Aurélie Frolet is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at Auburn University in the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture. Her research examines how architectural representation and design can make visible the complex environmental, social, and technical systems that shape water infrastructure. Her work argues that we must consider not only the technical performance of water infrastructure, but also how its appearance can be designed to make legible the constraints, contexts, and multivalent opportunities embedded in that performance.
Frolet’s current research investigates wastewater infrastructure in Alabama’s rural Black Belt through architectural drawing, mapping, visualization, and design. The work develops new ways to make complex infrastructure systems visible and understandable while engaging students, communities, and practitioners in exploring more equitable approaches to wastewater. In collaboration with Rural Studio’s Emily McGlohn, she received the SOM Foundation Research Prize, Columbia World Projects grant, an Auburn University Competitive Outreach Scholarship Grant, and an Auburn CADC Seed Grant to support this research.
In Spring 2025, Frolet served as Co-PI on a multidisciplinary seminar at Auburn funded by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), centered on flood resilience in Mobile Bay. Her research also extends to historical water infrastructures: using an Auburn CADC Seed Grant, she documented and drew Bronze Age water infrastructure in Sardinia, research she presented at the Architecture Media Politics and Society 2024 conference in Barcelona.
In 2022, while teaching at Syracuse University School of Architecture, Frolet co-led a sponsored studio examining the campus of New College in Sarasota, Florida, in relation to its vulnerabilities to sea level rise and storm surge. Student projects addressed the threat and potential of water through research and architectural design. At Syracuse, she also taught an upper-level drawing seminar examining the interwoven relationship between Italian architectural history and innovations in hydrological design, speculating on new potentials for water infrastructure in Florence, a city whose future may depend increasingly on its relationship to water.
Across her teaching and scholarship, Frolet uses experimental drawing as a mode of inquiry and a tool for communicating complex environmental forces and infrastructural networks. Through representation and architectural design, her work seeks to expand how infrastructure can be understood, not simply as technical support systems, but as architectural and civic constructs capable of making delicate and finite water resources visible, intelligible, and publicly consequential.
Contact:
Aurelie Frolet
amf0134@auburn.edu