Paul D. Bartlett, Sr. Lecture Series

22nd Annual Paul D. Bartlett, Sr. Lecture | September 26, 2024

The world's urban population is estimated to reach 2.6 billion people by 2050. To accommodate this population increase, an additional 65,000 square meters of floor space needs to be constructed per hour for the next three decades. Yet, the productivity of the construction industry has stagnated or fallen for decades in many advanced economies. Construction activity also generates an enormous amount of waste. This excessive waste and the lack of construction productivity, coupled with the high projected societal demand for new floor space, suggests that we need new approaches to design, fabricate and construct building forms.

In this lecture, Professor Adriaenssens explores the most inventive analog, digital, and AI methodologies, and craft-based, robotic, and Augmented Reality construction techniques, demonstrating their use in the realization of sustainable building forms.

The Speaker

Sigrid Adriaenssens is Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Princeton University. Professor Adriaenssens research interests like in the mechanics of large-span structural surfaces under extreme loading and more recently under construction. She has been working on a comprehensive framework with advanced analytical formulations, numerical form finding and optimization approaches, fluid/structure interaction, and machine learning models and algorithms to open new avenues for accelerated discoveries and automated optimal designs. In terms of applications, she has used this framework to successfully innovate structural and architectural systems ranging from macroscale adaptive shading shell devices to large-scale storm surge membrane barriers.

She is the co-editor of the International Journal of Space Structures and directs the Form Finding Lab at Princeton University, where she teaches courses on (non-)linear mechanics of solids and slender structures, structural design, and the integration of engineering and the arts.