The 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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Janet Echelman is an artist known for sculpting at the scale of buildings and city blocks, creating large-scale, fluid installations that merge art, architecture, and engineering. Her work transforms with wind and light, inviting viewers into immersive experiences rather than static observation. Echelman uses unconventional materials—from atomized water particles to fiber stronger than steel—blending traditional craft with advanced computational design. Her monumental works anchor public spaces across five continents, in cities including New York, London, Sydney, Shanghai, and Singapore. Permanent installations in locations such as San Francisco, Vancouver, and Porto continually evolve with shifting light and air. Echelman’s unconventional path includes a degree from Harvard, five years living in a Balinese village, and graduate studies in both painting and psychology. Oprah ranked Echelman’s work #1 on her List of 50 Things That Make You Say Wow!, and she received the Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award in Visual Arts, honoring “the greatest innovators in America today.” Recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, she has taught at MIT, Harvard, and Princeton. Her interdisciplinary approach challenges artistic boundaries and redefines urban space through experiential public art.
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StructureCraft
Design + Build, Reconnected
Design and construction have bifurcated. What might buildings look like if we returned to shaping natural materials in their rawest form? Designers and builders, reunited in the pursuit of efficiency and beauty amid an increasingly code-constrained, risk-averse era.
Lucas Epp is a structural engineer whose work sits at the intersection of architecture, engineering, and craft. His work advances timber and natural materials as primary, high-performance structural systems - from mass timber to long-span, free-form geometries. He has pioneered modern all-wood structural systems and joinery techniques at the new National Performing Arts Centre in Barbados and the School of Architecture and Design at the University of Kansas, blending ancient craft with state-of-the-art computational design and robotics – and pointing toward new possibilities for timber architecture.
In 2021 he founded Branch, an in-house software venture creating the next generation of digital tools for structural design-to-manufacture, informed by direct feedback from engineers, fabricators, and field crews.
Epp has practiced across the UK, New Zealand, China, the United States, and Canada. He has taught at ETH Zurich, the Architectural Association, and MIT; serves on Canadian and American timber code committees; and has authored multiple industry guidelines. His practice points toward a near future in which structural engineering, fabrication, and software merge - a return to the master builder mindset.
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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.