University of Pennsylvania

Projects 2023

Building With Food

Bhavana Balasubramanian, Yifan Lyu, Yue Wang, Jiachun Wang

The project is an exploration of waste valorization and its potential inclusion in the design and construction industries. The project incorporates vegetable scraps into material such as concrete to demonstrate potential uses for foods that would otherwise be thrown away.

Laia Mogas-Soldevila is an Assistant Professor of Graduate Architecture and Director of DumoLab Research at the Stuart Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania. Laia's research focuses on new sustainable material practices bridging science, engineering and the arts. Her broader pedagogy supports novel theory and applied methods understanding materials and materialization in architecture. She has built scholarship over the past ten years reconsidering matter as a fundamental design driver and partnering with scientists to redesign it towards unprecedented capabilities. Laia holds an interdisciplinary doctorate bridging materials science, biomedical engineering, and design from Tufts University School of Engineering, two master's degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is a licensed architect with a minor in Fine Arts by the Polytechnic University of Catalonia School of Architecture.