David Benjamin - Adaptation

David Benjamin is Principal at architecture firm The Living and Assistant Professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. The Living explores the architecture of the future through building it today. We bring new technologies to life in the built environment, and we have a passion for integrating design innovation, sustainability, and the public realm. We believe cities and buildings are living, breathing organisms. And in the context of rapid change and new urban challenges, we propose that design should be a living, breathing ecosystem. Within this design ecosystem, we work on multiple scales simultaneously. We anticipate and welcome rapid change. We embrace design with uncertainty, design with rules rather than fixed forms, and design with shifting and unknowable forces. Clients include the City of New York, Seoul Municipal Government, Airbus, Nike, 3M, Princeton University, Quantified Self, and Miami Science Museum. Recent projects include the Princeton Architecture Laboratory (a new building for research on robotics and next-generation design and construction technologies), Hy-Fi (a branching tower in the courtyard of MoMA PS1 created with almost no waste, no energy, and no carbon emissions), Pier 35 EcoPark (a 200-foot floating pier in the East River that changes color according to water quality), and Architecture Bio-synthesis (a new process of bio-computation and bio-manufacturing to produce high-performance, sustainable materials through synthetic biology).