PJ Dick Innovation Fund

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.

This project explores adaptive reuse in architecture through growth processes and the bioremediation of construction waste utilizing mycelium-inoculated invasive species to create Mycelium-Based Composites (MBCs).

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.

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.

The support 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.

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

Dana Cupkova, Associate Professor

Francesca Torello, Special Faculty

Jared Abraham, Associate Studio Professor

Tuliza Sindi, Ann Kalla Visiting Professor in Architecture