Forrest Meggers

Forrest Meggers
THERManifesto: Wordplay, Techplay, and Systemic Change in Architecture
Part of the Spring 2026 MIT Architecture Lecture Series. 
Presented with the Building Technology Group.

Does architecture really require a strict divide between inside and outside? This lecture questions the long-held belief that buildings must create sealed, mechanically controlled “comfortable” interiors. For over a century, architects and engineers have relied on thermal systems—especially air conditioning—that quietly shaped our buildings, aesthetics, and expectations of comfort. Yet the standards and metrics guiding these systems may be flawed, contributing to high energy use, health concerns, and limited design imagination. Drawing on research and built experiments, I explore alternatives based on radiant heat and other strategies that blur indoor and outdoor boundaries. Rethinking comfort can help us design healthier, lower-carbon, and more equitable places—not just enclosed shelters.

Biography
Forrest Meggers is an associate professor of architecture and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment at Princeton University. His fields of knowledge include building systems design and integration, radiant systems, desiccants, heat pumps; exergy analysis; geothermal energy; thermal storage; building materials; thermodynamics and heat transfer. Meggers founded and directs CHAOS (Cooling and Heating for Architecturally Optimized Systems) Lab, where he and his research team investigate alternative thermal paradigms to challenge the status quo in thermal system design, comfort metrics, and user-centric architecture. Meggers has several patents and founded Clearly-cool.com and CHAOSense.com to bring radiant and sensor technology to market while working closely with industry and standards organizations to accelerate critical opportunities for innovation adoption. He has numerous peer reviewed papers on his research, essays and chapters discussing systemic paradigm shifts, and recently is editing and publishing a disciplinary-boundary-breaking book with historians, engineers, preservationists, and designers on concrete. His secret project was recently made very public in the New York Times where he has been single handedly rebuilding his entire house using (and testing) ideas from the lab – only possible thanks to infinite patience and help from his wife and four daughters.  He prides himself as a bicycle mechanic growing up on a small farm in Iowa, an origin that laid the groundwork for a neverending career of trying to fix broken things.  

This lecture will be held in person in Long Lounge, 7-429 and will be streamed on YouTube.

Lectures are free and open to the public. Lectures will be held Thursdays at 6 PM ET in 7-429 (Long Lounge) and streamed online unless otherwise noted.