About
est. 2010lab-eds, the Lab for Environmental Design Strategies, is an architecture research practice founded by Daniel Koehler and Rasa Navasaityte. It began in Vienna in 2010 and works today from Austin, Texas, with research and teaching at The University of Texas at Austin and partners in Europe.
The name is older than the work it now describes, and it fits better than it did. The environment is the physical world that new technology has to be answerable to: materials, buildings, cities, and the people who live with them. Design strategies are the instruments: atlases that measure what generative models believe about the built world, materials predicted by AI and made in ordinary workshops, building types induced from both, and studios in which the space between the parts is the material of design.
The practice publishes its research as open datasets, books, and exhibitions, teaches it in studios and seminars, and takes commissions where the research is the answer. WanderYards is in the permanent collection of the Centre Pompidou, and the Deutsches Architekturmuseum has commissioned the Latent Earth atlas for its collection; the ACADIA 2025 Vanguard Paper Award recognised the materials research; the Bartlett medals of 2018 and 2019 and the Design Excellence Awards at UT Austin recognised the teaching.