David Benjamin

David Benjamin (‘05 M.Arch) is Founding Principal of The Living and Associate Professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. His work applies biology and computation to an expanded and actionable framework of environmental sustainability. By considering buildings as dynamic systems rather than static objects, he finds opportunities to design levers of decarbonization that scale up.

Recent projects include the Airbus NIS Engine Factory (a low-carbon manufacturing facility), the Princeton University Embodied Computation Lab (a new building for architecture research), and Hy-Fi (a branching tower for the Museum of Modern Art made of a new type of carbon-negative brick). Benjamin received a Bachelor of Arts in Social Studies from Harvard and a Master of Architecture from Columbia. He also edited the book “Embodied Energy and Design: Making Architecture Between Metrics and Narratives.”