Garófalo-Khan, Laura
Garófalo-Khan, Laura
Bio Sketch
Laura Garófalo is an architect and Associate Professor with Tenure at the Carnegie Mellon University School of Architecture, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate studios and seminars focused on material production and ecologically centered design. Her research, pedagogy, and practice focus on "the conjunction of natural and architectural systems" — lightweight and verdant structures, architectural ceramics, and hydrologically centered buildings. She received her first professional degree from the University of Miami School of Architecture and her Master of Architecture from Yale University; before CMU she was an Associate Professor at the University at Buffalo (SUNY), where she was a member of the Ecological Practices Graduate Research Group. She co-founded the firm Liminal Projects with Omar Khan (exhibited at the Architectural League of New York and the National Building Museum; selected by the Architectural League as Notable Young Architects) — the partnership from which the chapter's hyphenated byline "Garófalo-Khan" derives. Her work has been published in Matter: Material Processes in Architectural Production (Borden & Meredith eds.), The Interior Architecture Reader (Marinic, ed.), and Technology | Architecture + Design (TAD), and she is co-editor of the Bioclimatic Ceramic Assemblies series (Oro/AR+D).
Key Works
- "Sensorial interior landscapes" (2018) — Chapter 19 of The Interior Architecture Reader; the artificial grotto as the touchstone for a biophilic, sensorial conception of interior architecture. Source note
- "Natural Deviations: Cast Glass, Aggregate Microclimates" and other architectural-ceramics design research chapters in the Bioclimatic Ceramic Assemblies series (Oro/AR+D) — co-edited series on ceramic assemblies and microclimate (not yet ingested).
Key Concepts
Concepts associated with this author that have pages in this wiki:
- biophilia — the theory/science her chapter uses to frame the sensorial interior: the evolutionary connection to the non-human environment
- artificial-grotto — the chapter's touchstone typology: the interior "literally formed from the landscape"
- performative-ornament — the contemporary grotto's medium: ornament as performative system, after Bloomer's "dynamic line work"
- sensorial-interior-landscape — the chapter's titular conception: an "interior environmental aesthetic" bridging shelter and nature
- event-space — the grotto's temporal definition: "an event space, not a place of quotidian habitation"
- interior-cosmology — the grotto's and ornament's self-contained world-making
- ambient-conditioning — the grotto's sensorial programme (thermal sink, coolness, immersion)
- picture-window — the condition biophilic ornament answers (Bloomer, via the chapter)
- interiority — the grotto's "inherent interiority"
- poche — the "porous floral poché" of Bienvenidos al Sur and the Grotta Grande's "immeasurable depth of the poché"
- ornament debate — the chapter's third position: ornament that "proclaims life"
Relevance to the Core Research
Garófalo-Khan's chapter supplies the wiki's interior-architecture cluster with its nineteenth register — the biophilic-ornamental (grotto) register — and gives the ornament-vs-purity debate its first position that neither refuses nor symbolizes ornament but makes it performative ("defined by dynamism and exuberance conscripted to create delight"). Her reading of the grotto as an interior "not [indexing] its exterior form or structure" makes her the cluster's historian of a typology that is interiority from birth, complementing McClure & McClure's scalar-inclusivity and Treadwell's oceanic interiority as an account of interiors continuous with the non-human. The chapter also bridges the wiki's digital cluster (interactive-architecture, digital-fabrication, emergence) and its phenomenological cluster (embodiment, atmosphere, lived-body) through biophilia — the one framework in the corpus that grounds multisensory design in evolutionary claims about well-being.
Source Support
Source notes in this wiki drawn from this author's work:
