Supported Research Studios

The Gulf Coast Climate Futures Project

Lead Faculty: Liz Camuti, Leah Kahler co-instructor

As the fossil fuel industry proposes to bury millions of tons of carbon dioxide beneath the wetlands of the  lower Pontchartrain Basin, communities and landholders—both across the lake and across the aisle—are  asking what an energy transition should require, and what it should refuse to sacrifice. This fifth and final  iteration of the Gulf Coast Climate Futures studio, in collaboration with a state policy organization and the National Academies Gulf Research Program, will examine how architecture, landscape architecture, and  urban design can mediate the complex relationships between decarbonization, the health of human  bodies, and the ecological health of the estuary. Rather than accepting carbon capture and storage as  either an inevitable fix or an unstoppable threat, we will work to make the contested subsurface visible  and to recover the region's deeper legacy as a place of health, refuge, and repair. Building on ongoing  efforts to restore longleaf pine savannas and reconnect the Mississippi River's freshwater to Lake  Maurepas, students will ultimately produce design proposals—from the scale of the estuary to the scale  of the human body—that model what a just transition in the Gulf South might build instead of bury. 

This program is a design research program, funded by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine's (NASEM) Gulf Research Program, to prepare the next generation of professionals to identify, visualize, explore, and propose interdisciplinary design-based interventions to critical challenges in the Gulf of Mexico. Please visit the GCCF Project webpage for more information.

Image courtesy of Liz Camuti

Carbon Budget Zero Research Studio

Lead Faculty: Sonsoles Vela

The Carbon Budget Zero; Adaptive Reuse studio considers how to integrate climate-awareness into design decisions. The research is guided by a central question: How can we design buildings with a net-zero carbon impact? In Fall 2025, students focused on adaptive reuse in warm climates, specifically in Miami. The project explores the concept of buildings as material banks, a strategy rooted in lifecycle thinking that reimagines buildings not as end-products but as repositories of reusable components. Through the design of disassembly, cataloging materials, applying reversible construction techniques, and the careful selection of a new palette of carbon neutral materials, the project progresses from a conceptual framework into a detailed proposal for a new adaptive reuse concept that prioritizes sustainability and has zero carbon impact. Utilizing Life Cycle Assessment tools, students explore how their design and material choices affect each project.

Atacama Desert Project

Lead Faculty: Rubén García Rubio, Cristóbal Molina Baeza

Summer 2024 has been recorded as the hottest period in Earth's history.  From January to September, the average global temperature was 1.54 °C above the pre-industrial baseline. This trend positions this year to become the warmest on record.   The intensification of global warming is exacerbating environmental hazards and contributing to increased desertification worldwide. How will we adapt to living in a warmer climate?

The Atacama Desert Project will focus on one of the driest and most ecologically distinctive environments on the planet. The Atacama’s ecosystem supports nearly one million inhabitants and is crucial for key industries such as copper and lithium mining, renewable energy production, innovative agriculture, and advanced astronomical observatories, among others. While certain areas of the Atacama Desert have experienced decades without rainfall, the effects of climate change—including unforeseen climatic events, a global rise in temperatures, and the spread of desertification— make it an exceptional site for learning valuable lessons and testing innovative ideas to mitigate and adapt our built environments to a warmer scenario.

By participating in a journey to Chile and the Atacama Desert, students will research and propose improvements to urban settlements within this extreme ecosystem. Emphasizing social equity, sustainability, ecological integrity and risk resilience, the research studio provides an opportunity to face real-world challenges, explore impactful solutions for sustainable development in extreme environments and gain skills that can be extrapolated to similar contexts globally.

Ecological Tectonics: Architectural Ceramic Assemblies for Climate Adaptation

Lead Faculty: Adam Marcus

The Ecological Tectonics research studio explores ceramic material assemblies as a site for expanding architecture’s ecological agency. The studio operates across several domains—the material, the communal, and the contextual—to explicitly meld technical knowledge with ecological and social agendas. Projects engage in the tectonic scale of material prototypes, the building scale of domestic architecture, and the ecosystemic scale to synthesize pragmatic questions of fabrication and assembly with social and ecological questions about how architecture can adapt to a changing climate. 

Within the broad context of architectural ceramics, this course focuses specifically on the tectonics of clay ceramic parts: how modular components can be designed, fabricated, and assembled to form larger systems of enclosure and habitation. The primary emphasis of the fabrication research is on additive manufacturing of clay, using robotic 3D printers to reinterpret traditional typologies of bricks, tiles, and shingles and speculate how this technology can open new possibilities for texture, form, and performance. The studio works extensively in the Digital Ceramics Lab, a new partnership between Tulane School of Architecture and the Built Environment and the Newcomb Art Department.