Daniel Cardoso Llach

B. Arch, S.M.Arch.S., Ph.D.

Associate Professor

Track Chair, Computational Design program; CODELab Director

Daniel Cardoso Llach is Associate Professor of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University, where he chairs the graduate program in Computational Design and directs CODELab. He is the author of publications, exhibitions, and technologies critically exploring the nexus of design and computation. Daniel received a PhD and a MS in Architecture: Design and Computation from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a B. Arch from Universidad de los Andes. In 2016 he was a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge’s Martin Centre in the UK, and a research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study of Media Cultures of Computer Simulation in Leuphana, Germany. He has held faculty appointments at The Pennsylvania State University and Universidad de los Andes, consulted as a computational design specialist for Gehry Technologies and Kohn Pedersen Fox, among others, and practiced as a licensed architect and media designer in his native Bogotá.

Daniel’s research and teaching are interdisciplinary and develop along two related threads. The first is a critical reconstruction of the interplay of design and computation during the second half of the 20th century. Organized around archival, ethnographic, and curatorial research, this thread illuminates the emergence of new disciplinary and discursive configurations of design alongside postwar era research into computing, and reflects critically on their repercussions on architecture and other creative disciplines.

His first book, Builders of the Vision: Software and the Imagination of Design, published by Routledge in 2015, is an intellectual history of computer-aided design (CAD) at MIT that explains how early research into information processing, computer graphics, and numerical control fostered the convergence of fields including engineering, mathematics, and architecture around questions of design, yielding technical and conceptual armatures that remain at the core of present-day architectural and engineering practices. His new book, Designing the Computational Image, Imagining Computational Design, co-edited with Theodora Vardouli, expands this work by tracing the emergence of computational design practices across a broader landscape of institutions in the US, the UK, and Canada. Documenting a series of exhibitions and events, it includes an extensive visual archive of historical materials and contemporary works by architects, designers, and artists, as well as conversations and essays by over a dozen architecture, media, and science and technology scholars. The book is currently in press and will be available in the Fall of 2023 with Applied Research + Design. In addition, Daniel’s writings exploring historical and socio technical aspects of computational design practices have appeared in journals including Nexus Journal of Architecture and Mathematics, Leonardo, Architectural Research Quarterly, Design Issues, Digital Creativity, and Thresholds, among others, and in edited collections including Platform Urbanism (2021), The Active Image (Springer 2017), DigitalSTS (Princeton 2019), and The Routledge Handbook of Architecture and Artificial Intelligence (Routledge 2021). In 2020 he co-edited, with Andrés Burbano, the special issue of Dearq Other Computations, which innovatively featured scholarship and projects focusing on computational design practices outside of the “global North.”

The second thread of Daniel’s work focuses on developing cross-disciplinary research and pedagogical frameworks to mobilize computational methods critically towards architecture and design, and to cultivate critical technical practitioners and researchers. He pursues it through applied research and learning projects involving students, colleagues, and industry partners; through academic leadership; and by creating or supporting innovative knowledge platforms. His collaborative project Rethinking Automation in Construction, developed with Robotics Institute professor Jean Oh as Co-PI, combines qualitative research on construction practices with technical research into reinforcement learning and robotics to develop “robot in the loop” systems that enhance and interact safely and adaptively with construction workers in construction sites and modular factories. Another ongoing project, Experimental Archaeology of CAD, employs reconstructive, emulative, and speculative methods to explore historical CAD systems using modern technologies, re-presenting them as tactile, visual, and operative artifacts. Developed with the participation of CMU students, interactive installations resulting from this effort have been exhibited in the United States, Canada, and Germany. Daniel’s work also supports a wider community of scholars, researchers, and practitioners through knowledge platforms including the “Design, Technology, and Society” book series, and the web platform lattice.space, both of which he co-founded to advance critical and creative scholarship at the crossroads of design, computation, and the built environment.

Daniel has received grants by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Canada’s Social Science and Humanities Research Council, the Mellon-Funded EaaSI project at Yale, the Pennsylvania Agency for Economic Development, the Manufacturing Futures Institute, Autodesk, and Google among others. In 2021 he was named a 2021-22 Pennsylvania Manufacturing Fellow. He was the ACM SIGGRAPH 2022 Art Papers Chair, and currently serves as ACM CSCW 2024 Papers Co-Chair and as an editorial board member for the ACSA TAD journal.

At CMU, Daniel coordinates the graduate program in Computational Design, conducts graduate research seminars for MS and PhD students, and works closely with them in the development of their theses and dissertations. He has also taught seminars on the history of design technologies, on construction robotics, and developed the core architecture undergraduate course Fundamentals of Computational Design, which he taught between 2015 and 2019. He was awarded tenure in 2022.

As a research advisor and mentor, Daniel is especially interested in working with students who are motivated to bridge an experimental disposition towards design and technology with historical, critical, or artistic modes of inquiry and reflection.

Current Courses

48727 Inquiry into Computational Design

48788 Proseminar in Computational Design

48749 Deep Time Architectural Data

Current Projects

Experimental Archaeologies of CAD

Rethinking Automation in Construction

Deep Time Architectural Data

Recent Publications

Books

Designing the Computational Image, Imagining Computational Design (with Theodora Vardouli, forthcoming Fall 2023, Applied Research and Design).
Builders of the Vision: Software and the Imagination of Design (New York and London: Routledge, 2015).

Edited collections

Art/Tech Relocations, Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques. Vol. 5, No. 4. 2022. https://dl.acm.org/toc/pacmcgit/2022/5/4
Other Computations. Special Issue of Dearq, Vol. 27, 2020. (With Andres Burbano.) https://revistas.uniandes.edu.co/toc/dearq//27

Journal articles

Hasey, Michael, Jinmo Rhee, and Daniel Cardoso Llach. “Form Data as a Resource in Architectural Analysis: An Architectural Distant Reading of Wooden Churches from the Carpathian Mountain Regions of Eastern Europe.” Digital Creativity, (April 30, 2023): 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/14626268.2023.2201281.
Daniel Cardoso Llach. “Between Form and Information: Early Philosophies of Computer-Aided Design.” Nexus Network Journal 23, no. 4 (December 1, 2021): 933–43. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00004-021-00581-w
Daniel Cardoso Llach, Eric Kaltman, Emek Erdolu, and Zachary Furste. “An Archive of Interfaces: Exploring the Potential of Emulation for Software Research, Pedagogy, and Design.” Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 5, no. CSCW2 (October 18, 2021): 294:1-294:22. https://doi.org/10.1145/3476035
Daniel Cardoso Llach and Nida Rehman. “Magical Modernism: Latin American Urbanisms and the Imaginary of Social Architecture.” Dearq, January 14, 2021. https://doi.org/10.18389/dearq29.2021.06.
Daniel Cardoso Llach and Mine Ozkar. “Cultivating the Critical Imagination: Post-Disciplinary Pedagogy in a Computational Design Laboratory.” Digital Creativity 30, no. 4 (October 2, 2019): 257–76. https://doi.org/10.1080/14626268.2019.1691604.