Tectonic Accentuations – A critical examination of design between material and digital practices

You are cordially invited to attend the research seminar by Michael Budig:

Date: Monday, August 19th 2024

Time: 9:30 AM – 10:30 AM

Venue: SDE3 Level 4 LT425

Tectonic Accentuations – A critical examination of design between material and digital practices

Digitalisation and decarbonisation remain among the most pressing challenges in the built environment. My design and research address these topics on two architectural scales: on the level of components, I am investigating the combination of renewable and synthetic materials exemplified by explorations of wood with high-performance fibres and concrete. On the level of building structures, I am studying the potential impact of these hybrid materials, such as supplementing concrete structures with reconfigurable timber elements in high-rise buildings and developing computational tools to predict the Embodied Carbon (EC) of different material choices.

This research seminar will critically examine design practice and its environmental, cultural, and societal implications through the lens of tectonics. It will discuss the productive intersections between material and digital practices, respectively, crafts and machine production.

Michael Budig is an enthusiastic designer, educator, and technology innovator. He is the Executive Director of educational technologies start-up Wefaa Robotics and an Adjunct Research Fellow at Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), researching the interfaces between robotic technologies and architectural spaces. Before that, he was a faculty member of the Architecture and Sustainable Design Pillar at SUTD. He established the REAL Lab for Research in Renewable and Reconfigurable Architecture, which pushes the frontiers of design and construction, driven by digital technologies and the desire to provide innovative solutions for decarbonisation in the built environment.

 He held academic positions at MIT, ETH Zurich / FCL Singapore, University of Applied Arts Vienna and University of Innsbruck, and he was principal of Moll Budig Architecture, a multi-disciplinary office on architecture, urbanism and design strategies in Austria.