David Benjamin is Director of the Living Architecture Lab at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) and principal of the architecture firm The Living. Recent projects include Living City (a platform for buildings to talk to one another), Amphibious Architecture (a cloud of light above New York's East River that glows and blinks according to water quality and public interest in the environment), Proof (a series of design studios at Columbia that explore testing as a design methodology), and Architecture Bio-Synthesis (a collection of new software and wetware tools for design with synthetic biology). Benjamin received an M.Arch. from Columbia GSAPP, and a B.A. in Social Studies from Harvard University.