Study Architecture 
ProPEL Winners Announced for 2026 Course Development Prize in Architecture, Climate Change, and Society
PRESS RELEASE
Architectural Faculty to Lead New Courses on Climate and Society
For Immediate Release:
New York City, April 8, 2026 – Columbia University’s Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) announce the winners of the 2026 Course Development Prize in Architecture, Climate Change, and Society. These innovative courses will be taught at ACSA member schools across the U.S. in the coming years.
The jury selected two full courses to receive a cash prize and support to lead their courses at their host institutions within the next two years. In addition, the jury selected three full courses to receive an honorable mention.
The winners are:
After Extraction
Stephanie Choi, Rhode Island School of Design
The After Extraction studio series locates the omnipresent climate crisis in the American West. Its first year was sited in West Texas’s Permian Basin and the next iteration plans to visit New Mexico’s military testing and uranium extraction landscapes. As a required architectural studio at RISD, the sequence focuses designers-in-training on the material inputs, consumptive outputs, and socio-spatial implications of extractivism. Centering urbanistic methods of research and analysis, the course “uses the theme of extraction to investigate three materials: fossil fuels, rare earth minerals, and water, and their attendant infrastructures of removal in the American West.”
Among its objectives, the course asks students to “question the tools of colonization and extraction in the field” and “explore the potential for collaboration between design and activism,” goals that re-embed humanistic inquiry into the design process of things, places, and systems. It also calls on designers to interrogate authority and knowledge production. The studio intends to question architectural technologies – surveying, precision, and abstraction – aiming to use them critically and in concert with historical data, imagined, utopic futures, and lived realities that are often bypassed by traditional design processes. The jury particularly appreciated Choi’s commitment to developing a nuanced design education model beyond the solutions-based studio format.
OASIS: Optimized Architecture for Sustainability and Integrated ReSilience
Carla Brisotto & Aoife Houlihan Wiberg, University of Florida
Brisotto and Wiberg propose a rigorous superstudio that grounds astute technical reasoning in community co-design. The studio defines a “dual crisis” for coastal cities, where the impacts of development drive ever-greater climatological instability for the built environment. The studio will invite students to contribute data analysis, resilient and net-zero design to a global research consortium with hubs in Colombia, Indonesia, and the US’s Gulf Coast. Based in Northern Florida and studying Port Arthur, TX, students in this course will deeply consider their own coastal geography in a global context.
The jury lauded this studio’s integration of resilience and decarbonization as two simultaneous imperatives that can – and must – be realized at the neighborhood scale. The course challenges students to synthesize their reading and use of technology to make informed design decisions related to carbon, passive design, and regionally appropriate materials. The studio’s application of interdisciplinary writing, case studies, and software for modeling and visualization will prepare students to think broadly and select their tools critically. By addressing adaptation and mitigation strategies simultaneously, rather than in opposition, OASIS proposes a rigorous, localized, and human-centered approach to the future of coastal design and construction.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
Beyond the Black Box: Architecture Thinking Simulation
Ahmed Meselhy, Virginia Tech
This seminar reframes simulation as design intelligence, with rigorous climate analysis at its core. Open to both undergraduate and graduate students, the course presents climate scenario testing and resilience evaluation as means to develop sound environmental reasoning. This foundation in critical thinking prepares students to combine quantitative and qualitative tools as they emerge in practice. Meselhy’s course values buildings not only as performative systems or as beautiful objects, but as a productive synthesis of technical and creative skills. The jury honored the course’s rigor and its concern for climate impacts at every scale.
Gulf Coast Climate Futures | Rooting in Motion: Lessons in Cultivation and Migration from Pampas to Prairie
Liz Camuti, Tulane University
The Gulf Coast Climate Futures studio calls attention to the mutual vulnerabilities – and potentially mutual design – of coastal grasslands in the Americas. In partnership with the Louisiana Food Policy Council, this iteration of the studio will perform comparative research for the first time, examining the oceanic edges of Louisiana and Uruguay. Students will design “reciprocal landscape protocols,” sustainable rhythms for land use, agriculture, interspecies habitation, and migration. The jury appreciated how this course roots social analysis and policymaking in the specific and urgent environmental challenges faced by coastal agricultural communities.
Designing for Thermal Equity: Housing, Heat, and Health in Boston
Alpha Yacob Arsano, Northeastern University
The Thermal Equity studio foregrounds existing housing as an urgent site for equitable climate adaptation. The course challenges graduate architecture students to design for measurable social, health, and economic impact. Working locally, students will study Boston’s aging housing stock and propose retrofits. While students develop their climate reasoning, they will also learn to channel technical details and local priorities into accessible proposals, as the studio is built around community engagement and technical consultation. The jury admired Arsano’s dedication to examining energy, materials, and the social determinants of health together.
ARE YOU INTERESTED IN JOINING A NETWORK OF FACULTY TEACHING: ARCHITECTURE, CLIMATE CHANGE, AND SOCIETY?
About the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture
Columbia University’s Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture was founded in 1983. Its mission is to advance the interdisciplinary study of American architecture, urbanism, and landscape. A separately endowed entity within the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, it sponsors research projects, workshops, public programs, publications, and awards. In recent years, the Center has convened conversations among overlapping constituencies, including academics, students, professionals, and members of the general public. The Buell Center’s research and programming articulate facts and frameworks that modify key assumptions governing architectural scholarship and practice.
This prize was created through a Buell Center project entitled “Power: Infrastructure in America,“ which examined the intersections of climate, infrastructure, and architecture. It has continued within the Center’s project on Architecture and Land in and out of the Americas, which addresses the topic of land in its historical significance and contemporary relevance. This plural, Americas, helps expand the Center’s mission in two ways: by connecting building practices across the Western Hemisphere, and by recognizing that there are several Americas within the United States. For more information, visit buellcenter.columbia.edu.
About the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA)
The mission of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture is to lead architectural education and research.
Founded in 1912 by 10 charter members, ACSA is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit association of over 200 member schools in several categories. These include full membership for all accredited programs in the United States and government-sanctioned schools in Canada, candidate membership for schools seeking accreditation, and affiliate membership for schools for two-year and international programs. Through these schools, over 5,000 architecture faculty are represented.
ACSA, unique in its representative role for schools of architecture, provides a forum for ideas on the leading edge of architectural thought. Issues that will affect the architectural profession in the future are being examined today in ACSA member schools. The association maintains a variety of activities that influence, communicate, and record important issues. Such endeavors include scholarly meetings, workshops, publications, awards and competition programs, support for architectural research, policy development, and liaison with allied organizations.
ACSA seeks to empower faculty and schools to educate increasingly diverse students, expand disciplinary impacts, and create knowledge for the advancement of architecture. For more information, visit acsa-arch.org.
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Hanifah Jones
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202-785-2324
hjones@acsa-arch.org
