Faculty Directory

Wes Mcgee is the Director of the FABLab at the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning and a principal at Matter Design Studio, which he founded with Brandon Clifford in 2008. He also holds a lecturer position in the College where he teaches courses in robotic fabrication, and conducts research on advanced fabrication methodologies. The primary focus of the FABLab is to develop innovative fabrication workflows for architecture. To this end he has for several years collaborated with Dave Pigram of Supermanoeuvre on developing custom software for robotic fabrication. They are currently in the process of releasing an open source library of scripts for robotic fabrication. Their work has been published in the Architecture Beijing Biennale 2010: Machinic Processes, and Contemporary Digital Architecture: Design and Techniques, by Dmitris Kottos.

Previously he was the coordinator of the Digital Lab at the Harvard GSD, where he co-taught with Prof. Martin Bechthold and Monica Ponce de Leon a course titled Surfacing Stone, resulting in a permanent installation in Cambridge, MA, funded by the International Masonry Institute. Matter Design Studio recently created Periscope, the winner of the 10UP! Competition. The installation is a 50' tower of EPS foam, cut with custom robotic hotwire equipment, an installed with a small team in only 6 hours. Their work has been featured in several recent publications, including Pidgin Magazine 08, 09, and Monitor #61.

Wes Mcgee received a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2001, and a Masters in Industrial Design in 2005. During his graduate studies his research focused on fabrication techniques for furniture production on 5 axis CNC routers and the associated workflows for digital manufacturing.