2019 FELLOWS

Marta Nowak is a registered architect and a founding principal of AN.ONYMOUS- a antidisciplinary design firm based in Los Angeles. She is also a faculty at UCLA Architecture and Urban Design Department. She focuses on the relationship between human body and machine in the context of architecture and urban design, looking specifically at mobility, robotics and micro-environments.

Through the use of intelligent furniture the project seeks to optimize the workspace in order to create productive and healthy work environments. By implementing robotic office furniture that navigates the space through the use of machine vision, object recognition and path planning, the device would have an ability to accommodate people's changing needs, adopt to new team arrangements and different work styles. The transformable furniture would allow employees to go from focused individual work to teamwork/collaborative brainstorming while eliminating noise pollution, visual distraction and creating minimum impact for their neighbor.

Dr Kostas Grigoriadis is a Teaching Fellow at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL and a Diploma Unit Master at the Architectural Association in London. His work focuses on multi-material design methodologies and draws from cognitive and materialist theory. He is the winner of the 2018 Royal Institute of British Architects President’s Award for Design and Technical Research and is currently building a tourist centre and masterplan in Anhui, China with his practice Continuum.

His research aims to rethink the component based make up of a curtain wall panel that is typically composed of a multitude of parts and instead to provide an alternative in the form of a continuous multi-material. Multi-materials consist of two or more sub materials that are continuously fused together, without any mechanical connections. Being able to manufacture the panel in one facility as a continuous piece with a fraction of the materials typically used can enable radical energy savings, while allowing for greater design customisability of the panelling.

Doris Sung designs kinetic installations and dynamic building components using smart materials that actively respond to changes in the environment. A professor at USC, she heads a research practice called DOSU Studio Architecture and is co-founder of TBM Designs, a start-up company for smart building products. Her performative prototypes ambitiously blend digital computation, complex geometries, innovative structures, material technology and simple beauty to straddle the fields of art, engineering, architecture and public health/policy.

If the surface of building facades can be considered urban infrastructure, it has the potential to benefit the outside pedestrian in addition to performing for the building’s occupants. In Sung’s proposal, the liminal surface of the building can be used to filter smog and particulate matter in urban canyons where high levels of lung disease in underrepresented populations have been detected. By using passive methods of air movement, she is working with fluid dynamic engineers to develop new types of microsurfacing for building panels that can control the movement of air on the surface of the façade so that it can be filtered chemically and by filtration. A long-term target of this project is to design new forms of bus shelters that can provide fresh air pockets for those exposed to the worst vehicular exhaust. Architecture can then take an active role in the improvement of public health.

Materials have the power to change the world and the world needs this change now more than ever.

Elizabeth Gilligan is completing her PhD at Queen's University Belfast on the architect's role in material development, focused on the development of bio-receptive concrete facades. During the fellowship she will extend her research to create a bio-receptive concrete façade adapted to the climate of San Francisco: adding another climatic scenario to the body of work that up until now has only been tested in UK conditions.

The material she has developed uses 90% recycled materials and is purposefully designed to sustain plant growth on its surface.