News

For the first time, Berkeley teams came out on top in the 2025 Innovation in Affordable Housing Student Design and Planning Competition. The theme for this year’s competition, which received entries from schools across the country, was “designing for disasters.”

UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design is excited to announce that Justin Kollar will be teaching the InCity program this summer. Kollar brings a tremendous breadth of experience in academia and practice  —spanning global planning, urban design, and critical research — to the InCity studio. There are still some spots left: apply today!

The California Institute for Energy and Environment announced Aoyu Zou, a PhD student in architecture (BSTS), as the recipient of the 2025 Art Rosenfeld Award for Energy Efficiency. Working in the Center for the Built Environment under Professors Stefano Schiavon and Gail Brager, Zou is developing scalable, grid-interactive solutions to improve energy efficiency in the built environment.

Designer, educator, researcher, and alum David Brown (MArch 1990) led this year’s competition, with the theme Lot, Garden, and Void. Student teams of five to six students had 58 hours to create their designs before presenting to a panel of jurors. Brown, professor of architecture and director of the College of Architecture at the University of Illinois – Chicago, is best known for The Available City, his ongoing initiative to document, explore, and reimagine vacant lots in Chicago as landscapes of collective action.

CED announces Just Climate Futures grants to support projects that investigate carbon-neutral timber construction, new methods of wildfire risk mitigation, converting commercial buildings into affordable housing, and the environmental impacts of AI.