Mandi Pretorius is an architect and Ph.D. Candidate at the Yale School of Architecture and a researcher with the Yale Center for Ecosystems + Architecture.

Addressing global issues in a changing climate, her research explores how constructs between human systems, built and natural environments shape resource flows and notions of scarcity, access, and need. Towards enabling resource security at the building scale, her research examines how the provision of shelter and comfort intersects with interdependent phenomena in the Water-Energy-Food nexus to produce opportunities for greater socio-ecological valence that challenges conventional approaches to resource management (extractive, intensive, and lacking resilience). Through questioning means of pluralizing fluid embodiments of material and energy resource flows in architecture, her dissertation investigates how the building envelope could provide for the multiple roles of water (in vapor and liquid phases) as a thermodynamic & photoelectric medium, a human need, an equitable scarcity, and a biophilic affordance in the built environment.

As a collaborative effort between multiple universities and partners, her work has been awarded grant funding from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the National Science Foundation Nanosystems Engineering Research Center for Nanotechnology-Enabled Water Treatment (NEWT), and The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies.

She received her M.Arch (Prof) from the University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa, and an MSc. in Architectural Science from the Center for Architecture Science and Ecology (CASE), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), New York. She is a registered architect with the South African Council for the Architectural Profession (SACAP), with professional work experience on diverse award-winning projects.