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March 13, 2026

PhD Architecture Graduate Group Faculty Dorit Aviv, and PhD students at the Thermal Architecture Lab, study how humans, technology, and design intersect, paving the way for the development of novel approaches to cooling people efficiently

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Dorit Aviv and Zhan Shi preparing the lab’s mobile weather station for deployment in Philadelphia. Credit: Eric Sucar, University of Pennsylvania.
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Dorit Aviv and Zhan Shi preparing the lab’s mobile weather station for deployment in Philadelphia. Credit: Eric Sucar, University of Pennsylvania.
Credit: Eric Sucar, University of Pennsylvania.
Dorit Aviv, an assistant professor at Weitzman and director of the Thermal Architecture Lab. Credit: Eric Sucar, University of Pennsylvania.
Credit: Eric Sucar, University of Pennsylvania.
Credit: Eric Sucar, University of Pennsylvania.
Ph.D. student Ji Yoon Bae casting the topping layer of the heating and cooling chair with embedded water pipes. Credit: Eric Sucar, University of Pennsylvania.
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Effective and efficient cooling strategies are increasingly necessary in a warming climate. Humans continuously generate heat through metabolism, releasing it into the environment around them. Dorit Aviv views the built environment—buildings, roads, and other human-made infrastructure—as the site of a constant thermodynamic exchange between humans and space.

Penn Today spoke with Aviv, director of the Thermal Architecture Lab, about the vision of the lab and some of its current projects, ranging from human-centered cooling technologies to strategies for addressing urban heat, as well as the lab’s community collaborations in Philadelphia.The article features work by three Architecture PhD students in the lab: Ji Yoon Bae, Zhan Shi, and Zherui Wang. 

Read the full story in Penn Today.

 

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