Exploring the intersections of design, ecology, and human experience.
The Constructed Environment Research Network examines the social, ecological, and material dimensions of the built world. Member-based and scholar-led, the Network connects architects, urbanists, designers, and researchers working to understand how environments are shaped—and how they, in turn, shape us.
The Constructed Environment Research Network was founded in 2010 with its first conference at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice, held alongside the Venice Architecture Biennale. It was set up as a place where architects, planners, designers, and researchers could talk together about how buildings, cities, and landscapes are made—and how those decisions shape everyday life and the wider environment. From the beginning, the focus has been on the links between form, use, and responsibility: how the built world connects people, materials, and ecosystems.
After Venice, the conference moved to a series of different contexts and partner institutions: The University of British Columbia Vancouver, Universidade Nova de Lisboa in partnership with the Lisbon Architecture Triennial, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Arizona, Cracow University of Technology, Wayne State University in Detroit, Centro Cultural Vila Flor in Guimarães, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Calgary, the University of Monterrey, the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, the University of Vienna, and HTW Berlin – Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft Berlin. Each location has pulled different questions to the surface—sustainable cities, infrastructure and the Anthropocene, post-industrial regeneration, coastal and island urbanism, and new urban fabrics in Europe and Latin America.
Jeffery S. (Jeff) Poss served as the founding Chair and Editor (2010–2015), anchoring the early years in questions of design practice, studio teaching, and the relationship between architecture and place. Cidália Ferreira Silva led the Network from 2016 to 2020, bringing a strong emphasis on urban form, regeneration, and Portuguese and European debates about public space. Since 2021, Fabian Neuhaus (University of Calgary) has been Chair and Editor, with work that looks closely at time, ecology, and the city—how built environments register change and how they might be rethought in light of climate and social pressures.
Across these phases, invited plenary speakers have added their own perspectives on architecture and the city. David Mayernik, Kathryn H. Anthony, Jeffery S. Poss, Aaron Levy, Ryan E. Smith, Bing Thom, Beatrice Galilee, Sally Harrison, Winka Dubbeldam, Tiago Mota Saraiva, and Sarah Wigglesworth, among others, have spoken about topics ranging from gender and space, design-build and technology, exhibition and curatorial practice, and community-based architecture, to questions of infrastructure, informality, and spatial justice.
The Network’s journal, The International Journal of Architectonic, Spatial, and Environmental Design, provides a written record of this work. It publishes research on “human configurations of the environment,” with a focus on the meeting points between constructed, social, and natural systems. Articles move between theory and practice and cover topics like urban planning, building technologies, interiors, landscapes, and environmental design. The journal is Hybrid Open Access, peer reviewed, and indexed in Scopus and other databases.
Each year, the Constructed Environment International Award for Excellence highlights one article from the ten highest-ranked papers in the journal. Past winning work has ranged from studies of heritage buildings and geometric proportion, to urban “spatial regimes,” sustainable construction, mining landscapes, and the temporal experience of built environments. The award includes Open Access publication and an invitation to speak at a future conference, keeping a clear link between publishing and live debate.
The Constructed Environment Book Imprint supports longer projects—monographs and edited volumes on architecture, planning, and environmental design. It welcomes both broad and very focused topics and offers Open Access pathways, so work on the built environment can circulate widely to practitioners, students, and communities as well as academics.
Today, the Constructed Environment Research Network is a meeting point for people who care about how the built world is made and re-made. Through its conferences, journal, and books, it keeps returning to a simple set of questions: how do our buildings, infrastructures, and public spaces come into being, whose values do they express, and how might they be designed differently in light of ecological limits and social needs?
We are thankful for the leadership of the following Research Network Chairs.
Current Chair and Editor
(2021 - )
Chair and Editor
(2016-2020)
Founding Chair and Editor
(2010-2015)
The International Conference on the Constructed Environment has a rich history of featuring leading and emerging voices from the field, including:
Associate Professor, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, USA
(2010)
Professor, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA
(2010)
Professor, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA
(2010)
Executive Director & Senior Curator, Slought Foundation, Philadelphia, USA
(2011)
Director, Integrated Technology in Architecture, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, USA
(2011)
Founder, Bing Thom Architects, Vancouver, Canada
(2012)
Curator, Writer & Lecturer, London, UK
(2013)
Architecture Program Head, Temple University, Philadelphia, USA
(2014)
Founder, Archi-Tectonics, New York City, USA
(2014)
Managing Partner, ateliermob, Portugal
(2019)
Architect, Sarah Wigglesworth Architects, United Kingdom
(2019)
The Constructed Environment Research Network has had the pleasure of working with the following organizations:
