The Keynote Speakers
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Höweler + Yoon Architecture, Cornell University
J. Meejin Yoon is an architect, designer, and educator. She is currently the Dean of Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning and former Head of the Department of Architecture at MIT. Yoon is the co-founding principal of Höweler + Yoon Architecture, a multidisciplinary studio whose projects include the Karsh Institute of Democracy and the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at UVA; the collier Memorial and MIT Museum; and the Yale Living Village, a regenerative living and learning community.
Yoon’s research investigates the intersections between architecture, technology, and public space. She is co-author of the recent title Verify in Field: Projects and Conversations, Höweler + Yoon (Park Books, 2021). Her work has been exhibited widely in venues including the MoMA, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Vitra Design Museum, the National Art Center in Japan, and the Venice Biennale, among others. Recent honors include the World Cultural Council Leonardo da Vinci World Award of Arts (2022); the ACADIA Design Excellence Award (2022), and election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in the Field of Architecture (2021).
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Technical University of Vienna
Helmut Pottmann is a professor of applied geometry at TU Vienna. He has had faculty positions in the US and in Germany and at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, where he has been founding director of the Visual Computing Center. His research interests are in applied geometry, classical geometry and discrete differential geometry with a focus on applications in architecture, computational design and fabrication. His work in architectural geometry has also found its way into real projects such as the Eiffel Tower Pavilions and the Museum of Islamic Art in the Louvre in Paris, or the Yas Island Marina Hotel in Abu Dhabi.
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Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology
Professor Yi Min ‘Mike’ Xie is currently Dean of College of Future Technologies at Hohai University in China. Previously, he was an Australian Laureate Fellow (2020–2024) and a Distinguished Professor (2016–2024) at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in Australia. He established the Centre for Innovative Structures and Materials.
He played a key role in developing the evolutionary structural optimization (ESO) and bi-directional evolutionary structural optimization (BESO) methods, which have been used by thousands of engineers and architects around the globe to design innovative and efficient structures, including several landmark buildings.
Professor Xie is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering. He is one of the most highly cited researchers in his field, with over 41,000 citations in Google Scholar. He has collaborated with a wide range of companies, including Arup and Boeing. Recently, he published his third book titled Generalized Topology Optimization for Structural Design, which is freely accessible.
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StructureCraft
Lucas Epp is the Vice President and Head of Engineering at Structurecraft. He is a structural engineer with more than 19 years of experience working in Canada, the UK, and New Zealand.
His expertise with complex geometry and challenging structures has led to involvement in projects where the close interaction of architecture and structure is critical to the success of the project. Lucas has been an invited speaker and guest lecturer at ETH Zurich, the Architectural Association in London, and MIT, among others.
Lucas has had a lifelong exposure to timber, working at StructureCraft from a young age on the shop floor. He has since been involved in many of the company's signature projects, including the sweeping 200m (650 ft) long Arena Stage Theatre facade in Washington, DC and an 80m (265 ft) clear span footbridge in Banff, and now leads the engineering department at StructureCraft.
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Technical University of Munich
Kathrin Dörfler is Associate Professor of Digital Fabrication at the Department of Architecture within the School of Engineering and Design at the Technical University of Munich, Germany. She holds a Master of Architecture from the University of Technology Vienna, Austria, and a Ph.D. from the ETH Zurich in Switzerland. With her research group, she focuses on fabrication-aware design, collaborative human-robot processes, and on-site construction robotics. Their work emphasizes bridging digital planning environments and physical construction, aiming to enable more sustainable building practices. Kathrin Dörfler is also Co-Spokesperson of the DFG-funded Collaborative Research Centre TRR 277 Additive Manufacturing in Construction (AMC), a program dedicated to advancing robotic and additive manufacturing in architecture and construction.