Material and matter

Participants

Lola Ben – Alon

Engineer, Assistant Professor at Columbia GSAPP, Director of Natural Materials Lab and the Building Tech curriculum

Lola Ben-Alon is an Assistant Professor at Columbia GSAPP, where she directs the Natural Materials Lab and the Building Tech curriculum. She specializes in socially and environmentally sustainable building materials, construction practices, and engineering-architecture collaborations. Her current work focuses on natural earth- and bio-based building materials, their manual and digital fabrication, life cycle, supply chains, and policy. She uses quantitative and qualitative methods to evaluate the embodied and operational impacts of low-carbon assemblies such as cob, rammed earth, and light straw clay. Ben-Alon is particularly passionate about fostering connections between academia and local communities by using participatory design and social hands-on engagement in the production of the built environment. Through sharing skills and knowledge that promote healthy and affordable living environments, Ben-Alon hopes to diversify the building industry and catalyze new intersections and creative dialogues among the various disciplines of architecture, engineering, art, and sociology.

Ben-Alon received her Ph.D. from the School of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University, where she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Building Performance and Diagnostics. She holds a B.S. in Structural Engineering and M.S. in Construction Management from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. At the Technion, Ben-Alon also earned a diploma in Critical and Curatorial Studies, where she co-founded art.espionage, the Experimental Art and Architecture Lab. Previously, she served as a curator and content developer at the Madatech, Israel National Museum of Science, Technology, and Space. Ben-Alon also received $20.000 to fund her teaching through the HP Campus of the Future: Emerging Technology Grant for Teaching and Learning Projects.

Her work was published in Building and Environment, Journal of Green Building, Woodhead Publishing Series in Civil and Structural Engineering, and Automation in Construction. She serves on the board of ACSA’s Technology | Architecture + Design, and Elsevier’s Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews.

Ezio Blasetti

Architect, Senior Lecturer University of Pennsylvania, MsAAD Columbia University, Co-Founded maeta design, Founder of algorithmicdesign.net

Ezio Blasetti, registered architect in Europe (TEE-TCG), holds a masters of science in advanced architectural design from Columbia University after having previously studied in Athens and Paris.
His academic and professional research focuses on the application of advanced technologies in all phases of architectural design, from the initial composition to the digital and robotic fabrication.
He is a founding partner at Maeta Design, an architectural design and research firm based in Philadelphia, New York and Athens. In 2009 he co-founded ahylo, an architectural design and construction practice and “apomechanes” an intensive design lab on algorithmic processes and fabrication. Founder of algorithmicdesign.net, Ezio’s recent collaborations include new territories, biothing, acconci studio, a|Um studio and serge studio. He has taught generative design studios and seminars by means of computational geometry and digital fabrication at Weitzman School of Design, Columbia University, Yale SoA, Pratt Institute, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Sciarc, Cooper Union, the Architectural Association, Michigan University, University of Technology Sydney and the Bartlett. His work has been exhibited and published internationally and is part of the permanent collection of the Centre Pompidou.

Thomas Doxiadis

Director of Doxiadis+, Architect, Landscape Architect ASLA, B.A. MArch, MLA Harvard University

Thomas Doxiadis (Bachelor of Arts [AB] 1992; Master in Landscape Architecture [MLA] 1998 Harvard University) designs and studies the landscape, and through it the relationships between humans and the non-human. He does this as principal of the design practice doxiadis+, as an environmental volunteer currently heading the national Greek Adaptation of Landscapes to Climate Change program and as an occasional academic. Doxiadis has written about and participated in several conferences focusing on ecology, landscape and the city. Research-based projects include “Landscapes of Cohabitation”; becoming a finalist for the 2018 International Landscape Rosa Barba Prize; and “Entangled Kingdoms,” the first-ever fungal garden at the 2020–2021 Venice Architectural Biennale.

Yael Erel

Architect, Educator, Light Artist and Co-Founder of lightexture, Co-Director MArch Program and Assistant Professor at RPI

Yael Erel is an architect, educator and light artist. She interweaves light research with academic teaching and practice. She is a registered architect and co-founder of lightexture, where she designs and constructs light fixtures and installations. She graduated with honors from The Cooper Union and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute . Erel has been teaching architecture since 2004; she taught at Harvard GSD, Columbia University, Pratt Institute, The Cooper Union, and is currently an Assistant Professor at the Rensselaer School of Architecture.

Avner Ben Natan

Lighting designer and Co-founder of lightexture

Avner Ben Natan has been working with light as material since the early 90’s in his work as a lighting designer in films and television. After he moved to New York, he began to extend the work with light into the design of light fixtures and environments for art and dance installations, residential and commercial projects. A versatile artist, Ben Natan has also been writing poetry and prose. After completing a collection of short stories, he started to compose and sing his own poetry and has developed one of his short stories into a screenplay. Received a BA in Sociology and Anthropology from Tel Aviv University.

Athina Papadopoulou

Assistant Professor of Architecture, Health, and Design NYIT, co-Director ReMEDiaLab

Athina Papadopoulou, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Architecture, Health, and Design at the School of Architecture and Design. Her current research focuses on programmable wearable environments addressing aspects of personal health and well-being, and on the exploration of bio-based material fabrication addressing aspects of environmental health and well-being. She is the co-founder and co-director of NYIT ReMEDiaLab – A research laboratory investigating Regenerative Material Environments for Medical and Design Interactive Applications.

Athina received her Master of Science and Doctor of Philosophy in Design Computation, with a minor in Human-Computer Interaction from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she was a Presidential, Vergottis, and Leon Hyzen Fellow. She was also a member of the MIT Self-Assembly Lab and the MIT Computational Making Group. As part of her Ph.D. dissertation, she developed Affective Matter, a novel material system that interacts with the body to aid in emotion self-regulation and communication. She is the inventor and co-inventor of several patent-pending and patented technologies involving materials with programmable behavior that adapt or respond to environmental conditions, user’s physiology or needs.

Prior to joining the New York Institute of Technology, Athina taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Wentworth Institute of Technology, and Boston Architectural College. She received a Diploma in Architectural Engineering and a Postgraduate Master’s in Design Theory from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, where she is also a registered architect. Her work has been published in science and design journals including Nature, Cognitive Science, and Architectural Design, in computation and human-computer interaction conferences, and international design venues, including the Milan Furniture Fair and the Venice Biennale.

Mario Medina Vilela

Visiting Assistant Professor, NYIT School of Architecture and Design

Mario Medina Vilela is a Computational Designer and Visiting Assistant Professor of Architecture, Health & Design at the School of Architecture and Design at New York Institute of Technology. Mario’s research and work lies at the intersection of Computation, Digital Fabrication and Bio Design investigating how traditional building design methods and materials can be reinvented through advanced fabrication tools such as 3D printing, robotic and digital fabrication to promote sustainable, circular, health and well-being design solutions.

Prior to SoAD, Mario was the lead Computational Designer and Project Manager at Protolab Architects working on engineering computational design workflows for design and fabrication in Climbing Walls, and Art Installations and an Adjunct Faculty at the Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture and Design teaching Design Studios and Computational Design Seminars. His background in Architecture allowed Mario to work at multiple design offices such as Pickard Chilton, working on multiple high-rise buildings across the country

Mario received his Master of Science in Architectural Computation from the Bartlett School of Architecture at UCL, London in 2019. Mario’s master dissertation focused on employing computational workflows to segmentize mesh geometries towards computational knitting. In 2016, Mario received his Bachelor of Architecture from the Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture and Design from the University of Houston, Texas.

Christian Pongratz

MSHD Director, Professor, and Co-Director ReMEDiaLab

Christian R Pongratz is the Senior Advisor to the Provost and Professor of Architecture. From 2017-2019, he was the Interim Dean of the School of Interdisciplinary Studies and Education. In order to facilitate increased collaboration among New York Tech‘s disciplinary silos he is initiating new collaborative programs and teamwork driven projects engaging people, communities and industry. He co-founded the Creative Tech Innovation Council together with Isabel Draves (New York Creative Tech Week) and by forming transdisciplinary teams explores how innovation emerges at the intersection of design research, technology and business serving communities and solving broader environmental, social and economic issues.

Prior to joining New York Tech, Christian R. Pongratz was the director and founder of the Digital Design and Fabrication Program and Master of Science Specialization in the College of Architecture at Texas Tech University, where he also was a professor. He taught at the School of Architecture, University of Texas at Austin from 2000 – 2002, and was visiting professor at Yeungjin Jr. College, Taegu, Korea, the Busan International Architectural Design Seminar, Busan, Korea, and at the Architectural Association.

He is a jury member for the Pinnacle Awards by the MIA since 2007. He studied Architecture at TUM and Sci-Arc, and is a licensed architect in Germany with registration in Berlin. Before establishing his own practice, he worked in New York for Peter Eisenman and John Reimnitz, and was involved with the design of international, invited design competitions and with prestigious commissioned buildings.

Together with Maria Perbellini, in 2002 he co-founded and is a principal at pONGRATZ pERBELLINI Architects, an architectural design practice and research-oriented atelier investigating computation with material-based processes. PPA’s expertise in digital design and fabrication technologies engages with an architecture of experience and explores geometries, textures, and surface structures, and their material properties, behaviors, and performances.

Andreas Theodoridis

Assistant Professor NYIT & Practicing Architect-Engineer, Environmental Technologist

Andreas Theodoridis is a practicing architect-engineer and environmental technologist with a Ph.D. from the Center for Architecture Science and Ecology (CASE), a research center of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute based in New York City, and a research collaborator at the Yale Center for Architecture Ecosystems (CEA). He holds a Diploma in Architecture and Engineering from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece, and an M.S. in Sustainable Environmental Systems from Pratt Institute, where he was awarded the Green Infrastructure Fellowship and an award for outstanding merit. Theodoridis is the founder of United Atmospheres, an experimental design practice and consultancy based between New York and Athens.

His research is interdisciplinary, merging 25 years of experience in building construction and fabrication with applied research on building systems and environmental initiatives on an urban scale. His current work focuses on hybrid air phytoremediative modular ceramic systems for building envelopes, relative to questions of environmental inequality.

Theodoridis has taught at Syracuse University and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. He also lectured at the Syracuse Center for Excellence in Environmental and Energy Systems and served as a visiting researcher at the Cooper Union Institute for Sustainable Design. He is the recipient of awards and distinctions including the Humanities Graduate Fellowship at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, an honorable mention at the Architect’s Newspaper Design Awards, the One Prize annual design and science award, as well as an honorable mention on the d3 Unbuilt Architectural Visions international competition.

His work has been exhibited and published in several architectural exhibitions and forums including the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) Journal; Divergence in Architectural Research: ConCave, held at Georgia Tech; OFFRAMP Journal of the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc); the Venice Architecture Biennale; the Design Hub of Barcelona; the Oslo Architecture Triennale; the Le Lieu Unique Center for Contemporary Culture in France; the Istanbul Design Biennale; the Onassis Cultural Center in Greece; the Museum on the Seam in Israel; the Tallinn Architecture Biennale in Estonia; the University of Michigan; Princeton University; and the NYCx Design week, among other venues.