Kent Larson is an architect, entrepreneur, and academic, currently the director of the City Science research group at the

MIT Media Lab The MIT Media Lab is a research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, growing out of MIT's Architecture Machine Group in the School of Architecture. Its research does not restrict to fixed academic disciplines, but draws from ...

. Before joining MIT full-time in 2000, Larson practiced

architecture Architecture is the art and technique of designing and building, as distinguished from the skills associated with construction. It is both the process and the product of sketching, conceiving, planning, designing, and constructing building ...

for 15 years in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

. His research focuses on developing urban interventions that enable more entrepreneurial, livable, high-performance urban districts. He led the establishment of an international network of affiliated City Science labs. He has helped found spin-offs of the City Science group at the MIT Media lab, including L3Cities and ORI Living.

Career at MIT

Larson's Projects include compact transformable housing, ultralight autonomous mobility systems, sensing and algorithms to recognize and respond to complex human behavior, and advanced modeling, simulation, and tangible interfaces for urban design. Larson and his researchers from his MIT lab received 10-Year Impact Awards from Ubicomp in 2017 and 2019 for recognition of work that, with the test of time, has had the greatest impact.Pervasive 10 Year Impact Award
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Urban Mobility-on-Demand

Upon the 2010 death of William J. Mitchell, former Dean of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, Larson's group continued work on the MIT CityCar and developed concepts for shared-use light electric vehicles and intelligent fleet management to provide high-levels of service through sensor networks, dynamic incentives, and intelligent charging. The group worked with automotive suppliers in Spain to develop a commercial version of the MIT CityCar called Hiriko: a folding two-passenger vehicle with robot wheels and drive-by-wire control for urban mobility and highly efficient parking.

Personal life

Larson lives in

Jamaica Plain, Boston Jamaica Plain is a neighborhood of in the City of Boston, Massachusetts, United States. Settled by Puritans seeking farmland to the south, it was originally part of the former Town of Roxbury, now also a part of the City of Boston. The commu ...

, with his wife, Maria Miller Larson.

References

External links

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Kent Larson: Brilliant designs to fit more people in every city (TEDxBoston 2012)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Larson, Kent Architects from New York City Living people Year of birth missing (living people) MIT Media Lab people