‘Robot in the loop:’ Re-thinking Agency and the Social in Robotically Supported Design and Construction

Daniel is the author of the book Builders of the Vision: Software and the Imagination of Design, a history of computer-aided design (CAD) that identifies and documents technological theories of design emerging from postwar government-funded research projects at MIT, and reflects critically on their architectural repercussions. His new book, Designing the Computational Image, Imagining Computational Design, co-edited with Theodora Vardouli, draws from historical and contemporary materials to visually trace the emergence of computational design ideas and practices across a broader landscape of institutions in the US, the UK, and Canada.

Daniel Cardoso Llach is Associate Professor of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University, where he chairs the graduate program in Computational Design and directs CodeLab. He received a PhD and a MS in Architecture: Design and Computation from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a professional B. Arch from Universidad de los Andes. In 2016 he was a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge’s Martin Centre in the UK, and a research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study of Media Cultures of Computer Simulation in Leuphana, Germany. He has held faculty appointments at Penn State and Universidad de los Andes, consulted as a computational design specialist for Gehry Technologies and Kohn Pedersen Fox, among others, and practiced as a licensed architect and media designer in his native Bogotá.
Currently, he is recipient of the prestigious Humboldt Fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung/Foundation in Berlin. Extending his previous work documenting the postwar nexus of design and computing in North-America and Britain, Daniel Cardoso Llach’s current project Provincializing the digital: Computational Design in Germany after 1950 will examine how German researchers, government, and corporate actors conceptualized and gave meaning to computational ideas and methods in Germany’s design and architectural contexts during this period.