Marirena Kladeftira: A Post-Digital Perspective for Architecture and Humanity
Prōtóplasto, designed and built for the Futurama Hub in Switzerland in 2023-24. Prōtóplasto is a media installation that explores different ways in which plastics can be morphed and utilized for ultralightweight and fully recyclable architecture. The structure is composed of a self-interlocking modular roof system supported by hollow extruded beams manufactured with a novel 3D printing technology. image / Marirena Kladeftira
Design Tech Public Lecture Series
Abstract
This talk explores how emerging fabrication technologies can contribute to eco-social sustainability in architecture by enabling lightweight and circular building systems that respect local contexts, craftsmanship, and resource availability. It challenges the conventional notions of automation in construction, advocating for a balancing act between material ecologies, the future of work in design and making, and the democratization of technological means.
Despite the pressing need for technological innovation in AEC, automation in construction has fallen short of its transformative potential as models of single-task automation differ fundamentally from the inherently variable, context-dependent, and craft-rooted making practices that drove sustainable practices for millennia prior to industrialization. Fueled by advances in material science, manufacturing, robotics, feminism, and organizational psychology, this presentation will demonstrate research avenues and applications for novel manufacturing methods, modular, reversible, and circular systems, as well as interfaces and workflows for human-machine collaboration.
Bio
Marirena Kladeftira is an Inaugural Innovation Fellow at the Department of Design Tech, AAP, at Cornell University. By bridging design, fabrication, and human craft through technology, her work aims to create adaptive, eco-socially sustainable systems and ways of making. Through multi-disciplinary collaborations, she has contributed to advancements in digital manufacturing, material processing methods, new modular systems, as well as innovative models of cooperation with construction robots. Her work has earned recognition through awards, invited talks, and exhibitions at prestigious venues, including the Venice Biennale, ZAZ Bellerive Museum, Kunsthalle Zurich, and the Swiss Sustainability Forum. Marirena holds a doctorate from ETH Zurich as a fellow of the NCCR Digital Fabrication. Before joining Cornell, she was a postdoctoral researcher at EPFL, focusing on human-robot collaboration for reuse and leading a research team at the Lab for Creative Computation.
