The Confluence Park Pavilion is part of the park located at the confluence of the San Antonio River and San Pedro Creek. The park is a living laboratory that allows visitors to gain a greater understanding of the ecotypes of the South Texas region and the function of the San Antonio River watershed. Photo by Casey Dunn.
Andrew Kudless is founder of Matsys, an interdisciplinary design practice, in Houston, Texas. He is the Bill D. Kendall Professor at the University of Houston’s Hines College of Architecture and Design, as well as the Director of the Construction Robotics and Fabrication Technologies Lab (CRAFT Lab).
Kudless will present a lecture at 4 p.m. Monday, Feb. 5, in Ken and Linda Sue Shollmier Hall, Room 250 of Vol Walker Hall, on the U of A campus, as part of the spring lecture series in the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design.
In his lecture, “Architecture in the Age of Automation,” Kudless will discuss various design technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), robotics and computational design and their use within architectural education, research and practice. He will share examples focused on Matsys’ work with generative AI tools, computational drawings and the Confluence Park Pavilion in San Antonio, Texas.
Matsys is an award-winning design studio exploring and expanding the agency of material systems to produce emergent and integral relationships between form, fabrication and performance. The studio works at all scales and pursues a trans-disciplinary practice that blends art, design, architecture and engineering.
Craftsmanship is the core of the studio’s research and practice and informs both their approach to making custom computational tools as well as exploring new materials and fabrication techniques. This interest in craft, combined with a fascination with the emergence of structure, form and intelligence in the natural world, drives the studio to create objects, spaces and landscapes that are complex and engaging.
The studio is the recipient of several awards, including the 2019 AIA Honor Award for Architecture for Confluence Park, a collaboration with Lake|Flato Architects. The work of Matsys has been exhibited internationally and is in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, France, and the Frac Centre-Val de Loire in Orléans, France.
Kudless holds a Master of Arts in Emergent Technologies and Design from the Architectural Association and a Master of Architecture from Tulane University.
This is the John G. Williams Distinguished Visitor in Architecture lecture.
The school is pursuing continuing education credits for this lecture through the American Institute of Architects.
This lecture is free and open to the public. Seating is limited.
