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Fall 2026 Research Studios
ARCH 4041/5051 (Undergraduate) or ARCH 6051 (Graduate)
Carbon Budget Zero; Adaptive Reuse
Lead Faculty: Sonsoles Vela
The research studio is focused on finding ways to reduce our carbon footprint. This involves creating a toolkit to guide the design process, in which embodied and operational carbon are key factors in achieving carbon neutrality, as outlined in the Paris Agreement. The studio is guided by one central question: “How can we design buildings with a net-zero carbon impact?” This question will be explored across three iterations, each focusing on a different climate zone: the southeast climate (Fall 24), the Pacific Southwest climate (Fall 25), and the northeast climate (Fall 26). This will show how the research can be applied in real-world settings.
In the fall of 2026, the studio will concentrate on adaptive reuse in a cold climate, with a focus on New York City. The adaptive reuse project will explore 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 will progress 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 will explore how their design and material choices affect each project. The objective of this research is to discover strategies for building decarbonization, with a dual focus: reimagining design approaches that emphasize recovery, reuse, or recycling potential, and investigating new circular biobased materials as alternatives to traditional materials. This shift aims to reduce reliance on limited natural resources and fossil fuels as primary design components, all working towards a shared goal of eliminating carbon emissions and minimizing waste throughout the entire process.
Contemporary Architecture in Historic Contexts
Lead Faculty: Ammar Eloueini
This research studio will focus on architecture at the building scale and its relationship to the urban context in New Orleans. While some see the city and its historic architecture as a model to be replicated indefinitely, this studio premise is focused on answering the following question: “How can we design buildings that while respecting the historic nature of New Orleans’ context, one can design a building that: 1. Embrace the most current technologies of our era, 2. Considers architecture as a cultural expression that shapes daily life and innovation”.
Magazine Street is one of the oldest and most vibrant thoroughfares in the city with its mixed (commercial/residential) use developments, from Audubon Park to the French Quarter, Magazine Street crosses many different historic neighborhood and changes accordingly. The studio will experiment with a series of strategically chosen lots, empty or with an existing building that can be expended to study the possibilities of how a contemporary architecture can respond to the historic context. The studio will also expand beyond the footprint of the lot to consider the urban context, from the street to the sidewalk and the building. This studio is focused on the city of New Orleans as a testing ground, but the issues at hand could be applied to many other locations in the US or globally. This Research Studio may include travel to New York City.
Forests + Buildings: Elements of Wood
Lead Faculty: Chris Meyer
Forests + Buildings is a design research studio that investigates mass timber as a generative framework for architectural form-making rather than simply a structural system or construction technology. Through the study of Cross-Laminated Timber (CLT) and Glu-Lam assemblies, the studio explores how engineered wood products can serve as instruments for architectural invention.
The studio examines architecture as an extension of material origin, fabrication processes, and environmental performance; asking how contemporary design can reconnect forest systems, industrial production, and built form. While historical timber construction maintained a direct relationship between regional forestry practices and architecture, today's mass timber industry often operates through standardized production and globalized supply chains. This studio seeks to re-establish the relationship between forest conditions and architectural outcomes through design research. Investigations will be grounded in the ecological, material, and cultural contexts of the Southeastern United States and the Gulf Coast South, a region shaped by the expansive forests of Southern Yellow Pine. The forest, its associated industries, and the landscapes that have evolved alongside it will serve as a framework for architectural inquiry. By examining the relationships between resource management, material production, environmental performance, and regional identity, students will develop proposals that respond to the realities of place while contributing to broader discussions surrounding wood construction and architecture. Using fundamental architectural elements—roof, wall, floor, ceiling, window, door, and stair—students will explore how mass timber can shape architecture across multiple scale and forms; from building components and assemblies to spatial and formal organization. At its core, the studio asks how architectural form can be positioned between the logic of the forest and the cultural and technical inventions of architecture.
The semester will include travel to working forests, mills, a mass timber manufacturing facility, and exemplary timber buildings, as well as Wood Talks, a two-day symposium bringing together academics and practitioners to discuss contemporary wood-based approaches to architecture. This Research Studio includes local/regional travel
Gulf Coast Climate Futures
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 Research Studio includes local/regional travel. This Research Studio is also an approved Service Learning course
Small Center Design Build - Constructs, Carbon, and Community
Faculty: Emilie Taylor Welty
Location: Small Center - 1725 Baronne St.
This Small Center studio combines community engagement with design-build in a one-semester small project, continuing a 21-year legacy of applied research. This semester the design-build partner is Grow Dat Youth Farm, whose mission is to is to nurture a diverse group of young leaders through the meaningful work of growing food. At Grow Dat, people from different backgrounds come together to create a more just and sustainable food system and build power to create personal, social, and environmental change. Small Center designed and built Grow Dat’s campus, and is returning to this partnership after a groundswell of public support for Grow Dat and the importance of their work in the city.
This fall we will work with Grow Dat to master plan and build out components of their seven acre site in City Park. Students do not need construction experience to participate in this studio as all tools and skills will be taught in the Wednesday morning companion course, Advanced Building Technologies. Additionally, a key focus of this 3-year cycle of Small Center studios involve calculating the carbon footprint of the design in various phases. This research will inform student design decisions and includes an educational component so that community partners and the general public understand the benefits of carbon footprint reduction and accessible means of doing so.
Please see www.small.tulane.edu/projects for examples of recent design-build studios This Research Studio involves construction.
This Research Studio is also an approved Service Learning course.
URBANbuild 22, Phased Community Impact; The Next Chapter
Faculty: Byron Mouton
Location: Small Center - 1725 Baronne St.
Since 2005, the URBANbuild (UB) program has conducted research through the design and construction of contemporary homes in economically challenged neighborhoods of New Orleans. These projects were completed by annual teams of UB students in partnership with a variety of community organizations. For the past three years, UB has collaborated with Louvis Services to develop Tiny House strategies that provide transitional housing for people experiencing homelessness. This year, the UB22 team will continue that partnership. To learn more, visit: https://louvisservices.org/
Louvis controls several vacant properties in a section of the Lower Ninth Ward that continues to recover from Hurricane Katrina. While additional housing remains essential, the neighborhood also needs thoughtfully planned green spaces, circulation networks, and carefully placed structures that create an appropriate scale, density, and sense of community. Consistent with the URBANbuild research agenda, developments will focus on big questions related to community investment; however, those questions will be complimented by material consideration and resolution at the scale of detail. UB22 research will build upon the program’s past inquiries related to topics of efficiency, density, replication, and affordability - while also aiming to provide physical outcomes of quality thought and design. The URBANbuild Research Program spans both semesters of the academic year. During the fall semester, the studio focuses on research, site analysis, and the exploration of multiple design strategies culminating in the production of permit and construction documents. In the spring semester, the selected proposal is refined through fabrication, material assembly, and full-scale construction, transforming research into built work that serves the community.
Please visit www.URBANbuild.tulane.edu for more information.
This Research Studio is also an approved Service Learning course.
The Yamuna River Project: New Delhi Urban Futures
Lead Faculty: Pankaj Vir Gupta and Jess Vanecek
The Yamuna River Project (YRP) is a multidisciplinary research initiative established by Dean Iñaki Alday and Katz Professor Pankaj Vir Gupta in 2013. In 2025, Jess Vanecek joined the team to co-teach the New Delhi Urban Futures Research Studio with Pankaj Vir Gupta, a new three-year cycle of the studio at TuSABE. The Fall 2026 studio will be the second in the sequence.
Initial phases of the YRP sought to develop and advance strategies for the ecological recovery of one of the most polluted rivers on the planet – the Yamuna, in the megacity of New Delhi, India. While the pollution of the river has become an unprecedented and urgent crisis of social and ecological inequality, the river itself is not the problem so much as it is an indicator of broader systemic failures due to a century’s worth of negligent urban evolution. As the number of people living in urban areas continues to rise, New Delhi’s built environment faces mounting pressures that exceed the circumstances for which it was planned, leading the more than 30 million citizens residing in the capital city of the world’s largest democracy to live amidst extreme urban and environmental degradation. The situation demands a critical, holistic, and multi disciplinary approach, and this studio challenges students’ capacity to diagnose multifaceted dilemmas of urban inhabitation and propose nuanced interventions that embrace a multiplicity of use and function.
Over the course of three years, this studio will examine rapidly urbanizing mega-cities through a socio-ecological framework that asks: how do planned, urban fabrics contend with the pressures of climate change and rapid population growth for which they were never built to accommodate? The studios will act as successive research teams – each group of students inheriting and revising prior investigations as they translate contextual research into independently defined design projects at various scales and typologies. The projects serve to critically reflect upon and test the capacity of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design to operate within the complexity of New Delhi’s megacity conditions as they are amplified by climate change. This Mintz Global Research Studio includes subsidized housing and airfare for travel to India.