Joe MacDonald

Joe MacDonald is an internationally recognized executive and visionary architect, researcher, policy specialist, and climate subject matter expert advocate.

Joe founded Urban A&O in New York while serving as an Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture at Harvard University Graduate School of Design, his alma mater, and now serves as one of its principals. His mission is to revolutionize global project development, management, and delivery by harnessing the power of decarbonization, digitization, and enhanced data collection, delivering buildings of the future powered by renewable energy & automation. His practice emphasizes net-zero/carbon neutral design research, renewable energy, climate mitigation, public policy, 4IR; and emerging sustainable material science applications. UA&O is focused on transparent, quantified measurable results, and science-based targets.

Joe has been a thought leader in the net zero space for over a decade. He played a pioneering role in advancing smart city principles and data center innovations across Scandinavia, the Americas, and the EU.

Joe was an early adopter on the net-zero community development space across America. He secured and is delivering a phased 2,000 home Net Zero emissions development in the Hudson Valley, a $245M development in San Francisco focused on circularity principles and has worked with various asset management firms taking advantage of the Inflation Reduction Act to provide net-zero middle to low-income housing in the Texas Triangle or the Texaplex.

Joe serves as an ambassador within the international sustainability and UNFCCC climate action spheres, delivering keynote addresses in Bangkok, Dubai, London, and Copenhagen. He champions the fusion of data and building technologies, leveraging his influential platform to forge profound connections with industry leaders. MacDonald is UA&O’s Project Architect, incorporating his academic research into practice and his work has been published and exhibited widely. His practice emphasizes Net-Zero/carbon neutral design research, renewable energy, climate mitigation, public policy, 4IR; emerging sustainable material science applications, environmental analysis, and building retrofits. UA&O is focused on transparent, quantified measurable results, and science-based targets (SBTi).

MacDonald received Architecture Magazine’s Vanguard award as one of the top ten emerging practices from around the world and the highest honor of the New York AIA New Practices Award in the same year. He is a Visiting Professor of Architecture at several universities, most recently at the Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania. He lectures regularly on his research on impact investing, climate change, the UN’s 17 SDGs, circular economies, and emerging Net-Zero strategies.

MacDonald is a Subject Matter Expert on the Carbon Economy. He has served as Principal Investigator on several white papers, articles, books, and a served as an expert panelist at international conferences on the topics of Zero Carbon intensity; the Definitive Guide to the Carbon Credit Market; the Climate Guide to Carbon Credits and Carbon Offsets; and a New Language for Carbon.