Lara Davis

Lara Davis is the founding partner of Limaçon Design and an architect by professional training with three decades of experience in masonry design and construction. She specializes in earthen building and large-span vaults, and her projects and research are most often implemented at the scale of landscape and cross over the cultures of architecture, structural engineering, and heritage preservation.

Lara cut her teeth in early practice here in Providence with landscape designer Michael Veracka and continued to study masonry, forestry, and earthen cultural landscapes throughout her career. Her materials research has included work at the New York State College of Ceramics, MIT Masonry Research Group, Institute for Lightweight Structures (Stuttgart), Block Research Group (Zürich), and the Auroville Earth Institute/UNESCO Chair of Earthen Architecture (South India). Notable professional projects include her collaboration with revered American sculptor Martin Puryear at Storm King Art Center, the Sharanam Conference Hall in South India, and the Kaza Eco-Community Center in Spiti Valley, India. Her preservation work has most recently included work for the World Monuments Fund in Iraq and as a board member at Opus 40.

Lara teaches material seminars and hands-on workshops at the Sustainability Design Lab, a cross-disciplinary initiative led by RISD’s Landscape Architecture department that facilitates thesis research on endemic materials in New England. She is interested in the deep study of local material resources (clay/soil/ lime/stone) and how they have influenced heritage/vernacular design, building materials, building technologies, and craft.