P-REX lab is a research group focused on environmental issues caused by urbanization, including the design, remediation, and reuse of landscapes worldwide. Over the past decade we have become specialists on suburban development and mobility issues, particularly related to future autonomous mobility. All of our research and work emphasizes the link between our consumption of natural resources, and the waste and destruction of landscape, to help us better understand how to proceed with redesigning around our wasteful lifestyles for more intelligent design and development outcomes. Unlike conventional practice, there are no scalar limits in our outlook or pedagogy: projects are defined by the extent of the urban and environmental problems being addressed. We coined the term “Systemic Design” to describe our approach to urbanization, which considers the entire urban enterprise as one holistic system that can be improved through design thinking.

HISTORY

P-REX originated in 2002 at Harvard-GSD as The Project for Reclamation Excellence, a sustained effort to understand, represent and design reclaimed environments associated with large-scale natural resource extraction. Simply referred to today as P-REX lab, our portfolio of work demonstrates that landscape alteration, whether from relic industrial processes or new urbanization, is a ubiquitous, global condition. We research and practice through a highly targeted application of custom workflows developed to understand and solve each particular problem.