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21 projects

The Thoughts

  1. behavior information modelingJAN 2026For thirty years we've been getting very good at Building Information Modeling: every beam, every duct, every clash, tracked to the millimeter.
  2. neuroaestheticsDEC 2025Neuroaesthetics is the unglamorous name for a question everyone already feels: why does one room settle you and another keep you on edge?
  3. physics solversAPR 2026A physics solver is the most honest collaborator I have: it doesn't care what I intended, only what I actually built.
  4. generative aiJUN 2024Generative AI made the inspired gesture free. Anyone can produce a thousand renders before lunch, and a render is a promise, not a product.
  5. extended realitySEP 2022I started in a lab strapping headsets onto students to see whether a lesson lands harder when you can walk around inside it.
  6. comfort as dataMAY 2026You don't walk into a room and average your experience. You walk in and the thing that's wrong is the thing you notice: the glare, the echo, the cold draft on the back of your neck.
  7. drawing as interfaceMAR 2026For most of my life the drawing was the output. You designed the thing, then you drew it to prove it existed.
  8. evolutionary searchNOV 2025Evolutionary search is what I reach for when a problem is too tangled to solve head on: describe what good looks like, then let a population of designs breed, mutate, and compete until something clever falls out.
  9. heritage meets new techAPR 2026The usual choice with an old building is a trap: treat it as a museum piece no one may touch, or drop a glass-and-steel box in the middle and call it modern.
  10. buildings that respondJUN 2026Right now a building is a fixed guess. Someone chose the ceiling height and the window size years before you arrived, and you live inside their averaged assumptions whether they fit you or not.
  11. connecting the dotsJUN 2020When the art class was asked who here dislikes drawing, mine was the only hand that went up. Awkward.
  12. pelagñouJUN 2026Some projects hand you a tool; Pelagñou handed me a library card.
  13. explaining thingsJUL 2026How do you explain a complex, honestly boring technical subject so someone leans in instead of glazing over?
  14. adjacency is not accessJUN 2026A floor plan tells you which rooms touch. It will not tell you which rooms you can actually reach, and the gap between those two drawings is where the architecture is hiding.

Cappelletti Pavilion

EXPLORATIONS

Can a pasta shape hold up a pavilion?

A pasta shape is quietly structural: evolutionary optimization scaled a cappelletti shell to a 160 kg pavilion.

MACAD STRUCTURAL OPTIMIZATION · WITH AHMAD BALTAJI

GRASSHOPPER · GALAPAGOS · CRYSTALLON · ALPACA4D

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WHAT

Look closely at a piece of pasta: the curves, ridges, and hollows are structural engineering in miniature. We scaled up dinner: the equations describing a cappelletti became a pavilion shell at human scale, in glass-reinforced recycled PET. A duo with Ahmad Baltaji, shared end to end.

WHY

If a simple pasta shape holds the code for a stable structure, what other everyday objects are hiding blueprints? The pavilion is the serious answer to a playful question.

HOW

  1. Describe the cappelletti mathematically in Grasshopper, as equations rather than a mesh.
  2. Let Galapagos run evolutionary optimization against finite element analysis in Alpaca4D: minimize material, keep the shell standing.
  3. Lattice the surviving shell with Crystallon and detail it for fabrication.

WHAT CAME OF IT

The optimization refused to pick one winner: it produced two distinct lattice topologies that both hold, at roughly 160 kg of material. Evolution, given a fair fitness function, is happy to disagree with itself.