Leighton Beaman is a designer and educator working at the convergence of material intelligence, emerging technologies, and collective experience. His work explores how design might serve as a node in networks of planetary intelligence—treating architecture not as static form, but as a responsive system shaped by care, perception, and adaptation. As Co-founder of General Architecture Collaborative, he leads award-winning, community-driven projects across East Africa and North America that foreground sustainable construction, cultural resilience, and participatory design. Through the Laboratory for Material Propositions, Beaman collaborates with a transdisciplinary network—from musicians and neuroscientists to climate scientists and choreographers—to investigate how spatial systems can sense, feel, and respond. Central to this work is the study of affect—how emotional and sensory forces shape environments, and how environments might, in turn, care for us.
At Cornell University, Beaman advances a pedagogy grounded in systems thinking, material intelligence, and adaptive design strategies. Working across climate, computation, and cultural systems, he equips students to navigate complexity with analytical rigor and contextual sensitivity. But beyond technique, his teaching asks students to imagine design as a practice of empathy—a way of listening to the world’s signals and responding with care. Architecture, in this view, becomes a soft infrastructure: not a static enclosure, but a living interface—attuned to emotion, embedded in environment, and open to transformation.