Silvia Benedito

Jury 2026 /

www.gsd.harvard.edu/person/silvia-benedito/

Silvia Benedito is a registered landscape architect, architect and urban designer whose work foregrounds spatial experience, bioclimatic strategies and nature-based solutions.  She earned her PhD from the University of Coimbra, focusing on thermodynamically driven strategies for thermal protection across different climatic regions and scales. Benedito has taught for nearly 15 years at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she advances curricula and design strategies for climate and landscape resilience, nutrient circularity and community-based practices. She has served as a visiting professor at the TU München, TU Graz, University of Algarve, and the University of Pennsylvania.

Benedito is the co-founder of OFICINAA, based in Lisbon and Ingolstadt, known for integrating climate design, beauty, and biodiversity protection in collaboration with local communities. The work has been recognised and exhibited in various venues, including the New European Bauhaus (NEB), Princeton University, the Europan Competition, the American Architecture Prize, the MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program, and the Venice Architecture Biennale. Key projects include Stadt Park-Donau in Ingolstadt, an ongoing large-scale urban park published in Landscape Tunings: An Urban Park at the Danube (ACTAR, 2016).

Benedito has lectured worldwide, and she is the author of the book Atmosphere Anatomies: On Design, Weather, and Sensation (Lars Müller 2022), with photos by Iwan Baan. The book received the inaugural Book Prize for Architectural Innovation and Sustainability from the Minister for the Environment and Climate Action, Portugal (MAAC). She also co-edited Thermodynamic Interactions: An Exploration into Physiological, Material, and Territorial Atmospheres (Actar 2016 awarded the FAD Prize for Thought and Criticism, Spain). Benedito was the recipient of the Fernando Távora Prize from the Portuguese Ordem dos Arquitetos and was a Fellow at the MacDowell Colony for the Arts (2015–2016).

More recently, she launched OficinaAcademy, a design-based nonprofit advancing rural entrepreneurship through co-creation initiatives rooted in environmental education, local stewardship practices, and habitat conservation.