David Benjamin

David Benjamin is principal at The Living and assistant professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. The Living explores the architecture of the future through building it today, bringing new technologies to life in the built environment with a passion for integrating design innovation, sustainability, and the public realm. Benjamin believes that cities and buildings are living, breathing organisms, and in the context of rapid change and new urban challenges, proposes that design should be a living, breathing ecosystem. Within this design ecosystem, The Living works on multiple scales simultaneously; anticipates and welcomes rapid change; and embraces design with uncertainty, design with rules rather than fixed forms, and design with shifting and unknowable forces. Clients include the City of New York, Airbus, 3M, Quantified Self, and Miami Science Museum. Recent projects include the Princeton Architecture Laboratory, Hy-Fi (a branching tower in the courtyard of MoMA PS1 created with almost no waste, energy, or carbon emissions), Pier 35 EcoPark (a 200-foot floating pier in the East River that changes color according to water quality), and Architecture Bio-Synthesis (a new process of bio-computation and bio-manufacturing to produce high-performance, sustainable materials through synthetic biology).