Prof. Ramsgaard Thomsen is Head of CITA and Full Professor of Architecture and Digital Technologies. She has piloted the international research field on computational design and automation. She has significantly contributed to the theorisation and instrumentation of computational design in support of a sustainable architectural practice. These centre on creating new multi-scale modelling methodologies for the orchestration of bio-based materials in the built environment, developing methods of material hyper-specification interlinking material design with structural design and pioneering experimental workflows for predictive modelling for fabrication. Her work has made fundamental contributions to the rigorous and innovative Research-Creation model of knowledge creation in which designers and creators employ first-generation prototypes and testbeds accompanied by meticulous scientific analysis, in turn taken up by international societies during the past decade and now actively practiced in Europe, North America and Asia research centres. She has been recognised by Denmark’s highest awards for research, the EliteForsk Prize, and the field’s distinguished ACADIA prize. Her commitment to the critical examination of architecture as an instrument for change has led to political roles hereunder as General Reporter and Head of Science Track, UIA2023CPH World Congress “Sustainable Futures – Leave no one behind” examining the role of architecture in achieving the UN SDGs.

Robert Stuart-Smith

Robert Stuart-Smith is Program Director for the Masters of Science in Design: Robotics and Autonomous Systems degree (MSD-RAS), Assistant Professor of Architecture in the Weitzman School of Design, and an Affiliate Faculty member of Penn Engineering's GRASP Lab. He directs the Autonomous Manufacturing Lab in Penn's Department of Architecture (AML-PENN), and co-directs its sister lab in University College London's Department of Computer Science (AML-UCL). Stuart-Smith's research operates at the intersection of algorithmic design, robotic fabrication, and collective robotic construction — developing an integrated approach to design, manufacturing, and robot behavior through varying degrees of programmed autonomy. Stuart-Smith is P-I for the £1.2mil EPSRC project "Applied Off-site and On-site Collective Multi-Robot Autonomous Building Manufacturing" and Co-I for a £2.9mil EPSRC research project into "Aerial Additive Building Manufacturing", involving collaborations with industry partners including Cemex, Skanska, Mace, Burohappold, Arup, MTC, Ultimaker, Kuka, and others. Stuart-Smith is a co-founder of the experimental research collaborative Kokkugia and architectural practice Robert Stuart-Smith Design. Prior to joining the faculty at Penn in 2017, Stuart-Smith was a Studio Course Master in the AA School’s Design Research Laboratory (2009-17), and held visiting professorships at Washington University, RMIT, University of Innsbruck, amongst others. Stuart-Smith's work has been published in journals including Science Robotics, AD Architectural Design, and Architecture D’Aujourd’hui. He has lectured and presented in symposia at institutions including AA, Sci-Arc, CCA, MIT, RMIT, Angewandte, Strelka Institute, Tsinghua University, Texas A+M, and others.

Rashida Ng

A licensed architect and educator, Rashida Ng’s research lies at the intersection of the climate change and race. Focused on housing insecurity, she examines historical and current design practices that perpetuate social inequities and intensify climate change vulnerabilities.

Committed to advancing equity, she also writes about pedagogy, including the op-ed “What Will It Take? Reflections on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Architectural Education” in the Journal of Architectural Education (Taylor & Francis, 2019). More recently she published, “Breaking the Chains: Beyond the Beaux-Arts Tradition of Architectural Education in the United States” in Rethinking the Crit: A new pedagogy in architectural education (Routledge, 2023). Ng has also researched advanced materials and is co-editor of the book, Performative Materials in Architecture and Design (Intellect, 2013). She was the 2019-2020 President of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA), the first African-American woman to hold this position.

Marcos Cruz

Marcos Cruz is an Architect and Professor of Innovative Environments at the Bartlett School of Architecture. He is co-founder of Studio Biocene and co-director of the Bio-ID lab, a cross-disciplinary research platform created with Dr Brenda Parker that they run between architecture and biochemical engineering at UCL. In addition to his professional practice and academic leadership, which includes his Directorship of the Bartlett between 2010-14, Cruz’s research and teaching (UCL, IaaC, University Westminster, UCLA) has been focused on new forms of bio-integrated and sustainable design for the built environment. Main thematic foci include bioreceptive materials, poikilohydric design and neoplasmatic architecture (RIBA President’s award for research in 2008). Cruz has published numerous books and articles, lectured and exhibited internationally, and regularly serves on juries and advisory boards.

Winka Dubbeldam

Winka Dubbeldam, MArch MS-AAD, is a seasoned academic and design leader, serving as Chair and Miller Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design, where she has gathered an international network of innovative research and design professionals. She also taught advanced architectural design studios at Columbia University and Harvard University, among other prestigious institutions. Dubbeldam was the External Examiner at the Architectural Association London (2006-2009) and is currently the External Examiner at the Bartlett UCL in London (2019-present). Professor Dubbeldam was named one of the DesignIntelligence 30 Most Admired Educators 2015. She has been a juror and chaired many international and national award juries, and was keynote speaker at international conferences. Professor Dubbeldam is one of the creative directors for CityX for the Virtual Italian Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale [2021]. Winka Dubbeldam is also the founder and partner of the WBE certified firm Archi-Tectonics NYC LLC. widely known for their award-winning work, recognized as much for its design excellence as for its use of smart building systems, sustainable materials, and innovative structures. A recent book Strange Objects, New Solids, and Massive Things, was published by ACTAR Publishers, Spain, in Fall 2021.

Epilogue Keynote Panel

Jenny Sabin

Jenny E. Sabin is an architectural designer whose work is at the forefront of a new direction for 21st century architectural practice — one that investigates the intersectionsof architecture and science and applies insights and theories from biology and mathematics to the design of responsive material structures and ecological spatial interventions for diverse audiences. Sabin is the Arthur L. and Isabel B. Wiesenberger Professor in Architecture and Associate Dean for Design at Cornell College of Architecture, Art, and Planning where she established a new advanced research degree in Matter Design Computation. She is principal of Jenny Sabin Studio, an experimental architectural design studio based in Ithaca and Director of the Sabin Lab at Cornell AAP. Her book, LabStudio: Design Research Between Architecture and Biology, co-authored with Peter Lloyd Jones was published in July 2017. In 2017, Sabin won MoMA & MoMA PS1’s Young Architects Program with her submission, Lumen.

Hina Jamelle

Hina Jamelle teaches final year Graduate Option Studios and directs the Graduate Program's Urban Housing Studios at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design. She has held the Visiting Schaffer Practice Professorship at the University of Michigan. Jamelle is the co-director of the New York and Shanghai based architectural firm Contemporary Architecture Practice and has co-edited issues of Architectural Design AD titled IMPACT [2020] as well as Elegance [2007]. Hina Jamelle's book UNDER PRESSURE on Urban Housing was published in 2021.

Founded in 1999, Contemporary Architecture Practice [CAP] is known for futuristic designs using digital techniques and the latest technologies for the design and manufacturing of architecture. Projects include commissions by The Museum of Modern Art [New York]; Reebok Shanghai, Lijia Smart Park, Chongqing, Wenjin Hotels, Beijing, NJCTTQ Pharmaceuticals, Nanjing, AMEC Technologies, Nanchang [China]; Samsung, Seoul [South Korea]; and IWI Orthodontics Clinic, Tokyo [Japan]. Co-Directors Rahim and Jamelle have won the Architectural Record Design Vanguard Award and were featured in Phaidon's 10x10x2 as one of the world's top 100 emerging architects. Their project, IWI Orthodontics in Tokyo, Japan was featured in Phaidon's ROOM 100 as one of the most creative interior design projects of the century. In 2015 Jamelle was recognized as 50 Under 50 Innovators of the 21st Century by a distinguished jury.

Ferda Kolatan

Ferda Kolatan is an Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design and the founding director of SU11 Architecture + Design. He received his Architectural Diploma from the RWTH Aachen and his M.S.AAD from Columbia University. SU11 is an internationally acclaimed practice based in New York City and dedicated to the conceptual and material exploration at the intersection of contemporary culture, technology, and design. SU11’s projects have been exhibited at renowned venues such as MoMA, FRAC Center, Walker Art Center, Vitra Design Museum, Art Basel, Artists Space NY and participated in the Venice, Beijing, and Istanbul Biennales. Ferda Kolatan has taught, lectured, and written extensively about architecture. In 2010 he co-authored the book Meander: Variegating Architecture” and in 2016 his Penn Research-Studio on Cairo received the inaugural 2017 ARCHITECT Magazine Studio Prize. In 2011 Ferda was selected as a Young Society Leader by the American-Turkish Society in New York for his achievements as an educator and designer.

Antoine Picon

Antoine Picon is the G. Ware Travelstead Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology and Director of Research at the GSD. Trained as an engineer, architect, and historian, Picon works on the history of architectural and urban technologies from the eighteenth century to the present. He has published extensively on this subject. Of special interest to him are the changes brought to cities and architecture by the development of digital tools and digital culture. Three of his books are dealing extensively with this question: Digital Culture in Architecture: An Introduction for the Design Profession (2010), Ornament: The Politics of Architecture and Subjectivity (2013), and Smart Cities: A Spatialised Intelligence (2015).

Antoine Picon's latest book, The Materiality of Architecture (2021) is an ambitious attempt to replace the digital in architecture within a more global theoretical and historical frame.

Picon has received a number of awards for his writings. In 2010, he was elected a member of the French Académie des Technologies, and in 2015 a member of the French Académie d'Architecture. He is Chevalier des Arts et Lettres since 2014. He is also Chairman of the Fondation Le Corbusier.

Andrew Kudless

Andrew Kudless is a designer and artist based in Houston, Texas. In 2004, he founded Matsys, an art & design studio exploring the emergent relationships between architecture, engineering, biology, and computation. The work of Matsys has been exhibited internationally and is in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the FRAC Centre in Orleans, France. His work on Confluence Park has won a number of awards including a 2019 AIA National Honor Award. In 2019, he became the first American designer to contribute to Louis Vuitton’s Objets Nomades collection. Andrew is also a professor of architecture at the University of Houston where he holds the Bill Kendall Memorial Endowed Professorship and he is the Director of the Construction Robotics and Fabrication Technologies (CRAFT) Lab.

Special Topics Panel

Capping off morning sessions on Big Data, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence, the final day of the conference features a special topic panel titled “Origins and Destinations Beyond Midjourney”.

In light of a remarkable burst of synthetic architectural image-making - concentrated on social media platforms, and catalyzed by advances in text-to-image diffusion models such as Midjourney, DALL-E, Imagen, Stable Diffusion, and others - this panel seeks to contextualize this explosion with a socio-technical account of the recent history and future directions of this technology. Who better to demystify this subject than the creative technologists directly involved in the development of ML-based creative tools, and the technology that underlies them?

Our panelists include: a developer at Stability AI, Chigozie Nri, who is a contributor to the recent release of Stable Diffusion, as well as the animation code of the proceeding software Disco Diffusion; Joel Simon, creator of Artbreeder, and the founder of Morphogen, a company that turns new machine learning technologies into playful and accessible creative tools. The panel is moderated by Masoud Akbarzadeh (Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design) and Kyle Steinfeld (Associate Professor at the University of California, Berkeley).

Design Excellence Award Keynote

Höweler + Yoon Architecture

Keynote Speaker

Antoine Picon

Prologue Keynote Panel

Mette Ramsgaard Thomsen

Robert Stuart-Smith

Rashida Ng

Marcos Cruz

Winka Dubbeldam

Epilogue Keynote Panel

Jenny Sabin

Hina Jamelle

Ferda Kolatan

Antoine Picon

Andrew Kudless

Special Topics Panel

Chigozie Nri

Joel Simon

Masoud Akbarzadeh

Kyle Steinfeld