Newell in Architect Magazine Feature as One of Nine leaders in Digital Practice and Design Discussing “Technology to Master in Architecture in 2017”

Catie Newell, Assistant Professor and Director of the Master of Science in Material Systems and Digital Technologies, is featured in Architect Magazine’s “The Technology to Master in Architecture in 2017.” Newell is one of nine leaders in digital practice and design in this technology feature naming existing tools that firms and individuals—including themselves—should learn this year.

Newell recommends that “designers should learn—or re-learn—how to use the light meter. We have reached a point at which the design-to-fabrication process is quite fluid. Architectural offices and schools are increasingly tooled up with machines, software, and the ability to dream up novel constructions and processes. Within this swift cadence, we must embrace the opportunity to study the intended and resulting material and immaterial effects of a design before it enters into a completed structure. This critical moment requires us to analyze our works for performance-based aspirations—be it light, thermal contents, structural extremes, or the like—as physical assemblies cued into their environments. We need to be running them through a gamut of environmental inputs and outputs that challenge the fluidity that technology can now have with its raw surroundings, and assess how that feedback can return into the workflow of our digital and material climb.”

Newell’s practice, Alibi Studio, which she founded in 2010, is developing design tools and processes that apply years of experience in ephemeral material behaviors toward the construction of small, single-use buildings. 

Link to the full article on Architect Magazine