SUTD’s award-winning Advanced Architecture Laboratory (AAL), led by Professor Thomas Schroepfer and a core team of research scientists including Alex Cornelius, Yu Nong Khew, Aloysius Lian and Thomas Wortmann, investigates the increasingly complex relationship between design and technology in architecture. Its reseach and design projects relate to advances in building structure and form, environmental strategies, performance and energy, computer simulation and modeling, digital fabrication, and building processes. AAL’s work has been published and exhibited widely, including most recently at the Venice Biennale 2014.
Architectural Intelligence Research Lab focuses on research projects spanning from Geometric Exploration for Sustainable Space Making (GESSM), 3D Printing technologies applied to actual building components, Artificial Intelligence in Design Thinking, repurposing materials to develop Affordable Housing prototypes, and modes of design production in which material constraints creatively inform designs through digital technologies.
The Architectural Conservation Lab (ACL) focuses on cross-disciplinary collaboration related to the conservation of significant buildings, monuments and sites in the domain of design and aesthetics, cultural materials, and technology.
Artificial Architecture
Artificial Architecture is where research in artificial intelligence (AI) meets design in architecture. It is an interdisciplinary research group that examines the conceptual and technological shifts in design thinking and practices, as induced by state-of-the-art development in both fields of inquiry. The group speculates and reimagines new paradigms of artificial design computation and new modes of augmented human-machine interaction for the built environment. Current research focuses on architecting and applying machine learning and deep learning models for predictive urbanism and generative architecture, alongside collaboration with industry, academia and government. Artificial Architecture is led by Immanuel Koh.
Digital Design and Fabrication Lab focuses on rethinking the way we design and build architecture using information technologies. The research targets both the creative phases of concept and schematic design, exploring an architecture that could not have been imagined without digital media, as well as the later phases of design-development and construction, investigating methods for efficiently implementing contemporary architecture that could not have been constructed without the integration of the arts and sciences via digital computation.
Dynamic Assemblies Lab (DAL) is co-led by Kenneth Tracy and Christine Yogiaman. DAL focuses on investigations at the intersection of form, fabrication and the environment.
formAxioms is a research framework and a teaching cluster directed by Eva Castro and Federico Ruberto. Its agency is promoted by a research based on speculative narratives that engages de-sign focusing on two scales: territorial and architectural assemblages. At both the laboratory research is computationally driven and it integrates VR/AR in its pipeline: at territorial scales as means to edit-alter-display structural information and to create participatory practices, at architectural scales as means to problematize narrative-sequences-experiences by questioning/hybridizing the space-time of the subject by way of challenging its frame, by altering the dyad “digital/physical”. The studio’s interest in the redeveloping of the relation real/ideal, post post-modern thought, is carried forward through first a critical engagement with fiction and by adhering to an ontology of modelling: two pathways for creating syntaxes that allow for both, the constitution of (a shared) structure and the divergence from it.
The Metadesign Lab is a group of researchers headed by Sam Conrad Joyce which focuses on the research and application of process centred design tools. With experience in data-analytics, generative human-machine interaction, and design- based web platforms to enable design activities which are performance lead and computationally supported. Areas of active application are master planning, airport-terminal design and large span structures. Current projects target the integration of 3D spatial data with big-data collection from clients and public to enable A.I. supported design decisions on commercial and residential design, with collaborations in place with government, architectural, and engineering firms.
Social Urban Research Groupe (SURGe) is a research group based in Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), focusing on investigating the relationships between people and the built environment. Our research interests include demographic shift, participatory design, place-making, social infrastructure, neighborhood regeneration, smart growth, and other emerging urban community issues particularly in the Asian context. Through extensive fieldworks, local histories, action-based research and various digital platforms, we aim to uncover the on-going environmental behaviors and social movements, in order to develop an adaptive urban design framework that links urban spaces to the creative users, working towards the larger vision of social and cultural sustainability.