With our return to in-person teaching and learning, today more than ever we realize the extent to which built environment affect our life and health. We spend more than 90% of our lives within architectural spaces, designed to create situated interactions between people, the environment, and the materials that surround them. As David Benjamin writes in his editorial book “Embodied Energy and Design” (page 13), buildings are ideas made physical and they carry with them silent histories of the extractions, labor, and supply chains that are then manifested into an operational structure with dynamically moving parts. With emerging global challenges of social and environmental equity that arise from resource scarcity and public health emergencies, this sequence takes a strong position to forwarding novel approaches to making buildings more resource-efficient, comfortable (dare we say, pleasurable?), and affordable for all.

At the heart of this sequence are the required AT1-AT5 courses that take new stance in threading climate considerations in existing buildings and social responsibilities for occupant health and labor practices. Additionally, an array of elective courses are geared towards creating novel and radical experimental forms of technology, while celebrating the tactile interaction between people, materials, structures, and the built environments. The Tech electives cover a range of topics, from fabrication technologies and emerging healthy assemblies, through supply chain mechanisms of low-carbon and readily available building materials, to net zero and passive housing. This course selection not only provides software tools for performance analysis, but also cultivates radical interventions to crafting new ways of understanding and imagining resource justice, anti-racist vernacular, construction slowness, recovery and wellbeing.

Also shown here are the sequence Spring event series: the TechShops. The newly launched series converged hands-on opportunities to horizontally engage with technologists from a variety of perspectives and fields. From Storytelling for Building Tech Ventures, by Tenlie Mourning from Columbia Startup Lab, to World Building Metaphors by Dan Lockton who direct the Eindhoven University of Technology’s ‘Future Everyday’ group, these workshops focused on collaborative technologies and narratives for creative interventions with a revised outlook on social, cultural, and economic forces on building and ecological systems.

With best wishes at the end of the semester,
Lola Ben-Alon