Tectonic Accentuations - Designing through shifting material logics

This talk proposes reading labour through the lens of architectural design. It examines projects from professional and academic design practice to show how labour conditions shape what architects can do, and how design decisions become legible in the articulation of structure, enclosure, joints, and section: tectonic accentuations. Moving between different geographic and cultural contexts, it tracks how design responds when digital workflows meet material realities, and tools, processes, stakeholders, and site conditions impose changing constraints.

The lecture is structured around the transition from digital frameworks to material articulation as its central idea, which frames four perspectives on labour. First, labour as constraint, where topography, climate, and limited means set the boundaries for design, form, and assembly. Second, labour as tectonic systems, where work processes and climatic performance organise the building as an integrated envelope. Third, labour as resource, where embodied carbon, timber supply chains, and craft cultures make material choice an environmental and social responsibility. Fourth, labour as constructed topography, where ground is reintroduced through tectonic articulation, as a counterpoint to flattened modernist datums.

Across industrial work, material experimentation, and research on adaptive construction systems, the talk argues that material logics keep shifting through cultural contexts, and tie architectural decision-making to labour realities. Tectonics is used as a register that lets us read those shifts in design, compare them across contexts, and keep what we claim and what we build accountable.

Michael Budig is an enthusiastic architect, educator, and design technologist based in Singapore. He is an Associate Professor of Practice in Architecture at the National University of Singapore. Across his work, he has pursued a long-running interest in renewable materials and in expanding what timber can do in contemporary construction, from furniture-scale prototypes to building systems. He has built industrial and residential projects in Austria and developed research projects in Singapore that explore material innovation, robotic fabrication, and circular construction. His built work and designs have received international awards.

Budig has previously held academic positions at SUTD, MIT, ETH Zurich / FCL Singapore, the University of Applied Arts Vienna, and the University of Innsbruck. Earlier, he served as the inaugural CEO of the educational robotics startup Wefaa and practised as an architect in Austria through Moll Budig Architecture. He obtained his PhD at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), holds a Master of Architecture (Dipl.-Ing.) from the University of Innsbruck with his final thesis completed at the Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL), and is accredited as an architect in the European Union by the Austrian Board of Architects

Respondent: Roland Schnizer
Senior Partner at Foster + Partners, AADipl

Roland studied at the Architectural Association in London before joining Foster + Partners in 2000. As the leader of our Singapore office, he travels extensively to oversee the practice’s numerous projects in Southeast Asia. His projects include The Troika, a residential development in Kuala Lumpur, which was awarded the RIBA International Prize, and South Beach, a mixed use development in Singapore, which has won two Green Mark Platinum Awards. After 10 years of living in the equatorial climate, he has developed at great passion for tropical architecture and his research on vernacular architecture informs the studios ongoing projects in the region.