2026 Course Development Prize Winners

Overview

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 US in the coming years.

The jury selected two full courses to receive a cash prize and support to lead their course at their host institution within the next two years. In addition the jury selected three full courses to receive an honorable mention.

Winners

Image credit: [graduate student work from the Rhode Island School of Design fall 2025]
Enid Barragán-Ortiz and Molly Sullivan, “Testing Ground,” site plan, 2025.

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After Extraction

Stephanie Choi
Rhode Island School of Design

“After Extraction” is a three-year project of the graduate Core III: Cities studio. Using the lens of extraction to investigate three materials, fossil fuels, rare earth minerals, and water, the course traces the attendant infrastructures of resource removal in the American West. Broadly defined as west of the Mississippi River, the choice of the West situates extraction within a troubled history of manifest destiny and settler colonialism.

In fall of 2025 the studio traveled to the Midland/Odessa region in West Texas, which pumps roughly 25% of United States’ oil production from the Permian Basin. Focused on the petrochemical industry, the studio studied oil extraction’s effects at both the urban and territorial scales, and the economies of labor created in its wake. The second iteration of the studio will examine rare earth minerals critical to the green transition, with a pivot to New Mexico and its previous history with uranium mining and military weapons testing. The third year will take on water, concentrated on the Colorado River, a critical lifeline to seven states in the west, including California.

The overarching theme of extraction analyzes carbon energy’s production of the global climate crisis and problematizes the role of architecture in not only carbon emissions, but also in the design of infrastructure. Core III: Cities continues the graduate core studio sequence by broadening the scope of design to the scale of territories. Where Core I introduced subjects, tools, and processes within a domestic setting and Core II examined publics and public spaces within the city via the design of abstract orders, technical systems, and critical preservation, Core III augments disciplinary techniques of inquiry by investigating material provenance, territorial context, systems of energy infrastructure, geosocial governance, labor power relations, and environmental publics. We close the sequence by exploring the potential for architecture and architects to foster collective agency, care, and action.

Image credit: Flooded neighborhoods in Port Arthur, TX, on August 31, 2017, following heavy rainfall from Hurricane Harvey. U.S. Air National Guard photo by Staff Sgt. Daniel J. Martinez.

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OASIS: Optimized Architecture for Sustainability and Integrated ReSilience

Carla Brisotto & Aoife Houlihan Wiberg
University of Florida

Frontline coastal communities face two converging and equally urgent crises: the climate emergency which demands radical reductions in building energy use and carbon emissions, while intensifying disasters — flooding, hurricanes, and extreme heat — demand equally radical advances in community resilience and a paradigm shift in design approach. Yet architecture education and practice continue to treat these drivers separately, producing solutions that are either carbon-conscious but not resilient, or vice versa.

OASIS — Optimized Architecture for Sustainability and Integrated reSilience — is a Graduate SuperStudio at the University of Florida. Grounded in Port Arthur, Texas, one of the most climate-vulnerable cities in the U.S. Gulf Coast, the studio seeks to address this paradigm shift in how to reconcile climate resilience with net zero GHG emissions at multiscale from material to neighborhood, whilst at the same time restoring biodiversity and fostering social cohesion.

The studio operates as a co-design living lab embedded within PARCS (Participatory Collaborative Research for Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation in Underserved Communities), a live international research initiative with three living labs developed in close collaboration with local partners in communities exposed to climate change risks in Colombia, Indonesia, and the USA Gulf Coast, Port Arthur. The resulting strategy will be replicable worldwide in other built areas facing risks resulting from a fast-changing climate, contributing to the development of strategies for sustainable, inclusive, and resilient communities. In each living lab, community residents engage as active co-designers through a combination of design charrettes and immersive technologies to improve stakeholder engagement, such as Virtual Reality, and holographic visualization, to ensure resilient design solutions that are regenerative, innovative and technically rigorous, culturally grounded, and equitable.

Two phases structure the work. ZEN OASIS develops Zero Emission Neighborhood plans organized around resilience hubs — urban environments designed to thrive daily and function fully during emergencies. ZEB in a ZEN OASIS then deploys individual Net Zero Emission Buildings within those neighborhoods, integrating embodied carbon analysis, passive design, operational energy targets, and climate-resilient detailing simultaneously.

By unifying and advancing zero-emissions performance and resilience in a more holistic, inclusive, regenerative, and self-sustaining approach with an overall net positive impact on the environment and the communities living in it which will be achieved. Thus, OASIS positions students as agents of change in the urgent work of designing an uncertain and unpredictable climate future.

Honorable Mentions

Beyond the Black Box: Architecture Thinking Simulation

Ahmed Meselhy
Virginia Tech

The Beyond the Black Box: Architecture Thinking Simulation course makes a timely and important contribution to architectural education. It addresses one of the discipline’s most pressing challenges which is how to integrate building simulation as a meaningful design tool for climate-responsive architecture without sacriﬁcing spatial and experiential quality. The course aims to balance quantitative performance and qualitative spatial experience through simulation, using them as decision-support tools rather than decision making tools.

Architectural pedagogy often separates quantitative performance analysis from qualitative design thinking, which creates a misleading divide between environmental responsibility and spatial intent. The curriculum bridges the gap between conventional abstract simulation exercises in academia and the decision-driven simulation practices used in professional settings. Rather than treating simulation tools as “Black Boxes”, the course equips students with the foundational understanding needed to interpret assumptions, inputs, and outputs, transforming simulation into a predictive and intentional design process.

Through a sequence of models, the course enables students to evaluate design decisions across multiple skills and criteria. Each model integrates qualitative aspects such as spatial experience, daylight perception, visual connection, and views composition, with quantitative metrics including radiation, energy, daylight, and view percentages. The course’s explicit engagement with climate change further strengthens its relevance. Students evaluate building performance not only under current conditions but also through future climate scenarios, fostering long-term thinking, ethical responsibility, and resilience. This approach prepares students to respond critically to evolving environmental challenges while maintaining experiential richness.

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Gulf Coast Climate Futures | Rooting in Motion: Lessons in Cultivation and Migration from Pampas to Prairie

Liz Camuti
Tulane University

This interdisciplinary design research studio examines climate-induced agricultural displacement in Louisiana’s coastal prairie region, where compounding impacts from hurricanes and ongoing saltwater intrusion are threatening farmers’ ancestral lands and established livelihoods. However, rather than treating migration as a crisis, students spend the semester investigating how movement—of both people and ecosystems—can become a generative force for creating more equitable and regenerative food systems.

In the proposed fifth iteration of this course, working in partnership with the Louisiana Food Policy Council (LA-FPC), students will conduct comparative geographic research across two landscapes at similar latitudes: Acadiana’s remnant tallgrass coastal prairies and Uruguay’s pampas, where cooperative land stewardship models and a national resettlement framework offer instructive precedents for navigating climate change without severing communities from their cultivation practices.

Organized across four phases—systems research, propositional thinking, reciprocal landscape protocols, and design test fits—students ultimately develop multi-scalar architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design strategies for the Acadiana region that bridge coastal and inland communities. Final design proposals aim to explore the role designers can play in the adaptation of community-led food systems and to contribute to LA-FPC’s ongoing food policy advocacy work across Louisiana.

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Designing for Thermal Equity: Housing, Heat, and Health in Boston

Alpha Yacob Arsano
Northeastern University

Designing for Thermal Equity: Housing, Heat, and Health in Boston is a graduate research studio that addresses climate change through the intersecting lenses of housing, heat, and public health. The course focuses on the growing challenge of rising temperatures in low-income residential buildings, where aging construction, limited access to cooling, and energy burden disproportionately impact vulnerable communities.

Centering on common housing typologies such as Boston’s triple-deckers, students investigate how building form, materials, and systems shape indoor thermal conditions and everyday lived experience. The studio integrates participatory engagement, typological analysis, and simplified environmental assessment to ground design research in both performance and community knowledge.

Through scenario-based exploration, students develop phased retrofit strategies that improve thermal comfort and reduce heat-related health risks while prioritizing feasibility, affordability, and equity. The work emphasizes translational outcomes, positioning architecture as a critical interface between climate adaptation, housing policy, and community well-being.

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Architecture, Climate Change, and Society?

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.

Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture

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.

Other ACSA Websites

2026 Course Development Prize Winners

in Architecture, Climate Change, and Society