SOM Foundation Announces Speakers for the Second International Research and Design Forum in Stuttgart

Speakers

Sigrid Adriaenssens’s research interests lie in the mechanics of large‐span shells and membranes under extreme loading and more recently under construction. She has been working on a comprehensive framework with advanced analytical formulations, numerical form finding and optimization approaches, fluid/structure interaction models, and algorithms to open new avenues for accelerated discoveries and automated optimal designs. In terms of applications, she has used this framework to successfully innovate structural and architectural systems ranging from macroscale adaptive shading shell devices to large‐scale storm surge membrane barriers. In 2021, she was named a fellow of the Structural Engineering Institute of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), elected vice‐president of the International Association for Shell and Spatial Structures (IASS), and received the DigitalFUTURES Matthias Rippmann Memorial Prize (Tongji University) and the Pioneers’ Award (Spatial Structures Research Centre of the University of Surrey). In 2018, she received the ASCE George Winter Award. She chairs the ASCE Aesthetics in Design Committee as well as the IASS Concrete Shell Roofs Working Group. She is the coeditor of the International Journal of Space Structures and directs the Form Finding Lab at Princeton University, where she teaches courses on (non)linear mechanics of solids and slender structures, structural design, and the integration of engineering and the arts.

Thomas Auer is managing director of Transsolar, Stuttgart, a distinguished climate engineering practice working on all scales, from single buildings to urban neighborhoods. As professor and chair of Building Technology and Climate Responsive Design at the Technical University of Munich Department of Architecture, Auer advocates for holistic concepts that incorporate the urban and regional scale as well as an understanding of energy efficiency that goes beyond technology. His overall objective is to create maximum comfort in the interior as well as in the exterior of the built environment while minimizing the use of resources.

Martina Bauer joined Barkow Leibinger in 1999 and was appointed senior associate in 2005 and principal in 2020. With over twenty years of professional experience, she gained knowledge in project management on a range of projects varying from master plans to buildings, including her execution of the TRUTEC Building in Seoul. In her position as the head of the office’s competition team, she has been responsible for successful competition entries, mediating design and function with engineering and economics. She is currently in charge of the office’s projects in the United States and successfully completed the Harvard University ArtLab in Cambridge in 2019 and the New Sid Richardson College at Rice University in Houston in 2021.

Mollie Claypool is an architectural theorist and educator focused on issues of social justice highlighted by increasing automation in architecture and design production. She is an associate professor in Architecture at The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, where she is the codirector of Automated Architecture (AUAR) Labs and Historical, Cultural, and Theoretical Skills coordinator in the Architectural Design MArch program. Claypool is cofounder and CEO of the AUAR Labs spinout AUAR Ltd, a technology company working on distributed automated housing production. She is coauthor of the book Robotic Building: Architecture in the Age of Automation (DETAIL, 2019) and author of the SPACE10 report “The Digital in Architecture: Then, Now and in the Future” (2019).

Brandon Clifford is a time traveler who develops creative approaches to the world’s most pressing problems. He identifies contemporary blind spots by mining ancient knowledge that holds resonance with topics of today. Clifford is the director and cofounder of Matter Design. He is also an associate professor and director of the MArch program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Clifford received his Master of Architecture from Princeton University and his Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Clifford is a designer and researcher who has received recognition with prizes such as the Rome Prize, a TED Fellowship, the SOM Prize for Architecture, Design, and Urban Design, the Design Biennial Boston Award, and the Architectural League Prize for Young Architects + Designers. His most recent authored work, The Cannibal’s Cookbook, demonstrates his dedication to bringing ancient knowledge into contemporary practice with theatrical captivation. His work at Matter Design is focused on redirecting architectural research through spectacle and mysticism. Clifford’s speculative built works continue to disrupt common practices and challenge default solutions.

Ensamble Studio is a cross-functional team founded in 2000 and led by architects Antón García-Abril and Débora Mesa. Balancing imagination and reality and art and science, their work innovates typologies, technologies, and methodologies to address issues as diverse as the construction of the landscape or the prefabrication of the house. From their early works—SGAE Headquarters, Hemeroscopium House, or The Truffle in Spain—to their most recent—Ensamble Fabrica in Madrid and Ca'n Terra in Menorca—every project makes space for experimentation aiming to advance their field. Currently, through their startup WoHo, they are invested in increasing the quality of architecture while making it more affordable by integrating offsite technologies. Their new research and fabrication facility in Madrid, Ensamble Fabrica, has been built to support this endeavor. García-Abril and Mesa are committed to sharing ideas and cultivating synergies between professional and academic worlds through teaching, lecturing, and researching: she is critic at large at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and he is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where they cofounded the POPlab—Prototypes of Prefabrication Laboratory—in 2012.

Paul Fast, founding partner of Fast + Epp, has seen the firm grow from humble beginnings in 1985 as a single engineer in the Vancouver office, to a current staff of 150 persons with offices in North America and Europe. Fast graduated from the University of British Columbia (UBC) with a Bachelor of Applied Science degree in Civil Engineering in 1981 and has been recognized for his work in exposed architectural structures. He has emerged as a leader in the design of contemporary timber buildings, often pushing the design envelope to create architecturally expressive hybrid structures of timber, concrete, and steel. Fast has been the lead engineer for many of the firm’s most prominent projects and enjoys close collaboration with many leading architectural firms. He is perhaps best known for his work on award-winning projects such as the Richmond Olympic Oval Roof, VanDusen Botanical Gardens Visitor Centre, UBC Tallwood House, Grandview Heights Aquatic Centre, and the Kingsway Pedestrian Bridge. Fast was named an honorary member of the Architectural Institute of British Columbia and a fellow of the Institution of Structural Engineers in the United Kingdom in 2010. In 2013, he was granted Engineers and Geoscientists British Columbia’s highest annual honor, the R.A. McLachlan Memorial Award. Fast is a clinical professor at the University of Illinois College of Fine + Applied Arts. In 2021, he was awarded the Gold Medal by the UK-based Institution of Structural Engineers.

Mariana Popescu is an assistant professor of Parametric Structural Design and Digital Fabrication at the Delft University of Technology, Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences. She is a computational architect and structural designer with a strong interest and experience in innovative ways of approaching the fabrication process and use of materials in construction. Her area of expertise is computational and parametric design with a focus on digital fabrication and sustainable design. Her extensive involvement in projects related to promoting sustainability has led to a multilateral development of skills, which combine the fields of architecture, engineering, computational design, and digital fabrication. She obtained her PhD in 2019 from ETH Zurich with a research focus on the development of KnitCrete, a novel, material-saving, labor-reducing, cost-effective formwork system for casting doubly curved geometries in concrete using 3D knitting. She is the main author of the award-winning KnitCandela shell and was named a “Pioneer” in the MIT Technology Review Innovators Under 35 list of 2019.

Jenny Sabin is an architectural designer whose work is at the forefront of a new direction for twenty-first century architectural practice—one that investigates the intersections of 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 University College of Architecture, Art, and Planning (AAP), 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. In 2006, she cofounded the Sabin+Jones LabStudio, a hybrid research and design unit, together with biologist Peter Lloyd Jones. Sabin holds degrees in ceramics and interdisciplinary visual art from the University of Washington and a Master of Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania. She was a Pew Fellow in 2010 and was named a USA Knight Fellow in 2011. In 2014, she was awarded the prestigious Architectural League Prize for Young Architects + Designers and Architectural Record’s national Women in Architecture Awards selected her for the 2016 Innovator award. She has exhibited nationally and internationally including in the acclaimed ninth ArchiLab Naturalizing Architecture exhibition at the Frac Centre, Orleans, France and most recently as part of Beauty, the fifth Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial. Her book LabStudio: Design Research Between Architecture and Biology, coauthored with Peter Lloyd Jones, was published in July 2017. In 2017, Sabin won MoMA and MoMA PS1’s Young Architects Program with her submission, Lumen.

Mark Sarkisian is a partner of Structural and Seismic Engineering at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in San Francisco. He received his BS degree in Civil Engineering from the University of Connecticut, where he is a fellow of the Academy of Distinguished Engineers, and his MS degree in Structural Engineering from Lehigh University. He also received an honorary ScD degree from Clarkson University and an honorary MS degree from the Politecnico di Milano. In 2021, he was elected to the prestigious National Academy of Engineering in the United States. His career has focused on developing innovative structural engineering solutions for over one hundred major building projects around the world, including some of the world’s tallest. Sarkisian holds fourteen US and international patents for high-performance seismic structural mechanisms and environmentally responsible structural systems. He teaches studio design courses at Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, California State Polytechnic University, California College of the Arts, North Carolina State University, Northeastern University, and Pratt Institute and has written the book Designing Tall Buildings: Structure as Architecture, with the second edition recently released by Routledge.

Joshua G. Stein is the founder of Radical Craft, a Los Angeles-based studio that advances an experimental art and design practice saturated in history, archaeology, and craft. This inquiry inflects the production of urban spaces and artifacts by evolving newly grounded approaches to the challenges posed by virtuality, velocity, and globalization. His recent projects reimagine the construction and resource extraction industries as anthropogenic geological processes while investigating new applications for earthen materials. Stein has received numerous grants, awards, and fellowships, including multiple grants from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the AIA Upjohn Research Initiative award, the European Commission’s Science+Technology+Arts initiative, and the 2010–11 Rome Prize Fellowship in Architecture. He is a professor of Architecture at Woodbury University.

This forum is presented as part of the Stuttgart Week of Advancing AEC organized by the Cluster of Excellence IntCDC at the University of Stuttgart week. The forum is open to the public and welcomes design professionals, educators, and students. Registration is required. More information will be available at www.intcdc.uni-stuttgart.de/stuttgart-week-of-advancing-aec.