Winners Announced for 2025 Course Development Prize in Architecture, Climate Change, and Society

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

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

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.”