Day 1 - Morning Session

Modeling Speculative Infrastructures

Moderator: Jimmy Wei-Chun Cheng

Computation compresses reality into dynamic, navigable models that reshape how we model, inhabit, and co-create space. As pervasive infrastructures, large language models, search engines, and game engines evolve beyond tools into platforms that structure participation and mediate collective imaginaries. These systems operate through a dual logic: generalized models trained on planetary-scale data, and localized ones are tuned to specific contexts. Design becomes a negotiation between abstraction and specificity, autonomy and collaboration. This panel explores platforms as speculative media—reconfiguring ecological infrastructure, social organization, and spatial intelligence. What new spatial imaginaries emerge when platforms no longer serve us but collaborate with us in shaping the environments we inhabit?

Deborah Lopez and Hadin Charbel / pareid - The Bartlett, UCL

Jose Sanchez / Plethora Project - University of Michigan

Karla Saldaña Ochoa / SHARE Lab, University of Florida

Day 1 - Afternoon Session

Drafting Geometric Stories

Architectural Drawing, Computational Geometry, Generative AI, World-making, Architectural Writing

Moderator: Agostino Nickl

AI can endlessly write and render, achieving impressive results in the blink of an eye. As architectural writing and rendering practices start adapting to and adopting these tools, the measured architectural drawing—measured both as true to a particular scale and as a matter of careful attention—seems strangely absent. Both are acts of proportioning: not just walls and floors, but also characters and concepts. During our discussion, we want to explore how drawing brings latent things into view, how geometry moves from earth-measuring to world-making, and how storytelling functions as a reflective and projective instrument of sense-making. What becomes of writing and drawing, the key instruments that have long accompanied architectural thinking, in the light of AI?

Natasha Sandmeier / UCLA - A+D Museum

Adil Bokhari / ETH Zurich

Daniel Cardoso Llach / CodeLab, Carnegie Mellon University

Day 2 - Morning Session

Sensing Extended Bodies

Extended Reality, Human-Computer Interaction, Augmented Bodies, Multisensory Interfaces, Spatial Computing

Moderator: Lee-Su Huang

Emerging technologies—extended reality, embodied computation, and sensory augmentation—are reshaping our understanding of the body in space as a dynamic, distributed system. Drawing from Juhani Pallasmaa’s notion of “the eyes of the skin”, which foregrounds the primacy of touch and embodied perception, digital tools now extend that haptic field into interfaces, environments, and virtual terrains. The body becomes a site of distributed sensing—articulated not only through its physical contours but through the digital systems it inhabits, influences, and is reshaped by. How can we think of bodies that are not only mediated by technology but fundamentally rearticulated through it—becoming porous, networked, and performative across physical and virtual dimensions?

Dina El Zanfaly / hyperSENSE, Carnegie Mellon University

Paula Strunden / Bauhaus University Weimar

Alexandra Ion / Interactive Structures Lab, Carnegie Mellon University

Day 2 - Afternoon Session

Materializing Imaginary Geometries

Digital Fabrication, Sustainable Construction, Biogenic Design, Regenerative Materials, Material Intelligence

Moderator: Juney Lee

The intersecting realms of computational design, digital fabrication, and biogenic materials open new possibilities for how imaginative geometries can emerge from regenerative matter. Moving beyond purely representational models, it posits how physical matter could be designed to build, grow, and decay on its own terms. From computationally generated surfaces to bio-fabricated textures, the panel traces how stories, living organisms, and machines intertwine. Together, they offer a vision of architectural design not as static form-making, but as an evolving negotiation across the scales of the machine, the human, and the natural environment. Through this lens, how might material intelligence become not just a tool for generating digital outputs, but a collaborator in imagining and constructing new forms of architecture?

Talks by:

Dinorah Martinez Shulte / MANUFACTURA

Dana Cupkova / EPIPHYTE Lab - Carnegie Mellon University

Andrea S. Ling / ETH Zurich