Professor and Director, Media x Design Lab, EPFL Switzerland
With artificial intelligence, architectural agency shifts, no longer confined to buildings but unfolding within broader fields of interaction and evolving environments. This shift is not merely technical; it reconfigures the conditions under which architecture operates, entangling design with new regimes of knowledge and power. In this light, humanistic computation becomes a horizon through which questions of authorship, responsibility, and judgment are reopened. Drawing on projects that span planetary networks, hybrid environments, and artificial processes of design, this keynote traces the emergence of agentic and transscalar architectures, where human intuition is confronted with increasingly autonomous forms of machine intelligence.
Jeffrey Huang is Director of the Media x Design Laboratory and Full Professor of Architecture and Computer Science at EPFL in Switzerland, with joint appointments at the Faculties of Computer and Communication Sciences (IC) and Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering (ENAC). He holds a Diploma from ETH Zurich and Master’s and Doctoral degrees from Harvard University, where he was awarded the Gerald McCue Medal for academic excellence.
He began his academic career at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and subsequently taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design before joining EPFL in 2006, where he founded the Media x Design Laboratory. He has held visiting appointments at Tsinghua University and Stanford University’s d.school, and was a Berkman Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. From 2014 to 2017, he served as Founding Dean of the Architecture and Sustainable Design pillar at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), established in collaboration with MIT.
His work examines the convergence of architecture, artificial intelligence, and urban systems, advancing new forms of design intelligence at the intersection of physical and digital environments. He leads the Innosuisse Flagship project Blue City, which explores the use of artificial intelligence to model and engage urban flows across multiple scales. His research has been widely published and recognized with international awards, including the ACSA Best Article Award, and has been exhibited at major venues such as the Venice Architecture Biennale. He is co-inventor of several patents and co-founder of Convergeo, an internationally awarded strategic and experience design practice.
Chief Advisor of Architecture and Art, China Medical University and Hospitals
This talk outlines NCTU’s early involvement in CAADRIA and its three research areas: CAD/CAM fabrication, virtual space, and human-computer design thinking. Bridging the gap between academia and practice, several building projects and exhibitions have been executed. To further promote digital trends in architecture, Peter Eisenman, Zaha Hadid, and Frank Gehry were invited to design three museums.
Yu-Tung Liu received Doctor of Design from Harvard in association with MIT. He was the founding professor of Graduate Institute of Architecture at NCTU and the Vice President of Asia University. He is the Chief Advisor of architecture and art of China Medical University and Hospitals. Visiting positions and guest lectures include Harvard, Cambridge, Princeton, Yale, Berkeley, Roma La Sapienza, Oslo, Chile, Technion and Beijing. He was the 1997 Conference Chair and the 2022 President of CAADRIA. He has published eight English books with Birkhäuser and numerous articles in ISI-indexed journals. He was the recipient of the first Ivan Petrovic Prize awarded by eCAADe. His design works have been showcased in international exhibitions including the Venice Biennale, as well as in Japan, France, Chile, Florence, Barcelona, Hong Kong, and China. His solo exhibition, Architecture of Tomorrow, was selected as one of the “Top-Ten Public Exhibitions in Taiwan” in 2007.He has invited Peter Eisenman, Tadao Ando, Toyo Ito, Zaha Hadid, and Frank Gehry to design landmark building projects in Taiwan. He served as the commissioner of the Next-Gene project, which brought together 10 international and 10 Taiwanese architects. The Next-Gene project was featured as a special issue of A+U magazine in 2008 and was invited to participate in the 11th Venice Biennale. He was selected to join the New Trends of Architecture in Europe and Asia-Pacific 2008–2010 exhibition series.
Principal Architect, Bio-architecture Formosana (BaF)
Nature never intends to be creative, while its mere creativity never stops engaging our admiration. Not only does it create millions of life forms that exude absolute beauty and delicacy, but all its creations fit into a ceaselessly elaborate network that begs the question of how such engineering could even exist.The “mind” behind all this we call: Biological intelligence. There is a great similarity between architecture and life form. They are both made of skin, supporting structures and life-sustaining organs. They are both interconnected and driven by intrinsic energies as well as external pressures. Life itself is originated from single cell organism that eventually evolved into tens of millions of species through genetic mutations (intrinsic energies) and nature’s selections (exterior pressures). Architecture began with the fundamental principal of providing shelter with primitive materials and evolved, through main selection, into metropolises with varieties of functions that can accommodate tens of millions of people. It is the response to the needs of an ever-evolving human civilization that fuels the evolution of architecture. For BAF, we seek to explore the underlying mysteries of this billion-year-old intelligence and learn to create architecture that parallels how nature creates itself.
Ying-Chao Kuo is Principal Architect of Bio-architecture Formosana (BaF), a Taipei-based firm recognized as one of Taiwan’s leading architectural practices. BaF’s portfolio spans cultural, educational, transportation, hospitality, workplace, and housing projects across both public and private sectors. His notable work, the Bei-Tou Library (2006), is Taiwan’s first certified green building and has become one of the most widely published examples of sustainable architecture in the country; it was also selected by Flavorwire as one of the world’s 25 most beautiful libraries. Kuo’s work focuses on sustainability and circular design, integrating a biological-intelligence (BI) design approach that informs the firm’s philosophy. He has received numerous awards for his contributions to sustainable architecture, including the Outstanding Architect Award of Taiwan in 2011. In addition to practice, he has contributed to architectural education as an associate professor at several universities.
Kavita and Krishna Bharat Professor of Design and AI, Washington University in St Louis
We humans are defined by the overlapping relationships to the natural world from which we grew and the technological world we are creating. Our uneasy and evolving position at the boundary between these two worlds will shape much of what it means to be human in the decades ahead. As AI and systems approaches expand the imaginative, sensorial, and disciplinary scope of design, computational designers can embrace the challenges of shaping not only tools but techno-natural interfaces. Through a series of projects that explore themes of planetary imagination, radical reuse, generative reassembly, synthetic natures, and machine imagination, we can glimpse the special role that computational design can play in charting our uniquely human place at the nexus between natural and technological worlds.
Andrew Witt is a designer who creates across digital and physical realities. Trained in both architecture and mathematics, he has a particular interest in a technically synthetic and logically rigorous approach to form. He is the inaugural Kavita and Krishna Bharat Professor of Design and AI at Washington University in St Louis, where he teaches and researches on the relationship of computation, AI, and machines to architecture, design, and culture. He is co-founder, with Tobias Nolte, of Certain Measures, a studio that combines design and data for systemic and scalable approaches to spatial problems. The work of Certain Measures is in the permanent collection of the Centre Pompidou, and has been exhibited at the Pompidou, the Barbican Centre, the Venice Biennale, the Museum of the Future, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture, among others. Witt has a deep interest in the critical and historical interactions between design and the sciences, and he is the author of Formulations: Architecture, Mathematics, Culture (MIT Press) and the forthcoming The Technological Home. He was previously Associate Professor in Practice of Architecture at Harvard GSD, where he was co-director of Harvard’s Masters in Design Engineering program, focused on transdisciplinary and trans-scalar systems design.