RISD Architecture Departments Advance Sustainable Design Via Envision Resilience Challenge

How can a city’s industrial past help community leaders to shape a more resilient future? Students in a fall studio spanning RISD’s Landscape Architecture, Architecture, and Interior Architecture departments are working through such questions as part of the Envision Resilience Challenge, a collaborative model for imagining, testing, and advancing place-based climate resilience. 

The Envision Resilience Challenge embraces existing conditions not as problems to be solved, but as opportunities to explore how shared systems—water, land, housing, infrastructure, and public space—might support two thriving cities with their own identities and a more resilient collective future.

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This year’s multi-university design challenge, the sixth since the initiative was launched in 2021, is focused on Lewiston-Auburn, ME, a former milltown that has become the home of a large community of Somali immigrants. RISD students are participating alongside teams from Northeastern University, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the University of Florida, and Carnegie Mellon University. 

In addition to climate change, this year’s challenge asks how adaptation strategies can advance housing stability, food security, environmental justice, and economic opportunity. “The inaugural ‘superstudio’ spanning RISD’s three architecture departments gives us an opportunity to work at the regional, city, and building scales in an integrated and meaningful way,” says Landscape Architecture Professor Elizabeth Hermann, who is co-teaching the course with faculty members Jonathan Bell and Surella Segu.   

The development of Lewiston and Auburn was shaped by the Androscoggin River and the region’s manufacturing history. Thousands of Somali refugees brought significant cultural and demographic change to Lewiston in 2001, and those developments are part of a broader conversation about equity, inclusion, economic opportunity, and resilience. The area also faces climate-related challenges, including increasingly intense precipitation and flooding along the river.

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Students visited the site early in the fall semester and began documenting relationships among its built environment, natural systems, and communities. “The city is made up of a rich array of subcultures and histories that overlap but do not always build upon or support each other,” Hermann notes. “It needs more jobs, opportunities for skill-building, and other educational programs based on local expertise.” Hermann reminded students of the importance of community networking in these types of projects, noting that while they had been invited by Envision Resilience, personal relationships with residents are what really help achieve meaningful change.

Students translated their findings into a series of conceptual weavings used as visual maps that connected people, places, histories, and patterns of change, which they presented during an October crit with members of the Envision Resilience team. “The weavings were very generative and helped shape the team’s design proposal,” Hermann explained.

The team will focus their design efforts on the downtown area around the Main Street bridge to Auburn, the large Mill 5—which encompasses almost four acres and has been empty for decades—and Canal Street, where the main north-south canal runs parallel to the river and slope leading to the residential areas uphill. 

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Some students are zeroing in on indoor food production and a large international food hall. Others are working on nutrition education and considering a farm school focused on food production, processing, and dining. Another group is envisioning a center for women and mothers in response to the loss of birthing centers in Maine and the high rate of domestic violence. 

One group is working on making Canal Street pedestrian-only with a grand linear park and marketplace with events and new businesses, while another looks at flood patterns and a deliberate welcoming of rain and floodwater as a way to subdivide, structure, create identity, and direct future development within the currently identity-less post-industrial zones. All of the interventions will be on view in a public exhibition planned for spring 2027. 

“We hope that this studio will inspire new ways of seeing, thinking, drawing, sculpting, assembling, writing, collecting information, and experimenting,” Hermann says. “We all have responsibilities to generate critical, creative, thought-provoking, deeply researched, and forward-thinking outcomes grounded in real-world needs and issues.”

Kaylee Pugliese
November 5, 2026