About
Maria Lorena Lehman is a visionary architectural author, designer, and educator with a passion for creating environments where occupants can flourish and thrive. By specializing in architectural design, emerging technologies and innovative occupant experience, Maria Lorena Lehman brings leading-edge research from fields like neuroscience, biomimicry, and nanotechnology to help inform how environments can uplift quality of life. Maria Lorena Lehman is Author of the book entitled, Adaptive Sensory Environments. Lehman is also Founder of the Sensing Architecture Academy — an educational resource for designers worldwide, where she publishes and teaches about her designs, theories and research to help advance the positive effects of architecture. Maria Lorena Lehman received a Bachelor of Architecture with Honors from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and a Master in Design with Distinction from Harvard University. She has also worked as Associate of a notable architecture firm on an array of award-winning architecture projects. Maria Lorena Lehman has been published in Building Tomorrow Magazine, Intelligent Buildings International, the International Journal for Architectural Theory, and in the book Intelligent Buildings. Additionally, Maria Lorena Lehman has been seen in Esquisses Magazine, Architect Magazine, and Forbes.
Featured Work
Adaptive Sensory Environments
Adaptive Sensory Environments: An Introduction presents a cutting-edge methodology for adaptive sensory design by fostering an inter-disciplinary approach in which aspects of neuroscience, biophilia, captology, nanotechnology, kinetics, and sensemaking all play critical roles in helping adaptive architecture "tune" to occupants. Furthermore, the book illustrates how adaptive sensory environments transform and uplift quality of life in entirely new ways, by strategically unlocking the potential that technological innovations bring. By teaching scholars, researchers, practitioners, specialists, and consultants how to design architecture that guides what emerging interactive technology can do, it allows them to see deeper into an architectural design, to extend beyond interaction and, ultimately, to build environments that adapt by changing and growing with their occupants’ immediate needs and long-term goals.
Other Works
Awards and Recognition
- Silver Medal Nautilus Book Award Winner: Adaptive Sensory Environments
- Digital Design Prize awarded by Harvard University Graduate School of Design
