Yale University professor Anna Dyson is also founding director of the Yale Center for Ecosystems in Architecture (CEA), connecting to other interdisciplinary labs on campus to collaborate on vigorous research, development, and deployment of novel architectural systems to take on the challenge of metabolizing energy, water, and materials within architecture in radically new ways. Dyson has been a professor of architecture at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where she founded the Center for Architecture, Science and Ecology (CASE) in Manhattan with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP in 2006. She holds many international patents on building systems innovations for the collection and distribution of clean energy, water, air quality, and material life cycle. In this Architectural League talk, she argues that a substantial architectural research discipline must focus on integration across specialized silos, to push forward our collective task of understanding and shifting ecosystemic behaviors.

This lecture is part of “Towards a New Architecture: Climate change and design,” a series of discussions held by New York’s Architectural League in which leading practitioners and educators describe the urgent need for change and sketch the outlines of new ways of thinking and acting as architects and landscape architects. On each evening, respondents will draw out the implications of the ideas presented and offer suggestions for implementing them at a speed and scale commensurate with the climate emergency.