiential, ethical, and human-centered dimensions of design practice. This study reframes BIM as a strategic framework rather than a technical competency, advocating for pedagogical models that align BIM instruction with sustainability, interdisciplinary collaboration, and civic responsibility. It examines the ongoing disconnect between theoretical teaching and the practical application of BIM in sustainable design contexts. Using a mixed-methods approach, including a literature review, curriculum analysis, and surveys across multiple institutions, the research evaluates students’ understanding of BIM, identifies misconceptions, and assesses the effectiveness of current pedagogical strategies. Findings show that although students recognize BIM’s value for coordination and performance analysis, many lack awareness of its relevance to site-specific design, community engagement, and long-term environmental impact. This gap signals the need for instructional models that strengthen critical thinking and contextual application. The study recommends embedding BIM within site-based learning, interdisciplinary project-based studios, and real-world design challenges related to climate adaptation, urban resilience, and community development. Integrating sustainability metrics and experiential learning into digital workflows helps students perceive BIM as a tool for inquiry, ethical decision-making, and collaborative problem-solving. Such an approach not only improves technical fluency but also cultivates awareness of the social and environmental responsibilities of practice. Ultimately, the research supports a holistic curriculum model that bridges digital tools and human-centered design. By repositioning BIM as a medium for sustainable innovation, the study aims to prepare future designers and construction professionals to contribute thoughtfully and adaptively to a rapidly changing built environment.

The building sector is currently facing challenges in balancing decarbonization and occupant well-being. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has emerged as a key player that addresses these challenges, providing digital intelligence across the entire life cycle of buildings. This paper introduces a scoping review, employing the JBI Manual for Evidence Synthesis and PRISMA-ScR guidelines, to map 112 peer-reviewed publications from 2015 to March 2025. Based on the review, the applications of AI were categorized into three stages of the buildings’ life cycle: generative design, construction informatics, and operations using digital twins. The results of the review indicated the benefit of employing AI in the building design, construction, and operation phases. In the design stage, generative models could accelerate creative iteration, reduce simulation time, and optimize energy performance. In construction, computer-vision pipelines such as YOLOv5 decrease site-inspection labor by as much as 120 hours per month, while increasing accuracy sixfold compared to baseline approaches. Reinforcement-learning systems reduce idle crane energy consumption even more. In operation, AI-enabled digital twins achieve a median of 13% HVAC energy savings, enhancing predictive control, as well as improving indoor environmental quality and reducing mechanical downtime through predictive maintenance. Despite these advantages, some significant risks of using AI, such as privacy violations, cybersecurity vulnerabilities, and algorithmic bias, remain understudied; less than 10% of the reviewed studies assessed either fairness or explainability in the AI use. This review proposes a four-pillar strategy for responsible AI deployment by ensuring: 1) life-cycle data continuity, 2) open benchmark datasets, 3) privacy-preserving edge analytics, and 4) government-supported "AI sandboxes". The results show that the use of AI can lead to smart buildings; however, for widespread and equitable implementation, strong governance, enhanced human-AI collaboration, and workforce development are essential.

By 2050, over two-thirds of the world's population is projected to live in urban areas, intensifying myriad interconnected global challenges that cities must urgently address. We simultaneously consider the critical needs for affordable housing in urban areas, combatting energy precarity and structuring energy independence, and creating a more livable environment by augmenting tree canopy. With this project we focus on three vectors: a) implementing additional and complementary sources of energy within existing housing complexes, b) focusing on small-scale built-environment wind turbines and c) investigating the intersection of the natural and the built environment by integrating microforests in the urban realm. This paper reports on the work undertaken by our interdisciplinary research group, of a case study on three large affordable housing towers on the northern edge of Cambridge, Massachusetts. We ask: What if, rather than relying on known and commercially developed renewable sources (solar panels), one would shift to provide additional and new sources of renewable energy? What if, by imagining a slow and steady transformation of open spaces, one could envision a more ecologically performant open space? By showing simulations, maps, GIS data, and hypothetical strategies to slowly and continuously act upon existing housing projects, the paper envisions a future in which a continuous reconfiguration, adaptation, and change can transform the urban scene towards a more equitable access to energy and housing. This experimental approach is intent on developing guidelines for adaptive reuse scenarios in more holistic ways, culminating in a kit of parts to communicate the findings of the project and demonstrate the possibilities of improving the built environment with a more expanded view of its intersection with the natural environment.

Gypsum is one of the most commonly used materials to date and is prevalent in architectural acoustics. This research includes a catalog of acoustic-based designs and fabrication strategies for unique gypsum wallboard surface finishes that can be incorporated into typical methods of construction. It explores the material properties of wallboard in folded configurations to enhance their sound scattering properties while also investigating physical material strategies for fabrication. It presents the resulting suitable geometries that satisfy acoustic and manufacturing goals. Overall, it focuses on an opportunistic research agenda centered around acoustic performance-driven design for alternative wallboard configurations and outlines the demonstrated workflow from modeling and digital simulation to full-scale prototyping as a way to build practical research applicable to the current building industry.

The River Arts District (RAD) in Asheville, North Carolina, embodies a layered narrative familiar to many postindustrial riverfronts: rail spurs, mills, and warehouses reimagined as studios and galleries, a creative economy flourishing on a vulnerable floodplain, and, most recently, hurricane driven flooding that exposed critical weaknesses in its aging fabric. By grounding global climate concerns in this single mile of riverbank, RAD offers an ideal laboratory for teaching how local architectural strategies can confront the global realities of climate change and resiliency planning.

This paper reports on an undergraduate fourth-year architecture studio that asked students to “rebuild with purpose.” Working onsite and in dialogue with neighborhood stakeholders, students devised interventions for a district wide plan that includes storm water management, flood adaptive retrofits, and public spaces that nurture the district’s creative identity while strengthening its climate resilience.

A targeted literature review anchored the design inquiry: The AIA Resiliency Design Toolkit guided technical decisions for elevating and phasing interventions; the Planning for Climate Resilience: City of Asheville Final Assessment Report supplied watershed, scale, risk, and equity metrics; and the City of Asheville Municipal Climate Action Plan articulated policy targets for carbon neutrality, green infrastructure, and environmental justice. By juxtaposing these documents with on the ground observation, students interrogated the gap between policy aspiration and built reality.

Outcomes include research portfolios containing risk assessments, policy translation matrices, and design prototypes delivered to city officials and community organizations. The portfolio demonstrates that small-scale, local architectural and sustainable actions can advance global goals.

By detailing this pedagogical model and its RAD-specific outcomes, the paper contributes to the ARCC discourse on Local Solutions for Global Issues. It offers a replicable framework for schools of architecture seeking to empower students to confront climate realities through place-based, heritage-sensitive, community-engaged design.

Climate-driven wildfires continue to intensify in severity, particularly in urban regions like Southern California. However, traditional fire risk communication tools often fail to earn public trust due to inaccessible design, non-transparent outputs, and a lack of contextual relevance. These limitations are particularly problematic in high-risk urban communities, where trust in technological tools depends on how clearly and locally relevant the information is presented. Neighborhoods such as Pacific Palisades, Pasadena, and Altadena in Los Angeles, CA face recurrent wildfire threats and exemplify these challenges. This study introduces a community-led approach for integrating AI into wildfire risk assessment using the Participatory AI Literacy and Explainability Integration (PALEI) framework. PALEI emphasizes early literacy building, value alignment, and participatory evaluation before any predictive model is deployed, prioritizing clarity, accessibility, and mutual learning between developers and residents. Early engagement findings indicate strong acceptance of visual, context-specific risk communication, favorable fairness perceptions across neighborhoods, and clear adoption interest, alongside privacy and data-security concerns that shape trust. Participants emphasized localized imagery, accessible explanations, neighborhood-specific mitigation guidance, and transparent communication of uncertainty. The intended outcome is a mobile app co-designed with users and local stakeholders that enables residents to scan visible property features and receive interpretable fire risk scores, along with customized recommendations. By embedding local context into the design, the tool becomes more than a technical interface: it serves as an everyday resource for risk awareness and preparedness. This study argues that user experience must be treated not as an afterthought but as a central element in ethical and effective AI deployment. By establishing a literacy-first, participatory foundation for AI design, the study provides a replicable pathway for applying the PALEI framework to other regions facing growing climate-related hazards.

Climate disruption, economic inequality, and resource insecurity are global crises that often feel too massive for meaningful grass-roots intervention. Despairing, we run to the arms of society’s most powerful, believing that their top-down approaches and monumental gestures will solve our problems and relieve our collective malaise. Unfortunately, their promises rarely have the desired effect, and the problems faced by society’s most vulnerable become more acute.

This paper proposes an alternative: guerrilla altruism, a grassroots architectural praxis that privileges modest, scalable, and community-embedded actions over heroic, monumental solutions. Founded upon the thinking embedded within ideological pedagogy, bricolage, collective intelligence, and insurgent organization, guerrilla altruism aims not to deliver objects but to co-create new tools, knowledge, and spatial opportunities that are rooted in the local realities they are designed to change.

Anchored by case studies in Bolivia, India, and South Africa, this paper demonstrates how these tactics can be used to foster agency, build resilience, and create sustained change. Ultimately, the research argues that the future of a just and sustainable world lies not in the spectacle of the monument, but in the power of small, distributed acts of care to empower society’s most vulnerable so that they might help articulate a more resilient address. In the process, the paper argues that through guerrilla altruism it is possible to reposition architecture as a distributed, participatory, and subversive force capable of offering much-needed change.

In the past decade, expanding the tools and methods for digital documentation has become a priority in historic preservation, offering valuable support for the management, maintenance, and adaptive reuse of heritage buildings. Although technologies such as laser scanning and photogrammetry can capture unprecedented detail, they often generate documentation with large file sizes that exceed the practical needs of many restoration projects. This paper introduces a workflow designed to balance efficiency with usable outputs. The method integrates material documentation pipelines to guide physical assessment, streamline data acquisition, and produce essential construction documents. The workflow was developed from interventions at Sacred Heart Church, a historic landmark in El Paso’s Segundo Barrio, one of the city’s oldest and most culturally significant neighborhoods in this US–Mexico border community in West Texas. Its application demonstrates the potential to reduce redundant data collection, focus analysis on critical elements, and generate documentation that directly supports restoration activities. Future work will examine how this approach can be adapted to different building types and contexts, and how streamlined digital documentation workflows can serve as tools for community empowerment and equitable preservation.

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 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.

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.

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.