Lola Ben-Alon

Lola Ben-Alon is an Assistant Professor at Columbia GSAPP, where she directs the Natural Materials Lab and the Building Tech curriculum. She specializes in socially and environmentally sustainable building materials, construction practices, and engineering-architecture collaborations.

Her current work focuses on natural earth- and bio-based building materials, their manual and digital fabrication, life cycle, supply chains, and policy. She uses quantitative and qualitative methods to evaluate the embodied and operational impacts of low-carbon assemblies such as cob, rammed earth, and light straw clay.

Ben-Alon is particularly passionate about fostering connections between academia and local communities by using participatory design and social hands-on engagement in the production of the built environment. Through sharing skills and knowledge that promote healthy and affordable living environments, Ben-Alon hopes to diversify the building industry and catalyze new intersections and creative dialogues among the various disciplines of architecture, engineering, art, and sociology.

Ben-Alon received her Ph.D. from the School of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University, where she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Building Performance and Diagnostics. She holds a B.S. in Structural Engineering and M.S. in Construction Management from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. At the Technion, Ben-Alon also earned a diploma in Critical and Curatorial Studies, where she co-founded art.espionage, the Experimental Art and Architecture Lab. Previously, she served as a curator and content developer at the Madatech, Israel National Museum of Science, Technology, and Space. Ben-Alon also received $20.000 to fund her teaching through the HP Campus of the Future: Emerging Technology Grant for Teaching and Learning Projects.

Her work was published in Building and Environment, Journal of Green Building, Woodhead Publishing Series in Civil and Structural Engineering, and Automation in Construction. She serves on the board of ACSA’s Technology | Architecture + Design, and Elsevier’s Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews.