Lola Ben-Alon

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

Her current work focuses on quantitative and qualitative methods to evaluate the embodied and operational impacts of low-carbon building materials and methods such as rammed earth. She 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. Her work was published in Building and Environment, Journal of Green Building, Woodhead Publishing Series in Civil and Structural Engineering, and Automation in Construction.

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. She also served as a curator and content developer at the Madatech, Israel National Museum of Science, Technology, and Space.