ABOUT

Aileen Iverson-Radtke is an independent researcher and licensed architect base in Berlin, Germany, she is fluent in English and German. Aileen earned her Master’s in Architecture at the University of Florida and obtained her Doctor of Engineering at the Technical University of Berlin. Her PhD dissertation initiates a new taxonomy in digital design, cybermodeling a.k.a. hybrid analogue-digital modeling, a method for establishing an animated digital architectural model directly connected to real-time site conditions. Her research founded the concept of spatiomateriality, recognizing space and material not as separate but as combined spatial-material media, connected by the internal properties of each. This perception is influenced by New Materiality, describing

…an active matter endowed with its own tendencies and capacities, engaged in its own divergent, open-ended evolution, animated from within by immanent patters of being and becoming. (Delanda 2015, 16)

Aileen was trained in internationally renowned offices in NYC and Germany and received her professional license from New York State. Her career began as an internship with: Zaha Hadid, Tado Ando, Frank Gehry, and Alvaro Siza, architects of the Vitra Campus, Weil am Rhein. In 2020, Aileen founded ai-r_architecture, a theory-based practice pursuing making as a unique form of theorizing through objects, i.e., making-as-analysis. She views architectural practice as spatial exploration through form-making.

Aileen cultivates her practice as a combined professional and academic enterprise. She has held the position of Adjunct Professor at NYIT and AiNYC, teaching undergraduate architectural design studios and drawing courses. Aileen hosts design workshops and participates as guest critic at local universities. As critic she advises in undergraduate and master's degree programs, and regularly supervises PhD research at CA2RE conferences.

Following the completion of her doctoral dissertation, Aileen has focused on developing her research in cybermodeling—connecting computational and analogue ‘matter’ in architecture modeling. In this role, she has been invited to conduct workshops at both MIT and ACADIA 2023.

Cybermodeling, a technique designed to combat the neutrality of digital modeling, is directed at strengthening the design process as critical analytic method conducted through making, by activating digital matter and giving it agency to effect outcome. Dr. Iverson has been joined in these workshops by Dr. Augusto Gandia, an architect and researcher with interests in design computation of fabrication-aware structures and Dr. Andrew Payne an architect and software developer at Robert McNeel & Associates and co-author of Firefly plugin for Rhino, used in cybermodeling. Their research has been published in articles in eCAADe RIS, Dimensions Journal, and ACADIA 2023 Proceedings Vol. 3 and exhibited in the ACADIA and CAADRIA Joint Exhibition 2023. Aileen continues to lecture, publish, and conduct workshops promoting and developing cybermodeling as a new dimension in computational design engaging ‘live’ digital models. Her research in cybermodeling embodies the intent in Sanford Kwinter’s call for architects of the digital era

to make the electronic world work for us to reimpart the rich indeterminacy and magic of matter out of arid, cruel, and numericlized world of the reductionist mechanical and the disciplinary electronic... (Kwinter 2003, 91)

 

Delanda, M. 2015. The New Materiality. Architectural Design 85: 16-21.

Kwinter, S. 2003. The computational fallacy. Thresholds, 26 (Spring), 90-92.