This event will be conducted in-person in the Library Atrium and through Zoom.

For in-person attendance, please register in advance here.
For Zoom attendance, please register here.

This panel discussion will celebrate the publication of a new book called “Homing the Machine in Architecture.” This edited collection is a series of conversations on the ways designers, practitioners, historians, and theorists orient themselves within the world of architectural digital fabrication.

The panel will feature three of the book’s contributors—Michael Szivos, Shelby Doyle, and Marshall Prado— and will be moderated by the book’s editors, Zach Cohen and Galo Canizares.

To “home” a digital fabrication machine is to send it back to its origin point—a point that can be specified by the fabricator in advance of the fabrication process or by the defaults that are pre-programmed into the machine. The homing process is necessary and productive since it determines the physical point at which the machine (and the maker) begin making—every time that architectural designers begin to digitally fabricate something new, they first need to home the machine. “Homing the Machine in Architecture” gathers first- and second-hand accounts of the origins of individual “digi-fab” practices from the emergence of advanced prototyping tools to the contemporary moment. It features interviews, essays, and case studies organized around three questions: What are the possible histories of digital fabrication in architecture? How do designers orient themselves in this emergent discipline? What conceptual original points do architectural designers return to when they home their machines?

Zach Cohen is an architect, researcher, and educator. His research and teaching examine the ways in which architects can use digital fabrication technologies to reimagine both the immaterial and physical labor of architectural design. From 2019 to 2021, Zach was the Christos Yessios Visiting Assistant Professor at the Knowlton School of Architecture at The Ohio State University. Prior to his time at Knowlton, he was a Research Lead at the Self-Assembly Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Zach is currently an Adjunct Assistant Professor at The Cooper Union, where he teaches courses centered on what he calls “theoretical digital fabrication.” He is also the co-founder and partner of the Brooklyn-based architectural design practice, commoncraft, which presently has a variety of commercial and residential construction projects in and around New York City. Zach is a registered architect in the State of New York.

Galo Canizares is a designer, writer, and educator. His work blends absurdity, computation, world-making, simulation, and parafiction to address issues in technology and the built environment. He is currently researching the sociotechnical networks of relations between design’s softwarization and the architectural imagination. Galo was the recipient of the 2016-17 LeFevre ’29 Emerging Practitioner Fellowship, and in 2018 was awarded the Christos Yessios Visiting Professorship at The Ohio State University. His writings have been published in various journals and he is the author of Digital Fabrications: Designer Stories for a Software-Based Planet, a collection of essays on software and design published by Applied Research & Design. His collaborative architectural practice, office ca, won the 2018 Ragdale Ring competition. He is currently assistant professor of architecture at the University of Kentucky College of Design where he directs the Critical Software Lab.

Michael Szivos is the founder of SOFTlab, a New York City based design studio that combines research, technology, and ideas to craft work that spans multiple mediums and scales. In 2012 SOFTlab was awarded the Architectural League Prize for Young Architects & Designers, and in 2010 the studio was selected, along with seven other young studios, for the New Practices New York award by the AIA Chapter of New York. He also teaches at Pratt Institute and Yale University.

Marshall Prado is an Assistant Professor of Design and Structural Technology at the University of Tennessee. He holds a Bachelor of Architecture and a Bachelor of Environmental Design from North Carolina State University and advanced degrees of a Master of Architecture and a Master of Design Studies in Technology from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Marshall has previously taught at the University of Stuttgart, in the Institute for Computational Design and Construction, the University of Hawaii, and has been an invited studio critic at the University of Virginia, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Michigan. He has led several workshops on digital design and fabrication techniques. His current research interests include integrated computational design, robotic fabrication, additive manufacturing, and lightweight fiber composite systems for architectural applications.

Shelby Elizabeth Doyle, AIA is a registered architect and Associate Professor of Architecture where she is the Stan G. Thurston Professor of Design Build at Iowa State University College of Design, co-founder of the ISU Computation & Construction Lab (CCL), and director of the ISU Architectural Robotics Lab (ARL). The CCL and ARL the result of Doyle's ISU Presidential Impact Hire to rethink digital fabrication and design-build. The CCL works to connect developments in computation to the challenges of construction: through teaching, research, and outreach. The central hypothesis of CCL and Doyle's work is that computation in architecture is a material, pedagogical, and social project; computation is both informed by and productive of architectural cultures. This hypothesis is explored, through the fabrication of built projects and materialized in computational practices. The CCL is invested in questioning the role of education and pedagogy in replicating existing technological inequities, and in pursuing the potential for technology in architecture as a space of, and for, gender equity. Doyle is currently a Mellon Research Fellow for the Canadian Centre for Architecture's The Digital Now: Architecture and Intersectionality, the 2023 President of ACADIA - the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture - and a 2022-25 At-Large-Director for the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA).

This event is free and open to the public. Registration is required.