David Benjamin

David Benjamin (‘05 M.Arch) is Founding Principal of The Living and Associate Professor at Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. His work is focused on promoting environmental sustainability through new approaches to biology and computation. He believes there are vital opportunities to address climate change by designing buildings as dynamic systems rather than static objects. And he creates corresponding projects at many levels, from first-of-their-kind prototypes to demonstration buildings to strategies for scaling up.

Benjamin is known for his early work on generative design for architecture and aerospace. He created the Bionic Partition—a lightweight airplane component for Airbus (2013-2023)—by developing a novel biological algorithm for design, and the project is currently being scaled up to reduce carbon emissions in aviation by one million tons per year.

Benjamin is also known for his long-term research on carbon-negative construction materials, which are materials with more carbon absorbed than emitted during the process of production. He created Hy-Fi—a 40-foot-tall temporary building for the Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1 (2014)—by developing a new architectural brick, and the project was the first large-scale outdoor project made of straw (agricultural waste) and mycelium (the root-like structure of mushrooms). Building on this research, he designed Phoenix—a 300-unit affordable housing complex in Oakland (2027)—by developing 38-foot-long facade panels made of agricultural waste, mycelium, and fiber-reinforced polymer. The panels are carbon-negative and also ready to be used with today’s building codes and construction practices. They were designed to be scaled up by “dropping in” to systems that are already up and running.

Benjamin’s research and practice have won many prizes, including the Emerging Voices Award from the Architectural League, the Best Sustainable Design Firm Award from Architect’s Newspaper, the top Eco Design Prize from the German Federal Government, the Mies Crown Hall Americas Emerge Finalist Prize, the Zumtobel Group Award for Sustainability and Humanity, several AIA New York Design Awards, and two Holcim Sustainability Awards. It has also been selected for Architizer’s 100 Best Architecture Firms in the United States, Fast Company’s Ten Most Innovative Architecture Firms in the World, Rolling Stone’s 25 People Shaping the Future, and Archinect’s Top 10 Architecture Firms Leading the Future of AI and Innovation in Design. The work has been featured in over 80 books, and in publications including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, National Geographic, The Economist (UK), Die Welt (Germany), the Straits Times (Singapore), Financial Times (UK), El Mercurio (Chile), Chosun Ilbo (Korea), Architecture + Urbanism Magazine (Japan), Urban Environment Design Magazine (China), STIR (India), Domus (Italy), DETAIL (Germany), L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui (France), Azure Magazine (Canada), Architectural Record, and Scientific American. Benjamin’s work is part of the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Nevada Museum of Art.

Recent projects include the Princeton University Embodied Computation Lab (a new building for architecture research), the Airbus NIS Engine Factory (a flagship low-carbon manufacturing facility), and Alive (a probiotic pavilion for the Venice Architecture Biennale).

Benjamin has published over 30 peer-reviewed papers and book chapters, and his books include Now We See Now: Architecture and Research by The Living and Embodied Energy and Design: Making Architecture Between Metrics and Narratives. He received a Master of Architecture from Columbia University and a Bachelor of Arts in Social Studies from Harvard University.