Imagining a Wetter Future

How do you design for a city whose future is increasingly shaped by water? In Miami, sea level rise, flooding, and storm surge are already reshaping everyday life. Yet construction continues, raising urgent questions about how architecture and urbanism can respond to a wetter reality. In a Spring 2026 Harvard GSD studio led by Nader Tehrani, students designed an architecture school and housing on a downtown site defined by the Miami River, the Metro Rail, and a shopping center—three infrastructures set at different above-ground elevations. Rather than treating infrastructure only as an engineering challenge, the studio explored how it might become an architectural framework for public space. After traveling to Miami and learning from local experts, students imagined new ways of living, building, and connecting in a city already confronting the future. This research was made possible by the Koji Yanai Innovation Infrastructure Initiation Fund.