Spring 2025 Research Studios

Studio

Atacama Desert Project (a Mintz Global Research Studio)

Spring 2025.

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.

This Mintz Global Research Studio includes subsidized housing and airfare for international travel.

Studio

Ecological Tectonics: Architectural Ceramic Assemblies for Climate Adaptation

Spring 2025.

Lead Faculty: Adam Marcus

This research studio will explore ceramic material assemblies as a site for expanding architecture’s ecological agency. The studio will operate across several domains—the material, the communal, and the contextual—to explicitly meld technical knowledge with ecological and social agendas. Projects will 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 will focus 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 will be 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 will take place on the Uptown campus and will work extensively in the Digital Ceramics Lab, a new partnership between Tulane School of Architecture and the Newcomb Art Department.

Studio

URBANbuild 20, Phased Urban Impact

Spring 2025.

Faculty: Byron Mouton

Building upon recent URBANbuild research, UB20 students will be challenged to envision development strategies for specified project sites, and a phased process of fabrication will be planned for the realization of a selected vision. Comparative analysis will be made between past UB achievements, and those observations will direct this growing body of research. Selected outcomes of research efforts will be realized in the spring through coordinated fabrication projects. However, as the scope of UB research expands beyond the scale of single-family and two-family dwellings, the familiar pace of URBANbuild construction efforts will be challenged since the team must now consider limits of multifamily assembly related to safety, density, fire separation, fire protection, access, and egress. 

UB20 investigations will continue as direct extensions of recent achievements. The opportunity to expand upon the accomplishments of previous years will allow students to consider greater questions of neighborhood planning, domestic proximities, and public space. These are big planning questions, but the URBANbuild curriculum aims to offer students a chance to address big questions at an achievable scale. Please visit www.URBANbuild.tulane.edu for more information.