Collective Comfort exhibition at the Center for Architecture
Collective Comfort: Airing on Possibilities unveils new approaches to climate resilient design in extreme desert climates. On view at the Center for Architecture + Design, San Francisco, November 21, 2024–February 6, 2025.
San Francisco, California—The (Im)material Matters Lab at the University of California, Berkeley, led by Assistant Professor Liz Gálvez, presents Collective Comfort: Airing on Possibilities, an innovative exhibition examining climate resilience in desert cities. Opening November 21 at the Center for Architecture + Design in San Francisco, the exhibition highlights design-research, full-scale prototypes, and student work that address the urgent need for alternative cooling solutions in regions facing extreme heat.
Exhibition opening reception: November 21, 6–8pm, free admission. Center for Architecture + Design, Hallidie Building, 140 Sutter Street, San Francisco, California 94104 / info [at] centersf.org.
Visit e-flux to view the event announcement.
Drawing Codes Book Launch
Emerging technologies of design and production have transformed the role of drawings within the contemporary design process from that of design generators to design products. As architectural design has shifted from an analog drawing-based paradigm to that of a computational model-based paradigm, the agency of drawing as a critical and important form of design representation has shifted. Drawing Codes: Experimental Protocols of Architectural Representation examines the effects of this transformation on the architectural discipline and explores how architects have critically integrated procedural thinking into their drawing process.
This event, marking the launch of the book, will discuss the premise of the project and focus on the role of computation in the pedagogy of architectural drawing. Book authors Adam Marcus and Andrew Kudless will be joined by contributors Liz Gálvez, Thom Faulders, Zeina Koreitem, and Heather Roberge to present their contributions to the book and participate in a conversation about how computation has both transformed and revitalized architectural representation.
League Prize 2025: Plot Jury
Established in 1981 to recognize visionary and innovative work by young practitioners, The Architectural League Prize for Young Architects + Designers is a competition organized by The Architectural League and its Young Architects + Designers Committee. Learn more about The Architectural League Prize’s past winners.
THE YOUNG ARCHITECTS + DESIGNERS COMMITTEE
Rayshad Dorsey
Liz Gálvez
Miles Gertler
JURY
Behnaz Assadi
Mario Gooden
Jia Yi Gu
William O’Brien Jr.
And the Young Architects + Designers Committee
THEME: PLOT
Whatever the narrative, architecture can’t help but engage with plot. This is an open call for designers with a story to tell.
Every building has its lore, and plots are known to thicken. Which dramas are shaping architecture’s arc today? The truth may be stranger than fiction. Despite the best-laid plans, design so often deals in circumstance. That is, while architects may endeavor to write their own stories, projects always present twists.
The 2025 Architectural League Prize for Young Architects + Designers competition asks entrants to interrogate Plot and map out the throughlines that shape their work.
How is architecture informed by considerations of plot, whether as land, drawing, or scheme? We invite young designers to chronicle that which bookends their practices and to demonstrate plot’s persistent role as main character.
All entries must be submitted through the League’s online competition portal.
Linear Kitchen in Drawing Codes
“Through 96 experimental drawings and five critical essays, this book examines the role of computational processes and procedural thinking in the production of architectural representation.” — Adam Marcus & Andrew Kudless
The Linear Kitchen is included in Drawing Codes: Experimental Protocols of Architectural Representation, which examines the effects of this transformation on the architectural discipline and explores how architects have critically integrated procedural thinking into their drawing process.
The Linear Kicthen’s ventilation system organizes kitchen functions with ventilation processes. Through the use of product specifications, cooked air particles are drawn, reoriented, and ejected revealing a linear, yet illusive, architectural element.
Architecture’s Ecological Restructuring: Part II
Architecture’s Ecological Restructuring: Part II, a workshop-style symposium, follows the inaugural session in 2023.
Speakers include Debbie Chen, Rhode Island School of Design / Rebecca Choi, Tulane School of Architecture / Liz Gálvez, Berkeley College of Environmental Design / Mae-ling Lokko, Yale School of Architecture / Antoine Picon, Harvard Graduate School of Design / and Meredith TenHoor, Pratt Institute School of Architecture.
Convened and moderated by Zaid Kashef Alghata, Favrot Visiting Professor, Tulane School of Architecture. Sponsored by the Tulane School of Architecture and the Charles A. Favrot, H. Mortimer Favrot Chair in Architecture. For more information, visit here.
Collective Comfort — Graduate Option Architecture Studio
Today’s cooling centers are often basic, temporary spaces in repurposed buildings or large venues that provide relief from the heat but fail to create a welcoming community atmosphere. The lack of essential amenities like access to food or engaging activities, makes them unappealing for extended stays despite the extreme temperatures outside. This graduate-level architectural studio course examines equitable cooling in relationship to an over-reliance on private mechanical, electrically powered air-conditioning technologies.
Working collectively, the students developed five building designs which exemplify how to move beyond the minimal air-conditioned space to expand the idea of the cooling center towards the concept of Collective Comfort: an architectural and programmatic hub that not only cools bodies but expands agency to vulnerable communities while developing engaging programs able to develop discourse through collective pleasures. The work envisions a future where cooling centers are reimagined as spaces that prioritize shared thermal pleasures and the joy of gathering as tools for community resilience.
Students (M.Arch): Xinhui Harper Dong, Kyra Johnston, Bryan Kim, Tin wing Alvina Lee, Monical Leslie, Maria Maddox, Elizabeth Renchin, Mike Ren, Jackie Urwin, Wenjun Wei, Wenteng Zhao , Todd Zhou, Pinru Zhu.
Collective Comfort awarded 2022 SOM Research Prize
"Collective Comfort: Framing the Cooling Center as a Resiliency and Educational Hub for Communities in Desert Cities" is Awarded the 2022 Research Prize by the SOM Foundation, the project reimagines cooling centers in desert cities as educational resilience hubs. The initiative is led by Liz Gálvez of the University of California, Berkeley, and Dalia Munenzon of the University of Houston.
The research focuses on the Phoenix metropolitan area, known as the Valley of the Sun, which experienced 145 days with temperatures exceeding 100°F in 2020. This overreliance on fossil-fuel-powered air conditioning poses risks, especially during extreme weather events that strain electrical supplies. The project aims to educate communities about heat risks and weatherization, promoting collective resilience and reducing dependence on fossil fuels.
For more information, visit the SOM Foundation's official page on the project.
Collective Comfort II Studio Course receives an Honorable Mention for the 2024 Course Development Prize
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 2024 Course Development Prize in Architecture, Climate Change, and Society. These courses will be taught at ACSA member schools across the world in the coming years.
Collective Comfort selected for the 2023 AIA Upjohn Research Initiative
The initiative is led by Liz Gálvez of the University of California, Berkeley, and Dalia Munenzon of the University of Houston.
Collective Comfort aims to develop a public program that re-thinks the cooling center as an educational resilience hub. It will explore how visualization and somatic practices of thermal comfort can reduce risk from urban heat, and how resilient hub co-design can create agency and stewardship for vulnerable populations affected by heat and cooling inequality. This research brings interdisciplinary partners from resiliency planning, engineering, and architecture into collaboration with community stakeholders and municipal government to develop design guidelines.
For more information, visit the AIA Upjohn Research Initiative Page.
The Unbearable Tightness of Building
Liz Galvez, Lizzie Yarina, Claudia Bode; The Unbearable Tightness of Building. Thresholds 2022; (50): 271–288. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/thld_a_00767
On the occasion of its 50th issue, Thresholds 50: Before // After includes scholarly articles, interdisciplinary investigations, and creative contributions from art, architecture, and related fields that explore the thematic concerns of BEFORE and/or AFTER. Thresholds is the peer-reviewed journal produced by the MIT Department of Architecture and distributed by the MIT Press.
Focusing exclusively on variables of energy sources or envelope technologies obscures the more radical lifestyle changes essential for the formation of a new, environmentally just society. Efforts to produce global regulatory standards miss the subtleties of specific social, cultural, climactic, technological, and economic contexts. As such, the shift from measuring the efficacy of our separation from the environment, to considering (if we must measure) the efficacy of our mediation with the environment, is a societal and conceptual shift rather than a technical adjustment. It suggests a return to the bearable looseness of the non-modern envelope: a method of enveloping that addresses not only the building interior and its exterior, but also the nuanced and inescapable relationship between the two—one of transition and mediation—as an area of design intervention. Loose conclusions call for a multiplicity of approaches to enveloping and, as such, the return of design-thinking to the thick and porous realm of enclosure.
From Exigent to Adaptive: The Humans of Air Architecture and Beyond
Gálvez, Liz. “From Exigent to Adaptive.” Footprint, Vol. 13 No. 2, Issue 25 (Autumn/ Winter 2019): 101-118. https://doi.org/10.7480/footprint.13.2.3925.
Unfolding in the study of histories, architectural types, aesthetics, atmospheres, systems, and users, the research articles and visual essays included in this issue shed light on the many ways architects, advertently or inadvertently, coalesce with forces intending to condition humans.
The divorce between the disciplines of architectural design and systems engineering in conjunction with the scientisation of comfort-standards encourages a year-round and day-round comfort routine to the contemporary human. In his proposal for Air Architecture, French artist Yves Klein proposes the opposite: an architecture devoid of the responsibility to temper human environs. Mechanical machinery enables an architecture to come, while Klein’s proposal for an Architecture of Air imagines a future adaptive-human. Before the popularisation of interior weather, Native populations employed adaptations, or experience a ‘change of human sensitivity’, much like native plants and animals do in order to survive their environment, much like the transformation that Klein describes. In a world where resource reduction and scaremongering tactics regarding climate change do not accomplish enough, we must think towards a more enriched human existence, for a thriving, strengthened human race. Klein uses architecture to imagine a new, joyful world to come, encouraging human evolution through the employment of playful mechanics.