Faculty News:

Arta Yazdanseta appointed Assistant Professor

The Dean’s Office has announced the full-time tenure-track appointment of Dr. Arta Yazdanseta as the newest Assistant Professor in the School of Architecture.

With expertise in bioclimatic envelopes at the intersection of design, building performance, and plant biophysical ecology, Dr. Arta Yazdanseta will provide an invaluable contribution to our architecture program that is committed to overcoming climate change and the unique social, economic, and ecological disruptions of the Anthropocene.

In her role as an educator and administrator, she has developed novel pedagogical approaches to integrating environmental design in architectural education today that address the perceived and ongoing divide between design poetics and building science.

Dr. Yazdanseta earned her Doctor of Design and Master of Design in Energy and Environments from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and her professional architectural degree from the Pratt Institute. As a researcher at the Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities, she developed architectural environmental design strategies and provided performance analyses for the Center’s headquarters’ Zero Carbon Retrofit project. Her research contributions have been published in Empire, State & Building, Essays on Thermodynamics: Architecture and Beauty, and Phyto: Principles and Resources for Site Remediation and Landscape Design.

Dr. Yazdanseta was the first prize winner of the International Building Performance Simulation Association Competition Award in Chambery, France. She was the recipient of the Harvard Sustainability Award, Circle Award Fellowship, and AIA Women’s Architectural Auxiliary Eleanor Allwork Scholar. Her work has been exhibited at the New York Chapter of the AIA and has been published in Metropolis magazine. She is the co-founder of Growery Collective Lab with a mission to enhance socio-natural systems by cultivating their self-organizing potentials.

She has taught at Northeastern University, Harvard Graduate School of Design, Boston Architectural College, and Pratt Institute. Most recently Dr. Yazdanseta was an Assistant Professor of Environmental Design and Technology at the Parsons School of Constructed Environments (SCE) where she also served as the Faculty Leader of Environmental Design and Director of the Master of Architecture Program.

Dean Evan Douglis would like to thank the Faculty Search Committee comprised of Prof. Ted Krueger, committee chair; Prof. Lonn Combs, M.Arch Director, and IDS Coordinator; Prof. Rhett Russo, Chair, Bachelor Architecture program ; Prof. Alex Tsamis, Associate Director of CASE, and Graduate Program Director of the Built Ecologies program; and Prof. Adam Dayem, AD3 and AD4 Coordinator, and Director of Publications and the Career Discovery Program for their impressive efforts throughout the search process on behalf of the School of Architecture.