Elisa Iturbe

Elisa Iturbe is an architectural designer, writer, and educator. Her work studies the relationship between energy, power, and form, with a focus on how the adoption of fossil fuels changed the spatial organization of the built environment, producing an urban and architectural paradigm unique to the carbon age—carbon form.

Iturbe’s theory of carbon form first appeared in Log 47, titled “Overcoming Carbon Form,” which she guest-edited in 2019. The lead essay, “Architecture and the Death of Carbon Modernity” was awarded the Pierre Vago Journalism award in 2020. This conceptual framework for that issue laid the foundation for the co-curated and co-produced exhibition Confronting Carbon Form at The Cooper Union, which exhibited original works in various media that work together to define the spatial concepts of the carbon age. Her writings on this topic have been published widely in journals such as Log, AA Files, Perspecta, New York Review of Architecture, E-Flux, Antagonismos, as well as several essay anthologies. She also co-wrote a book with Peter Eisenman titled Lateness.

Iturbe is currently Assistant Professor of Architecture at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and was previously Assistant Professor at The Cooper Union. She has also taught courses on carbon modernity and formal analysis the Yale School of Architecture and Cornell AAP. Her work has been supported by the Graham Foundation and the New York State Council for the Arts, and she was awarded a MacDowell Fellowship in 2024.

She is a graduate of Yale’s dual degree program, where she earned a Master’s in Architecture from the Yale School of Architecture and a Master’s in Environmental Management from the Yale School of the Environment. She is co-founder of Outside Development, a design and research practice.