“Toward an Architecture of Comfort: Jenny French on Climate, Clothing, and Collectivity”

In the article Toward an Architecture of Comfort: Jenny French on Climate, Clothing, and Collectivity by A. Krista Sykes, readers are introduced to “Outfitting Architecture: Expanded Comfort in Athens,” a fall 2025 studio at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD) led by Jenny French, assistant professor in practice of architecture at the GSD and partner at French 2D.

The studio, funded by the Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities (CGBC) and the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies (JCHS), investigates how architecture, like clothing, can be rethought as an adaptable soft system able to evolve for shifting climates and forms of inhabitation. As part of the studio, students visited Athens, Greece—a city experiencing extreme heat due to dense urban development and lack of greenery—to examine how architecture can respond to shifting environmental conditions and redefine dominant understandings of comfort.

Read the full article in Harvard Design Magazine.