Kathy Velikov

Kathy Velikov is a registered architect, associate professor at the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, and the current president of ACADIA (Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture). She is founding partner of the research-based practice RVTR, which serves as a platform for exploration and experimentation in the intertwinements between architecture, the environment, technology, and sociopolitics. Her work ranges from material prototypes that explore new possibilities for architectural skins that mediate matter, energy, information, space, and atmosphere between bodies and environments, to the investigation of urban infrastructures and territorial practices, working through the techniques of mapping and analysis, speculative design propositions, installations, and writing. Kathy is a recipient of the Architectural League’s Young Architects Award, the Canadian Professional Prix de Rome in Architecture, and the Oberdick Fellowship at Taubman College.

Her practice, RVTR, has won numerous awards and their work has been exhibited widely; recently, “Infundibuliforms” received a 2016 R+D Awards honorable mention from Architect Magazine and EXTRACTION, the Canadian Pavilion for the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale received a 2017 CSLA Award of Excellence. She is co-author of Infra Eco Logi Urbanism (2015) and her work and writing has been published in TAD, AD, Footprint, JAE, IJAC, Leonardo, New Geographies, eVolo, Volume, [bracket] Goes Soft, and MONU, as well as in the books Towards a Robotic Architecture, Third Coast Atlas, Infrastructure Space, Hypernatural, Paradigms in Computing, Performative Materials in Architecture, and High Performance Homes. She is co-curator of the traveling exhibition “Ambiguous Territory: Architecture, Landscape and the Postnatural” and co-editor of an upcoming book on the topic.

She has held previous teaching appointments at the University of Toronto and the University of Waterloo. At Taubman College, Kathy teaches Architecture studios, thesis, ecology and technology seminars, and in the Master of Science in Digital and Material Technologies.