Making sense of climate data for a different architecture
A Spring 2026 graduate seminar in architecture taught by Associate Professor Martha Bohm produced a series of prototypes and installations that construct a new approach to design for climate resilience – one that uses materials as a physical vocabulary and the act of making as an investigatory process. Photos by Maryanne Schultz
Rachel Teaman May 26, 2026
Now more than ever, designing for resilience requires architects to interpret and act upon expanding domains of data that track everything from building energy use, to greenhouse gas emissions, to clean energy production.
The big question, according to Martha Bohm, associate professor of architecture, is how.
“The world is giving us information that says we need to do things differently,” says Bohm. “We can’t just dismiss that. We actually have to do things differently."
The problem is particularly salient to a shifting architectural pedagogy and the training of young designers, according to Bohm, whose current research explores how students designing in the context of a warming planet construct new understandings from the chaos of information surrounding us.
She and a cohort of Master of Architecture students at UB dug into this very question this past Spring through a seminar inviting the aspiring architects to translate mounds of climate-related data into inquiries in materiality and making.
The premise of the course, Bohm says, eschews the profession’s preoccupation with “data-driven design,” which can actually decouple design from the tangible aspects of climate resilience by overemphasizing quantification and, at least on the surface, oversimplifying what is a highly complex process.
“It is a stretch to grapple simultaneously with the abstract (tons of carbon) and the physical (tons of concrete), but numbers, stories and materiality are all essential when designing spaces,” Bohm states in the course syllabus, referring to the practical challenge of designing with (and for) data.
The exploratory course – the first of its kind offered at UB – produced a series of prototypes and installations that together construct a new approach to design for climate resilience – one that uses materials as a physical vocabulary and the act of making as an investigatory process.
Drawing from the fields of data humanism, visualization and physicalization, the course applies design interventions to concretize the abstractions of climate – from magnitude and scale to precision and accuracy. “Studies suggest that data isn't experienced as 'real' to designers when expressed mathematically,” says Bohm. “The data are understood, but not internalized when they are just visual graphics.”
Bohm designed the course based on insights from her research – that designers need time to investigate and understand data before integrating them into design. Students focused on a single project over the course of the semester, developing their concept through data analysis and storytelling, a review of ‘physical data’ precedents across disciplines, intensive sketchbook writing and data mapping workshops, and a final assembly representative of a discrete dataset.
- Martha Bohm, associate professor of architecture
It is a stretch to grapple simultaneously with the abstract (tons of carbon) and the physical (tons of concrete), but numbers, stories and materiality are all essential when designing spaces.
Students began by selecting their data from wide-ranging sources that track climate indicators across scales, from the Paris Climate Agreement to the New York State Climate Act. They were then invited to identify a palette of materials that could both explain and structurally explore patterns and trends revealed by their data.
“One thing I was really strict about was that they had to be bounded by the data, and specific with how they represented it,” says Bohm. “In fact, that’s what we’re trying to do architecturally in designing for climate resilience. We have to be bound by certain prescriptive standards about how things need to be, whether that’s embodied carbon in materials, or the performance of those building materials and assemblies.”
“Sometimes students were didactic in their projects, seeking to explain their data. But more often, they were exploratory, saying ‘we’re just going to sit in this data landscape, walk around in it and see things that we didn’t see before.’”
“One of my favorite days was when they showed up to class with all the things they could find,” adds Bohm, highlighting the students’ resourceful repurposing of materials, including discarded steel from the waste bins of the Fabrication Workshop, recycled spools of thread from Stitch Buffalo, and scavenged tiles from Buffalo ReUse. “They had to find things they could get a lot of, in different colors, sizes, textures, and shapes. The challenge was getting them to think abstractly about those materials, even though they’re concrete things.”
In the end, students’ design imaginations and activist ambitions manifested as provocative, multi-dimensional assemblies – from beads threaded onto steel-wire trees to show gradations of building-level energy use, by sector, across New York City; to an installation of suspended, pointed steel shards representing 40+ years of the world’s severe weather events (with each piece sized according to the event's economic destruction and hung at heights in line with the number of human casualties); to a radial sculpture of incense sticks notched, coated, and intentionally burned to illustrate household energy consumption and fuel insecurity for selected regions across the United States.
Bohm, who plans to teach the course next Spring, says it may take years for the students to weave this type of thinking into their overall architectural design process, but it is an essential first step. “If we just set requirements that students do a certain type of analysis, then, as practicing architects, they might just as well bring in consultants to perform that analysis. They need strategies to integrate data into an embodied design process – to think with data. I wanted to explore that integration and give it the time and space it needs. It’s a messier process than data analysis, but I think it's the only way architecture students will learn to design differently for climate resilience.”
Featured Projects
Fragments of a New Abnormal, by Justin Switzer
Fragments of a New Abnormal presents severe weather data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration spanning 1980 to 2024, organized chronologically to reveal patterns over time. The dataset is structured through key variables such as event type, date, damage cost, and casualties, which together shape its current form.
The work centers on damage cost as a lens for understanding the environmental consequences of destruction and rebuilding. Each instance of loss, particularly to built structures, implies a cycle of reconstruction highlighting the carbon impact embedded in these repeated processes.
As patterns emerge across time, shifts in frequency, seasonality, and event type suggest narratives that extend beyond the initial focus. What do these changes reveal about broader environmental conditions? How might the accumulation of these events reshape our understanding of what is considered normal?
Emission Veil: Suspended Consequence, by Sukriti Sharma
By converting atmospheric data into a tactile and inhabitable condition, the work positions emissions as something encountered, not just measured. “What does it mean to move through a field of emissions?”
This project translates New York State’s greenhouse gas emissions into a spatial field where quantity becomes density and composition becomes legible through variation. Each vertical string represents a major economic sector, and each wooden element encodes emissions in CO2-equivalent, embedding the relative potency of gases within a single cumulative system. Carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and fluorinated gases are expressed through distinct material variations, revealing differences not only in scale but also in the nature and impact of what is emitted.
The installation allows data to determine form. A constant string height and fixed margins establish a controlled framework, while the number and size of elements distribute themselves through equalized spacing. Density emerges directly from the dataset, while dimensions are derived using a square root transformation of emission values scaled by a factor of 3.2 million, ensuring proportional clarity while maintaining buildable limits.
Regional Diffusion, by Regan Dauenhauer
Regional Diffusion is a set of data-based sculptures illustrating household energy consumption and insecurity, represented by the systematic aggregation of incense sticks with alterations that affect their ability to burn.
Incense, like energy, is a consumable item that is burned to achieve a temporary result in one’s household environment. In the process of burning, it undergoes irreversible chemical change and is converted to combustion products. Household use accounts for roughly one-fifth of the energy consumed in the United States, and consideration of the many factors influencing it is vital.
Due to its geographic and cultural diversity, each of the United States’ five census-designated regions are represented individually and divided into sub-regions. A set of unique factors influence each region’s relationship with energy including local climate, economic forces, quality of the built environment, and cultural attitude towards energy use. Regional Diffusion aims to materialize this variation and encourage contemplation of these underlying patterns.
Each region’s stock of occupied housing units is represented by the aggregation of incense sticks. The clusters take shape based on the number of sub-regions they contain; regions with three sub-regions are triangular and regions with two are square-shaped. The age of the housing stock is illustrated with wrappings that denote the number of housing units built by decade. A portion of incense is removed from each stick to signify annual household energy expenditure by square foot. These methods of representation intend to create a broad impression of each region’s character and scope.
The component of scent offers a more nuanced materialization of each region’s conditions. Burning a portion of the incense symbolizes the average annual energy consumption per household. It changes the scent and appearance, emphasizing the differences in consumption across regions. In contrast, self-reported energy insecurity is represented with an unscented wax dip that suppresses scent and prevents the incense from burning. This way, the scent component is uniquely modified by the patterns affecting each region.
Consumption Forrest, by Janice Ng
The exhibit invites viewers to look and think about where they are and how much energy is being used and where it goes, not just to a specific location but also what building types are using that energy.
Each color represents a different category of building type; residential, small residential, large residential, commercial, industrial, and institutional. Adding a layer to the story, the size of each bead represents the amount of energy use.
The data takes the form of a tree to create an inversion of what a tree is meant to do for the environment. Where they are meant to clean, these fantastical fairy-like trees are now what represents the main cause for our environment's decay.
The forms of the trees also start to invite curiosity to ask why so much energy is going to this specific building type and if there is a way to lower it by creating an alternative energy layout.
Woven Imbalance, by Emma Chase
Woven Imbalance is a suspended textile installation that examines the growing disconnect between rapid urban development and the slower expansion of renewable energy infrastructure in Brooklyn and NYC.
Using annual datasets from 2000 to 2023, the project translates climate, housing, and offshore wind infrastructure data into a layered woven system that visualizes the relationship between rising temperatures, increasing residential growth, and the gradual implementation of renewable energy systems.
The installation is composed of three interconnected textile panels, each representing a different data set. Annual average temperatures are translated through gradients of green while also using stitch densities to emphasize temperatures staying the same or decreasing, allowing fluctuations in climate data to become materially visible over time. Wooden beads suspended on white thread represent residential housing units permitted annually in Brooklyn, with each bead representing 2000 new housing units, emphasizing the accelerating pace of development. Offshore wind turbines are represented through suspended light blue yarn frills, while strings extending between the turbine and housing panels visualize the amount of energy each turbine can provide to residential growth.
Through weaving, suspension, and accumulation, the project transforms abstract numerical data into a tactile and spatial experience. The installation allows viewers to physically perceive the imbalance between these interconnected systems rather than presenting data through conventional charts and graphs. The work questions why large-scale housing development can be approved and constructed at such a rapid pace while the renewable energy infrastructure and policies needed to support that growth continue to expand more slowly, despite the accelerating climate crisis. Woven Imbalance ultimately highlights the tension between urban expansion, energy dependency, and climate in the city.