2025 Course Development Prize in Architecture, Climate Change, and Society
OVERVIEW
Education in architecture and urbanism is well positioned creatively and critically to address the exigencies of climate change. However, pedagogical methods that prioritize immediate applicability can come at the expense of teaching and research that explore the sociocultural and ecopolitical dimensions of the crisis. This, in turn, ultimately limits the range of approaches addressing climate change in professional practice. Columbia University’s Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture therefore issued, together with the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, a competitive call for course proposals on the theme of “Architecture, Climate Change, and Society.”
From history seminars to visual studies and from design studios to building technologies, the wide variety of course offerings at schools of architecture is a testament to the diversity of perspectives, skills, and tools that ultimately comprise quality work in the field. In contrast, the urgency of the unfolding climate crisis—especially as it intersects with calls for environmental and racial justice—can seem to demand a singular focus that is antithetical to humanities-based critical inquiry or to longer-term creative and technical endeavors. We seek the kind of realism, however, that redefines problems and leaves room for the imagination. Successful proposals for this Course Development Prize in Architecture, Climate Change, and Society will include methods and themes that innovate within their institutional setting—asking hard questions of students that are equal in weight to the hard questions being asked of society in the midst of a global pandemic as it continues to grapple with the intertwined causes and effects of climate change.
This prize was begun as part of a Buell Center project entitled “Power: Infrastructure in America,” which sought critically to understand the intersections of climate, infrastructure, and architecture. It is being continued in conversation with ongoing research on "Architecture and Land in and out of the Americas." This plural, Americas, helps decenter the concept of "American Architecture" in two ways: by connecting building practices across the Western Hemisphere, and by recognizing that there are several Americas within the United States. It is in this spirit that the prize aims to contribute to the development of intersectional pedagogy on the theme of “Architecture, Climate Change, and Society” in the Americas today.
2025 WINNERS
Carbon Budget Zero | Climate Positive
Sonsoles Vela, Tulane University
This studio operates on the premise of a future where carbon neutrality is the standard. It presents an expansive approach to sustainable design, helping students consider the overlapping effects of efficient waste management, low-energy materials, and renewable energy. The jury remarked on the course’s embrace of both operational and embodied carbon, and the way its guiding questions foreground the social–as well as technical–dimensions of materials in the built environment.
As Vela writes, the built environment’s major contributions to total global carbon emissions “highlight an urgent need for change, especially as we approach the UN’s 2030 targets. Current environmental policies focus on energy efficiency but often overlook material. Today’s construction industry often follows a linear ‘take, make, use, dispose’ model, which hinders material reusability and fails to consider total environmental impact. Addressing embodied emissions is crucial, making material selection and future reuse key to reducing the sector’s carbon footprint.”
Plastic Marsh: Cycles and Cyclones on the Texas Gulf Coast
Daniel Jacobs, University of Houston
Image credit: Property of the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation, Photo: André Grossmann© 1970 Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation
This core undergraduate studio will ask students to question their regional oil economy by intervening in its material cycles and water landscapes. The jury emphasized “Plastic Marsh’s” critical positioning “against the backdrop of the extractivist tendencies of the petrochemical landscape of Houston’s Gulf Coast,” and its multimedia approach to design research that interrogates conventional construction, disposability, and recycling. This award will support student fieldwork, as well as the display of student work in an exhibition at the Houston Climate Justice Museum, one of several local organizations partnering with the studio.
Jacobs writes, “Houston’s hydrocarbon processing landscape is one of the great generators of our contemporary waste streams: from synthetic rubbers, to petroleum-based fibers, to petrochemical polymers (plastics). Over half of each barrel of oil produced today goes to the production of these petro-materials, most of which end up in landfills and recycling centers, creating a superabundance of raw resources available for the foreseeable future. How do we position ourselves, as designers, relative to these streams of everlasting materials?”
HONORABLE MENTIONS
Mini Ice-Box Challenge
Maryam Singery, University of Texas at San Antonio
This hands-on learning experience is designed to address the climate crisis as a component that can be added to studios, seminars, or other types of classes to emphasize the intersection of climate change, environmental justice, and social equity. The jury appreciated how this course refocuses the educational agenda on the “deeper sociocultural, political, and ecological dimensions” of design for climate justice. Singery explains that “the challenge encourages students to rethink traditional design solutions while incorporating low-tech, passive strategies to achieve energy-efficient and environmentally conscious buildings. Students participate in teams to design and build small-scale prototypes of energy-efficient boxes, testing their designs in real-world environmental conditions to demonstrate innovative approaches to sustainability.”
Fossil Space
Aleksandr Bierig, University of Toronto
Image credit: Charles Joseph Minard, Carte figurative et approximative de la houille Anglaise exportée en 1864 [Figurative and Approximate Map of the Coal Exported from England in 1864] (1864), G3201.H9 1864 .M5, Library of Congress Geography and Map Division Washington, D.C.
https://www.loc.gov/item/2004626058/
The jury emphasized the importance of interrogating climate change within architectural history and theory, rather than confining these salient themes to technical courses. Bierig introduces this graduate seminar by quoting Dipesh Charkrabarty, “The mansion of modern freedom stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil-fuel use. Most of our freedoms so far have been energy intensive.” As societies became accustomed to living with fossil fuels, what kinds of spaces did their extraordinary power produce? The seminar will consider spaces made by and for fossil fuels: their extraction, their transportation, their consumption, and their waste. Collective investigation will range from the fundamental material considerations of acquiring and distributing subterranean fuels to the broadest consequences of their use on human culture: the compression of space and time, the creation of evergreater scales of circulation, the politics of energy abundance, and the present global climate crisis, precipitated in large part by their use.
Projects for the Future City: Urban Climate-Responsive Design
Diana García Cejudo & Rodrigo Pantoja Calderón, Tecnológico de Monterrey, Querétaro
This series of architecture studios approaches transdisciplinary design teaching in partnership with schools in three countries (Mexico, US, Chile) over the course of four years. The jury highlighted this ongoing course series as an ambitious and necessary approach, and appreciated how it situates broad ecopolitical topics in a Central Mexican, semi-urban context. The instructors write, “Climate change already adversely impacts food and water security, human health, and economies, generating significant losses and damages to communities, cities, and countries. However, as the IPCC stated in 2023, the effects are disproportionately felt by nonprivileged, marginalized, and vulnerable groups who have historically contributed the lowest emissions to the current situation. Increasing extreme weather and climate events have exposed millions to food insecurity and reduced water security, especially in locations and communities in the Global South.”