Outfitting Architecture imagines building assemblies like clothing–something you can layer, unzip, or throw on depending on the weather, your mood, or how many people are coming for dinner.

This option studio challenges dominant understandings of comfort in architecture, proposing a layered, climate-responsive design methodology that bridges social, thermal, and material entanglements within the apartment buildings and arcades of Athens. The studio investigates how architecture–like clothing–can be rethought as an adaptable, soft system able to evolve for shifting climates and forms of inhabitation.

Comfort has long been tied to interior predictability, air-conditioning, and sealed envelopes. Yet climate volatility, resource scarcity, and shifting social expectations call for a new spatial language. The studio explores how architectural envelopes can be outfitted–rather than sealed–to create responsive environments.

The studio will focus on the design of rooms without and rooms within–occupiable exterior wall sections and nested conditioned spaces–to challenge the binary between interior and exterior environments. Drawing inspiration from high-performance clothing and outerwear, the studio incorporates architectural textiles, insulation systems, barriers, and reflective surfaces to rethink architectural envelopes as dynamic systems. Students will study semi-permanent structures–awnings, canopies, umbrellas–as formal prompts. The work will value tactile variation, collective intimacy, and flexible thermal boundaries as students test how modularity and permeability might replace the sealed 70-degree interior, tuning instead to seasons, material culture, and history.

A key component is the studio’s site visit to Athens, often called Europe’s hottest capital, which will expose students to the climate realities of warming temperate zones. Traveling from the cold climate of Cambridge (Köppen climate classification: Dfb) to the temperate climate of Athens (Köppen climate classification: Csa), will allow students to study architecture’s response to shifting environmental conditions, projected to shape much of the developed world’s future climate.

Study sites in Athens include ancient and contemporary buildings that employ a range of climatic strategies and expose students to precedents that blur indoor/outdoor binaries. This research will be applied toward speculative proposals for retrofitting existing structures in Athens. Students will design adaptive thermal envelopes (semi-permanent architectural coverings) to both shield the thermal mass and create new social boundaries for existing buildings. The studio will work on two ubiquitous Athenian building types — the polykatoikia (apartment building) and the urban stoa (arcade). Along with these exterior interventions (rooms without), students will design small scale adaptive environments (rooms within), to host the intimate scale necessary for climatic and social retreat.

Research will span scales and disciplines: from historical analysis of clothing and furniture, to passive systems and textile prototyping. The studio introduces students to an alternative to the overreliance on mechanical conditioning while recognizing that thermal comfort is never purely technical–it’s also psychological, cultural, and formal.

The studio is generously supported by Harvard’s Center for Green Buildings and Cities and Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.

Note regarding the Fall 2025 GSD academic calendar: The first day of classes, Tuesday, September 2nd, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. This studio will meet for the first time on Thursday, September 4th.