Elizabeth Bowie Christoforetti

Assistant Professor in Practice of Architecture

Affiliations
  • Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities
  • Laboratory for Design Technologies
Research Areas
  • Design Engineering
  • Housing
  • Practice

Elizabeth’s teaching and research focus on emerging modes of design practice in the built environment. Her work at the GSD explores design methods, theories, and the technological building blocks that enable design practice to better confront the imperatives of our time, such as artificial intelligence and market-driven urbanism. The Laboratory for Values in the Built Environment (ViBE Lab ), her research group within the Laboratory for Design Technologies,  aims to uncover the potentials for scalable systems of design by daylighting, operating upon, and designing new socio-technical systems – design that is dependent upon a combination of social and technological processes, and collaboration between them.

Elizabeth directs Supernormal , a design studio based in Cambridge, MA. She founded Supernormal to create meaningful and practical change through the intersection of architecture, urbanism, technology, and contemporary culture. Elizabeth directs Supernormal as an engaged design practice that meets the world exactly as it is, and with a glass that is half full.

Her design practice, research, and teaching explore the cultural implications of large data sets, human-machine collaboration, and scalable systems of design. Elizabeth’s work joins a perspective of radical pragmatism with a deep value for the potential of design imagination.

Courses

DES-3542
Spring 2026
Discussion-based Seminar
4 Units
STU-1232
Collaborative Design Engineering Studio II
Elizabeth Bowie Christoforetti, Leighton Beaman, Justin W. Cook, Mark Coughlin, Monique Fuchs, George Guida, Karen Reuther, Daniel Tish
Spring 2026
Core Studio
6 Units
STU-1231
Collaborative Design Engineering Studio I (with SEAS)
Elizabeth Bowie Christoforetti, Justin W. Cook, Alexandros Haridis, Melanie Hoff, Yuan Mu, Andrew Witt, Siqi Zhu
Fall 2024
Core Studio
6 Units
PRO-7445
Fall 2024
Lecture
4 Units