Carnegie Mellon Architecture Announces 2026 PJ Dick Innovation Fund Faculty Grants Program Recipients

"BuildFest: Five Years of Peace and Building" is an edited volume that documents the activities of the first five years of the Bethel Woods Art and Architecture Festival (BuildFest), compiled from photos, essays, and oral histories that explore how the act of architecture (building) can function as a catalyst for civic and environmental peace.

Over the course of five years, BuildFest has grown from a small gathering of like-minded students and colleagues at the historic site of Woodstock to the country’s largest assembly for active design-build education. Since its inception in 2021, the festival has attracted over 300 student and faculty participants from more than 20 diverse institutions — including Carnegie Mellon, Princeton, Cornell, Syracuse, and the University of California, among others — to prototype sustainable and innovative architecture at full scale.

"BuildFest: Five Years of Peace and Building" draws on the vast expertise of festival participants, including industry leaders in the fields of robotic fabrication, circular construction, and equitable design, to showcase a selection of the most innovative practices, methods, and techniques currently being developed in architecture programs across the nation. The book functions twofold, as both a compendium showcasing the results of the first five years of BuildFest, and, by doing so, as a survey of the state of design-build across the country and beyond, and as an argument for the importance of design-build in education and the profession as an incubator for experimentation and innovation in the discipline of architecture.

This project conducts a full-community infrared (IR) drone scan of the Larimer neighborhood to reveal envelope performance, material behavior, and winter heat loss patterns across its residential building stock. By integrating this thermal imaging with electricity-use data from Duquesne Light Company, we will evaluate discrepancies between energy consumption and actual thermal performance, showing where energy-use-based targeting aligns with architectural envelope failure, and where it misses homes experiencing underheating or material decay. Computer vision techniques will automatically detect thermal anomalies across roofs and facades, enabling scalable analysis of hundreds of structures and identifying the subset of buildings with the most severe envelope issues. 

With the support of this funding, we will activate an existing partnership with a professional drone-imaging team that is prepared to conduct the full-neighborhood IR scan. Funding will enable deployment, data capture, and processing of high-resolution thermal imagery that we cannot carry out without this support.

Findings will inform construction-specific retrofit bundles for Larimer’s three dominant building types — multi-wythe brick, wood-frame with brick veneer, and wood-frame siding — supported by architectural diagrams, typology mappings, and a community-facing "Thermal Map + Retrofit Guide." This work advances both scientific understanding of thermal envelope behavior and design-driven methods for equitable, high-impact retrofit planning.

This project explores how artificial intelligence (AI) can mediate human experiences of non-human temporal scales in natural landscapes, addressing both climate change awareness and the critical role of AI in environmental futures. As climate change accelerates species decline and ecosystem transformation, this project develops interactive technologies that foster attunement to the multiple temporalities of other beings — from the acoustic rhythms of endangered species to the deep time of geological change.

Building on CodeLab’s Design for Collaborative Survival research and recent collaboration with ITI Lisbon on Critter Connect, this project develops three interconnected prototypes: 1) an AI-assisted audio landscape tool that reconstructs acoustic experiences from photographs to build awareness of species presence; 2) a More-than-Human Temporalities Probe deployed across Pittsburgh and Lisbon to document encounters with temporal cohabitation across seasons; and 3) a Deep Time Landscape Walk using AR and generative AI to create interactive narratives spanning geological timescales at natural heritage sites.

Through research-through-design methods and iterative prototyping, this work positions AI both reflexively — as implicated in climate extractivism — and as a tool for remediation and care. By designing encounters with uncomfortable temporalities of loss and decline, the project "stays with the trouble" (Haraway, 2016) to foster new forms of care for human and non-human beings. Expected outcomes include three working prototypes, scholarly publications at DRS 2026, C&C 2026, CHI 2027 and DIS 2027, and strengthened international collaboration with ITI Lisbon that will support two visiting PhD students in 2027.

This project investigates the structural, economic, and social potential of Pennsylvania-sourced hardwood — particularly yellow poplar — for use in mass timber affordable housing across Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, and other legacy urban neighborhoods. Led by CM—A faculty with support from partners including PSEIF, PSELT, Crosswoods, Arup, Equilibrium, and CHM Fire Consultants, the project engages two to three CMU students over one summer and semester to document statewide hardwood resources, evaluate structural performance, and publish a design and feasibility toolkit.

Through demonstration housing projects (87 units across four sites), digital design-to-build integration, workforce upskilling, and supply-chain activation, the research develops a replicable model for hardwood mass-timber infill housing.

The work directly addresses CM—A’s three pedagogical challenges:

• Climate change is engaged through decarbonization research, substituting renewable hardwood mass timber for carbon-intensive concrete and steel, advancing ecological forest management and quantifying embodied-carbon reductions.
• Social justice is addressed through researching the opportunity for the creation of permanently affordable housing, reinvestment in disinvested neighborhoods, rural-urban economic linkage, and workforce opportunities for small contractors and mills in under-resourced communities.
• The project also advances AI-adjacent computational design by deploying digital platforms that connect standing timber inventories to modular production workflows and structural dimensional limitation testing.

The project’s methods include resource assessment, structural and fire-performance analysis, economic and market feasibility studies, and documentation of prototype construction. Outcomes will include a publicly disseminated research publication, a market analysis report, a design toolkit, and built demonstration projects. The project will leverage CMU’s Regenerative Structures Laboratory (RSL), CM—A faculty expertise in timber design, and student research capacity. This work will position the team for continued leadership in mass timber innovation and affordable housing delivery in Pennsylvania.

The rapid expansion of text-to-image generative AI is transforming visual production in architecture, creating an urgent pedagogical challenge: how to integrate these systems into the curriculum while ensuring the credibility of their outputs and addressing their opaque, black-box reasoning. In conventional studio pedagogy, architectural literacy is cultivated through precedential research, iterative critique, and dialogic negotiation between students and advisors. Achieving an image with architectural rigor is a multi-stage process that requires interpretation and judgment. By contrast, text-to-image systems accelerate production but compress this cognitive process into a single prompt, often resulting in outputs with reduced architectural coherence.

Proprietary AI platforms such as Midjourney, OpenAI, and Google Gemini further embed platform-specific censorship and generalized aesthetic assumptions. These models frequently flatten complex architectural concerns into simplified visual clichés. For example, sustainability or climate-responsive design is commonly depicted as greenery-covered buildings, while socially oriented architecture is represented through equally generic tropes. Such biases risk misguiding early-stage students who have not yet developed the architectural literacy required to evaluate AI-generated work critically.

This project proposes a search-driven framework for integrating generative AI into architectural education, linked to the Carnegie Mellon Architecture Libraries' knowledge infrastructures that relate to architecture. By combining intelligent critic agents, multimodal search, and an image generator, the framework contextualizes AI-generated images within architectural discourse. Funding from this grant will support the development of a pilot prototype and its deployment test in the undergraduate Poiesis studio. The outcomes will provide the foundation for seeking subsequent funding to scale the framework into a comprehensive, school-wide educational platform.

The project supports the Remaking Cities Institute (RCI) Symposium.

Cities today are shaped by the intertwined forces of globalization, profit-driven growth, and fossil capitalism — systems that generate inequity, environmental harm, and escalating climate vulnerabilities. Planetary in scale yet locally felt, these dynamics materialize through extraction, commodification, displacement and ruination. They manifest in vacancy, crumbling infrastructure, housing precarity, and uneven redevelopment — conditions shared across post-industrial and rapidly urbanizing contexts alike. "Making Alive: Cities!" begins from this recognition and asks how architecture and urbanism might shift from mechanistic and extractive paradigms toward decommodified, regenerative, pluriversal, and reworlded urban futures. Here, "alive" signals an ontological reorientation: understanding cities as dynamic, interdependent, and more-than-human ecologies rather than systems to be controlled or optimized. This framing foregrounds relation, reciprocity, care, and reworlding as foundations for imagining otherwise.

Over two and a half days, the symposium convenes scholars, architects, urbanists, policymakers, cultural practitioners, and community leaders in a series of situated conversations. To ground these discussions in lived conditions, sessions will take place at selected Pittsburgh sites whose spatial, political, industrial, or ecological trajectories make the stakes palpable. Locations such as Mill 19 at Hazelwood Green, Community Forge in Wilkinsburg, the Manchester-Chateau highway trench, and a vacant downtown office tower function as provocations — immersive environments for interrogating how hegemonic logics organize urban life and for experimenting with alternative frameworks of commoning, stewardship, circularity, ecological repair, and mutual care.

A keynote dialogue between CM—A’s 2025–26 Watson Chair Arturo Escobar and David Bollier will frame the event within broader transformations in design, commons governance, and systemic change. Building on the fall 2025 RCI Faculty Dialogues, the symposium will serve as a pivotal moment in articulating and publicly announcing the agenda of the RCI. Intended outcomes include a publication through CM—A’s new imprint, the seeding of an emerging research cluster, and the advancement of more equitable and regenerative approaches to shaping cities.

This interdisciplinary and speculative design research project investigates how historical and contemporary weather control technologies are shaped by colonial power structures. Building on earlier work in rural land politics in the Hudson Valley, the project shifts from the cultivation of land to the cultivation of atmosphere, tracing how human attempts to engineer weather emerge from fantasies of domination. Through fieldwork, archival research, and documentation of cloud seeding stations, fog dispersal systems, and climate laboratories, the project uncovers the material and ideological legacies of atmospheric manipulation, from Indigenous rainmaking practices to General Electric's 1946 cloud seeding tests and Project Cirrus.

The project addresses climate change, social justice, and artificial intelligence by revealing how geoengineering often mirrors extractive colonial practices that disproportionately affect Indigenous nations, rural communities, and farmers of color. By examining contemporary bans and resistance movements, the project highlights how communities assert atmospheric sovereignty and challenge unconsented intervention.

At the same time, "Weather Dreams" uses speculative design, mythmaking, and alternative modes of sensing weather as tools for imagining futures beyond technocratic control. Drawing from Indigenous cosmologies, agricultural ceremonies, and embodied atmospheric knowledge, the project proposes that new myths and sensory practices can help reimagine how we cultivate land, agriculture, and desire in an era of climate instability. These speculative narratives refuse the inevitability of geoengineering and instead explore forms of atmospheric relationship grounded in care, reciprocity, and relational environmental ethics.

The resulting work, culminating in a major outdoor installation planned for fall 2026, creates immersive experiences that unsettle dominant climatic narratives and open pathways toward more just, imaginative, and community-centered futures of weather and ecological stewardship.

This project examines how urban design, infrastructure, and community-engaged planning can repair historic disconnections in Pittsburgh neighborhoods and address social justice in the built environment. Focused on East Allegheny and Spring Garden East Deutschtown, the research explores how reconnection strategies such as caps, crossings, and public space redesign can improve community identity, pedestrian access, resilience, and mitigate harms caused by the bounding and severing of these communities by highway infrastructure. 

The work builds on long-standing collaborations with the East Allegheny Community Council (EACC) and the Community Alliance of Spring Garden East Deutschtown (CASGED) through the City of Pittsburgh's Strategic (Community) Planning division. Both organizations are already committed partners.

This research will benefit CMU and the communities by strengthening collaboration among CMU, the City of Pittsburgh, and neighborhood partners. It will support a continued flow of CMU students working with the Department of City Planning (DCP), building on previous successful student internships and allowing current Master of Urban Design (MUD) students to undertake internships with DCP that shift from being unfunded positions to fairly compensated paid research positions. Findings will inform future research at the Remaking Cities Institute (RCI) and contribute new tools and insights on equity-focused urban design. Technical assistance from RCI will enable DCP to develop design options and a vision for the I-279 corridor and surrounding communities, integrate these concepts into the city's ongoing Comprehensive Plan, and pursue future implementation funding through the Reconnecting Communities Initiative of the federal Department of Transportation. Finally, research could generate supporting materials and framing for future required MUD studios.

This project seeks to develop novel computational workflows at the intersection of digital processes, automated fabrication, and augmented reality (AR) through textile crafts. Architecture has a long history of involvement with textiles as design method and theory. With the development of new technologies, materials and methods, textiles can now also be extended into methods for fabrication. This project brings architecture, computer graphics, human-computer interaction, and textile crafts together to develop novel computational workflows for and from textiles to extend human creativity and augment human experience through architecture. We will create computational workflows for employing knitting, weaving, and smocking in the design and fabrication of installations and structures. Steps will include making material samples and prototypes of textile techniques with manual and CNC knitting machines, building digital knitting geometry using a solid knitting design tool, weaving, and sewing smocking techniques with a domestic and industrial embroidery machine. Steps also include embedding hard materials and hardening materials into soft materials for structure. A collaborative robot will aid in the automated application of materials, and AR tools will be employed in fabrication and assembly of installations and structures. Findings from this project will contribute to scholarship in design, architecture and computing.

This seminar confronts the ethical imperatives of architectural practice amid intersecting crises: climate collapse, technological acceleration, and structural injustice. Anchored in Carnegie Mellon’s ethos of critical praxis, it recasts design not as neutral problem-solving, but as a philosophical and political act, a making-with the world that entangles the architect in struggles over power, subjectivity, and the conditions of collective life.

We cultivate an ontology that faces the dark side of the Anthropocene by unsettling inherited narratives of human mastery and domination. Rather than treating the environment as a passive backdrop for human projects, we approach the world as a lively field of forces with its own propensities and agencies. Landscapes, materials, atmospheres, and species are engaged as co-actors in a shared, more-than-human field. Within this frame, design becomes a practice of attunement: learning to sense, negotiate, and collaborate with the trajectories of soils, waters, climates, and other beings.

In parallel, we examine how contemporary technologies, and AI in particular, no longer simply extend human capability but reconfigure the very conditions of agency. Modern technics do more than accelerate workflows; they organize, mediate, and distribute what counts as knowledge, creativity, authorship, and "world." Generative systems blur the boundary between tool and collaborator, raising urgent questions of responsibility and control.

Pedagogically, the course pauses the rush to make in order to ask: Why build at all, and for whom? Through readings, discussions, and speculative design exercises, students develop an inquiry-driven lens and prototype ethical, relational practices that work with, rather than against, the forces that shape our world — bringing more just and livable futures into view.

This hands-on course explores the synergy between ceramic 3D printing and the creation of soft, organic, fluid ceramic forms. Historically, terracotta was praised for its capacity to be molded into any geometry; this course reinvents that potential in a contemporary context centered on expressive form, unique structures, and material-driven experimentation. Students engage directly with clay through both digital and tactile means, utilizing computational design tools — including AI image to model speculations — alongside sustained work with 3D clay printers.

The curriculum emphasizes challenging standardized production norms to design complex geometries. We investigate how soft forms inspired by natural scale structures or patterned aggregations can be realized through manufacturing methods that blend digital precision, such as CNC-milled molds or robotic control, with the hands-on material intuition essential to ceramic craft.

A central component of the course is an exploration of ceramic material logics — the inherent behaviors, constraints, and opportunities embedded in clay as a responsive medium. Students study how clay’s plasticity, shrinkage, structural capacity, drying characteristics, and fluid-to-solid transitions can become generative design drivers rather than limitations. These logics guide decisions about geometry, ornamentation, layering strategies, and printing behavior, encouraging students to design with material tendencies instead of imposing purely digital form. By understanding how clay coils slump, fuse, warp, or self-support under different deposition patterns, students develop a design approach rooted in a dynamic feedback loop between computation, fabrication, and material behavior.

A primary focus is linking these aesthetic soft forms and material logics to performative objectives, transforming ornament into bioclimatic systems responsive to climate change. Students develop prototypes that leverage clay’s intrinsic thermal and hydraulic properties for heat exchange, shading, water channeling, or evaporative cooling.

The course embraces discovery and the productive unpredictability of clay, resulting in innovative architectural assemblies that move terracotta beyond conventional cladding toward a materially resilient future.

This course investigates mobility as a spatial, political, and infrastructural condition by examining how velocity is understood as the capacity, rate, and permission to move, and structures access, autonomy, and power across the built environment. Through a three-phase sequence that moves from embodied performance to digital capture to urban-scale analysis, students develop a layered understanding of how movement is designed, granted, or constrained. The course pairs full-scale experimentation, performance art-based precedents, and unfolded section techniques at contrasting scales with research in accessibility, code, and contemporary mobility studies. This studio operates in parallel with ECE's mobility-focused project lab, enabling students to generate a translatable awareness of movement into interventions that respond to gradients of access and the lived realities of highly diverse users. The semester culminates in designed, critical, projective work representative of how velocity, mobility, and spatial agency may be constructed and taught across disciplinary boundaries.

This new Core 5 Studio (formerly Praxis II Studio) will reinforce the existing B.Arch studio sequence by integrating collective housing as the design project. This new curricular development strategically focuses on utilizing housing not merely as a program, but as a vehicle to productively and organically engage with the existing required course curriculum, thereby reinforcing overlapping learning objectives while introducing new critical knowledge elements and competencies.

The studio will contribute to CM–A's pedagogical mission, particularly in addressing the challenges of social justice. Beyond understanding the multitude of actors and constituents in housing development, students will undertake deep analysis on architectural typology and urban morphology that cultivates collective identity and affinity, supporting cultural and social diversity. This approach enables students to develop a critical position on imminent housing crises, fostering ownership in speculating future housing practices towards building equitable and resilient communities.

Through the support of this grant, the curricular invention and development in 2026 aims to lay a foundation for three consecutive terms (Spring 2027–29) by establishing a robust framework of learning objectives, assignments, readings, workshop activities, and assessment methodologies.

This advanced elective repositions architectural representation as a critical cultural practice at a moment when the field is being reshaped by climate instability, social fragmentation, and the accelerating influence of artificial intelligence. Rather than treating representation as visualization or stylistic output, the course enables students to use drawing, speculative world-building, artefact construction, and counterfactual narrative as methods for thinking, questioning, and imagining otherwise. Through these approaches, students develop representational agency and conceptual clarity while cultivating the ability to articulate architectural ideas grounded in memory, identity, and cultural meaning.

This funding request supports the continued development of the course through three targeted enhancements that directly serve the school's pedagogical challenges:

• Climate Change: addressed through student-selected themes and speculative design prompts responding to planetary rupture, ecological loss, displacement, extinction, and environmental memory.
• Social Justice: centered through counternarratives, belonging, erased communities, and cultural memory, enabling students to articulate spatial agency beyond dominant frameworks.
• Artificial Intelligence: positioned as a critical apparatus of memory, distortion, and imagination, prompting students to question authorship, representation, and technological power.