Mandi Pretorius is an architect and Ph.D. Candidate at the Yale School of Architecture and a researcher with the Yale Center for Ecosystems + Architecture. Addressing global issues in a changing climate, her research explores how constructs between human systems, built and natural environments, shape resource flows and notions of scarcity, access, and need. Towards enabling resource security at the building scale, her research examines how providing shelter and comfort in buildings intersects with interdependent phenomena in the Water-Energy-Food nexus. Her dissertation investigates how the building envelope could provide for the multiple roles of water as a thermodynamic and photoelectric medium, a human need, an equitable scarcity, and a biophilic affordance in the built environment.
