Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowships 2008
Assistant Professor
Art
Santa Fe University of Art and Design
Emergent Genetic Architecture: How Recent Scientific Theories Are Shaping Contemporary Architecture

This interdisciplinary research investigates the ways in which contemporary architectural theory and practice derive from recent scientific theories of emergence, self-organization, complexity, evolution and genetics. Leading architects now design using software that integrates genetic algorithms into the core of their process. Their aim is to incorporate into architecture the sustainable features of self-organizing natural systems, using processes that ultimately may be compatible with genetic engineering. This project situates this movement within architectural history through comparison and contrast with theories of eugenic design within modernism. It thereby raises new questions about the social, cultural, and ethical implications of today’s emergent genetic architecture.

Luce/ACLS Dissertation Fellowships in American Art 1999
Doctoral Candidate
Department of Art and Art History
University of Texas at Austin
Reconsidering the streamlined style: evolutionary thought and U.S industrial design, 1925-1940