- City Science
Kent Larson is an architect, MIT Professor of the Practice, director of City Science at the MIT Media Lab, and co-director of the Norman Foster Institute on Sustainable Cities based in Madrid. His research is focused on urban and architectural design, urban modeling and simulation, transformable micro-housing, living laboratories, ultralight autonomous mobility, and algorithmic dynamic zoning. Larson received 10-Year Impact Awards from Ubicomp in 2017 and 2019 for recognition of work that, with the test of time, has had the greatest impact.
Larson and his team have established the City Science Network of ten affiliated City Science Labs in Shanghai, Taipei, Toronto, Hamburg, Guadalajara, Andorra, San Sebastian (Spain), Concepcion (Chile), and Beersheba (Israel). The City Science Group's work has recently been presented at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the Venice Biennale of Architecture, the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City, and the Museum of Science in Boston. He has given over 100 invited keynote talks and delivered a TED talk with 1.3 million views.
Larson practiced architecture for 15 years in New York City, with design work published in Architectural Record, Progressive Architecture, Global Architecture, The New York Times, A+U, and Architectural Digest. The New York Times Review of Books selected his book, Louis I. Kahn: Unbuilt Masterworks, as one of the Ten Best Books in Architecture 2000. He founded multiple MIT Media Lab spin-off companies, including ORI Living, which commercializes architectural robotic systems for compact transformable housing, and the consulting firm L3cities, which is focused primarily on large-scale urban projects in Asia and the Middle East.