Harvard GSD: Project Highlight
“In Atmospheric Springs: The Future of Fog in Los Angeles, Nathan Sweitzer (MLA II ’26) reimagines coastal fog as a source of civic infrastructure. Developed in Biospheric Urbanism — Changing Climates — Los Angeles, taught by Bas Smets, the project looks to the atmospheric cycles of the region as a design driver.
For millennia, coastal fog nourished the ecosystems of the Los Angeles basin, feeding soils and vegetation that supported natural springs where Indigenous communities gathered, long before waterways were buried beneath asphalt. Today, this fog still arrives each summer, precisely when the city’s water systems are under the greatest stress.
The project proposes a network of fog harvesting interventions that transform overlooked urban infrastructure into seasonal water sources. Billboards are equipped with low-tech mesh to irrigate street trees, while buildings and transmission pylons are retrofitted with high-tech panels capable of supplying millions of liters to new public landscapes, including community gardens, nurseries, and public springs in underserved neighborhoods.
Grounded in Indigenous knowledge and emerging electrostatic technologies, Atmospheric Springs is not simply a water strategy. It is a proposal for a new kind of civic infrastructure rooted in atmospheric cycles, embedded in the everyday landscape, and shared as common ground.”
