PJ Dick Innovation Fund

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

This project seeks to develop novel computational workflows at the intersection of digital processes, automated fabrication, and augmented reality (AR) through textile crafts.

This seminar confronts the ethical imperatives of architectural practice amid intersecting crises: climate collapse, technological acceleration, and structural injustice.

This hands-on course explores the synergy between ceramic 3D printing and the creation of soft, organic, fluid ceramic forms.

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.

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 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.

This project addresses the challenge of transitioning stormwater infrastructure to a more resilient and socially integrated urban system.

South Asian Urban Climates (SAUC) is a scholarly community and research platform dedicated to critical understandings of the structural, experiential and more-than-human dimensions of changing climates across South Asian cities.

The MycoRubble project explores adaptive reuse in architecture through growth processes and the bioremediation of construction waste, utilizing mycelium-inoculated substrates to create mycelium-based composites (MBCs) with higher compressive strength that embrace the aesthetics of bio-spolia.

The Indigenous knowledge of Chiang Mai, Thailand, is made of rhythms of human rituals — planting, harvesting and practices that have centered matrilocal beliefs for centuries with the intimate association of climatic, topographic and fluid knowledge of land as they meandered the alluvial plain nestled between two mountains.

This project conducts inquiry into acts of building, their builders, and built-things to repair — restore, remediate and reconfigure — cultures of making and computation.

This grant will support the ongoing development of a book manuscript by funding essential research trips for the fieldwork and archival investigations which are critical to two chapters. The manuscript explores the emerging concept of Commons-Public Partnerships (CPPs) as a transformational alternative to Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs), which typically privatize profit while socializing risk. Distilled from an archive of over 70 case studies, the selected initiatives offer insights from the struggles and successes of tackling the wicked problem of housing affordability.

This innovative project emerges as a beacon of hope in the face of the climate crisis, repurposing bamboo from the previous NOMAS Spring Carnival Pavilion. It seeks to present a compelling case for low-carbon practices through a full-scale intervention within an underserved neighborhood, thus supporting the community while fostering sustainable development.

Bamboo, a material endowed with vast, yet largely untapped, potential — especially within the domain of architecture — serves as a testament to nature’s ingenuity. Despite its remarkable attributes, bamboo remains an underutilized resource in architectural practice, often relegated to peripheral applications such as scaffolding, and occasionally used in a more substantive capacity. As a rapidly growing, low-cost, carbon-sequestering natural resource, it offers tremendous promise that has yet to be fully realized. It is time to reassess our approach and unlock the full potential of this multifaceted material in the 21st century.

This Options Studio course aims to build a body of knowledge surrounding the widely unexplored hybrid-typology of office-to-residential conversion. The studio treats the conversion of Pittsburgh's vacated office buildings as a design research project, the outcome of which will directly contribute to the emerging dialogue surrounding this new building type.

The funding for this elective course will provide support for research exploring the transformative potential of extended reality (XR) technology in revolutionizing the interactive design and teaching process of three-dimensional (3D) architectural structures. The project aims to bridge the gap between traditional digital design methodologies that are constrained to two-dimensional (2D) interfaces and the fully immersive spatial capabilities offered by XR.

This elective course tackles climate change by examining extractive material systems and exploring innovative construction methods and tectonics grounded in ethical and ecological principles.

This proposal seeks support for the construction and testing of a series of full-scale hempcrete architectural assemblies.

In collaboration with Chiang Mai University, the proposal expands a relationship between designers, students and local villagers to focus on the current urbanization of a municipality of agricultural villages in San Pu Loei.

This proposal is for a book that offers readings in Design Ethics on questions of broad contemporary import: that of participatory publics in an era of neoliberal development and hardline politics, of design and its spatial agency, of the legacies and futures of modernism in the global south, and of the care and repair of buildings and cities in an age of climate crises.

This project is an ethnographic study, computational investigation and design exploration of craft practices in three different locations: willow, wire and textile weaving in Pittsburgh; the Gullah tradition of sweetgrass basket weaving in South Carolina; and joinery, umbrella-making and weaving in Thailand.

This project aims to address these disparities by developing a user-centric smart lighting system that collaborates with the architectural façade to enhance mood and perception while ensuring equitable access to quality lighting in everyday spaces.

This year-long studio project utilizes bamboo that has been repurposed from the previous NOMAS Spring Carnival Pavilion installed on campus. The project aims to set a cogent case of low-carbon practices through a full-scale intervention in the neighborhood, thereby supporting an underserved community.

This project emerges from the teaching and research work of the project lead over the last two years. This application is for the dissemination/sharing of stories globally as a storybook of methodologies, and locally as a series of stories shared as an exhibit.

The aim of this book and website is to provide academics and practitioners with strategies that can be used in combination throughout the building project lifecycle to help designers align their work with the appropriate forces of change.

We see this proposal as a seed grant to identify three pathways of tectonic/geometric strategies that can be further elaborated at full scale with future funding and industry partnerships. Emerging technologies, such as AI-driven generative design and optimization, AR enhanced construction, and other computational processes will be essential to developing the work.

This proposal seeks to establish the “Regenerative Structures Laboratory” at Carnegie Mellon Architecture.

Jongwan Kwon, Assistant Teaching Professor

IMAGE DEEP studio explores expanding AI’s role in the design process beyond mere visual inspiration. By connecting AI with material research, the studio uses analog material models to guide AI workflows and explore alternative pathways beyond the predefined aesthetics of text-to-image models

Francesca Torello, Special Faculty

Jared Abraham, Associate Studio Professor

Tuliza Sindi, Ann Kalla Visiting Professor in Architecture