Caitlin Mueller is an academic who works at the intersection of architecture and structural engineering. She is currently an Associate Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Department of Architecture and Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, in the Building Technology Program, where she leads the Digital Structures research group (digitalstructures.mit.edu). Her research focuses on new computational design and digital fabrication methods for innovative, high-performance architecture in the built environment. Professor Mueller earned a PhD in Building Technology from MIT, a SM in Computation for Design and Optimization from MIT, a MS in Structural Engineering from Stanford University, and a BS in Architecture from MIT, and has practiced at several architecture and engineering firms across the U.S., most recently as a structural designer at Simpson Gumpertz & Heger in Boston. She has recently contributed to the organization of several major conferences in architecture and engineering, including the 2017 Design Modelling Symposium in Paris, the 2017 ACADIA Conference at MIT, and 2018 Symposium of the International Association of Shell and Spatial Structures at MIT, which she chaired. With her team, she regularly publishes and presents her research in peer-reviewed journals, international conferences, and the popular press.
The construction and operation of the built environment contributes significantly to global climate change; around 40% of greenhouse gas emissions come from this sector. In response, it is critical that architects, engineers, and builders rethink design and materialization processes that result in wasteful and inefficient constructions. At the same time, tools and processes used for automated design and optimization in other industries are challenging to apply to the design of buildings, because so many of the criteria for success in this area are qualitative and intrinsically human. In many cases, the shapes and geometries of building designs are critical to both performance- and human-driven design criteria i.e. how a design functions and how it looks. In this talk, Professor Mueller will share recent research that aims to bridge this divide, between performance-driven optimization methods and human design intuition and ingenuity, utilizing recent advances in computation, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. She will also discuss new opportunities for the construction of efficient buildings, empowered by digital fabrication technologies.
