Silvia Benedito

Weather as Space

What is weather? What is atmosphere? And how to design with/for it considering comfort, resource optimization, and climatic mitigation? This presentation explores these questions by journeying from the psycho-physiological domains of the human sensation to the scale of territorial planning in which the meteorological elements—and corresponding thermodynamic processes—act as matter and space in the practice of design.

About Silvia Benedito

Silvia Benedito teaches in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (Harvard GSD), and currently holds the Aga Khan chair in the Department. Benedito is a registered architect, landscape architect and urban designer in both Portugal and Germany. She teaches and coordinates design studios and research centered on the role of climate-oriented design strategies in ameliorating thermal loads of urban territories. Her last research examines the wildfire causes in rural communities of the Mediterranean-type climate regions (MCRs) and West Africa. Benedito was a Guest Professor at the Technische Universität München (2018) and at the Technische Universität Graz (2019). More recently, she was the Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the University of Waterloo, Canada.