The School of Architecture is pleased to announce that Joshua Bard has been promoted to Associate Professor and awarded indefinite tenure with the school, effective July 1, 2020.
Bard previously held an Assistant Professorship at the SoA and a courtesy appointment in Carnegie Mellon University’s The Robotics Institute. He is an architectural educator conducting applied research at the intersection of construction culture and robotic technology. His teaching and research interrogate traditional binaries in design culture (industry/craft, machine/hand, virtual/physical space, digital/analog production), discovering new potential for contemporary digital tools in the jettisoned logics of hand and material craft. Bard creates augmented construction and design systems combining the best of human skill, algorithmic translation, and robotic automation. He collaborates with roboticists and computer scientists conducting basic research in human machine interaction and reality computing. He also works with historians, material scientists, and tradespeople immersed in theoretical and tacit knowledge of building construction. The focus of these collaborations is to explore human-machine collaboration in the high-skill domain of the building trades. Bard teaches undergraduate and graduate architecture studios and instructs seminars in robotic fabrication and computational design.
“I am excited for this next step,” Bard said. “For me, Carnegie Mellon has been the perfect place where all of my research interests intersect in a great way. I am thrilled to be a part of the culture of innovation here at CMU.”
Bard credits the culture both within the School of Architecture and the university at large with making possible much of what he has been able to accomplish in his career. Trained as an architect, Bard aims to bring a thoughtful voice and perspective in questions around technology.
“While at CMU, I have grown to enjoy and value working with engineers, scientists, computer scientists, and hardcore technologists,” Bard said. “Each collaborator brings fascinating questions and interesting capacities with them to the table that challenge me as a designer in dialogue with them as a technologist. Some of our most interesting and productive ideas have emerged from that collaboration.”
“Carnegie Mellon has been the perfect place where all of my research interests intersect in a great way. I am thrilled to be a part of the culture of innovation here at CMU.”
The Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing (ARM) has been one of the largest sources of collaboration and ideas during Bard’s time at CMU, in addition to work with computer science. Bard feels that this work is only made possible in this way due to the concentration of expertise at the university in these areas. Bard credits the openness and willingness of his collaborators to bridge disciplinary boundaries.
“For me, interdisciplinarity hasn’t been lip service, but actually how I’ve worked with people on campus,” Bard said. “I’ve been able to think about my work in ways I wouldn’t have had I only been working with architects.”
Bard has been actively working with Manufacturing Futures Initiative (MFI) for the past several years, looking at how to do a better job of rethinking American manufacturing both regionally and nationally. Since there are many pressures on these industries, innovation is a necessity to remain competitive and relevant. The United States cannot compete on labor costs and scale, but can with innovation at the regional level. Working with groups on campus from different disciplines can take advantage of overlap in interests and goals. Bard collaborates with Associate Professor Dana Cupkova on projects in materials science and robotics, primarily focusing on robotic finishing of hard-set materials such as plaster and concrete, but this research could have other applications in ceramics, biocomposites, and emerging materials as well. Applications and industry partnerships are important even beyond the individual work of faculty. By understanding the behaviors of various materials, Bard can train a robot to understand the material and know when and how to respond. Since concrete is the most-used person-made material on the planet, and the second most-used material short of water, innovations with this material can have important ramifications across many industries, from architecture, to infrastructure, marine and dock building, and others.
Bard collaborates with Associate Professor Dana Cupkova on projects in materials science and robotics.
"Josh's research engages important concerns for the SoA as we track the future of architectural design and collaborative practice,” said SoA Professor & Head Omar Khan. “His work in new technologies, advanced fabrication, traditional and digital craft, materials, and innovation lays out a thoughtful and interdisciplinary agenda that brings local manufacturing and expertise across CMU together. His teaching provides our students an understanding of the state of technology and ways in which it can become a driver for better design and cultural expression."
More recently, Bard has been working on grant proposals related to the construction of marine sea walls with an industry partner in Florida. Many coastal areas are rapidly updating their seawall infrastructure in response to climate change and sea level rise and increased flooding events. Concrete is a common material for this type of infrastructure, so Bard and his collaborators are looking at pre-cast panels and how new and innovative finishing techniques could help improve these products and make them faster and cheaper to construct. This is an example of an application outside of Bard’s typical specialty area, but it has important connections with industry. Bard is also looking forward to continuing to work with ARM on new manufacturing-related grants.
In other aspects of his work, Bard works with fellow SoA faculty member Francesca Torello on projects in the digital humanities that incorporate robotics, augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and mixed-reality to help inform the understanding of history and culture. Historically, the architect’s skill lies in the ability to imagine and represent potential realities. The explosion of VR and the modeling of virtual worlds that are not built in the real world is very close to how architects have thought and worked all along. In his collaboration with Torello, Bard seeks to better understand how the physical and non-physical worlds inform each other. Together, the two have been working to develop a mixed-reality app for College of Fine Arts (CFA) Great Hall that examines issues of virtual travel in the masterplanning and design of the CMU campus by architect Henry Hornbostel. Torello has transcribed Hornbostel’s travel journals and finds his travels abroad in the late 19th century heavily influenced his designs of the campus and the CFA murals. Torello is working on further connecting the journals to the media world of the frescoes and the history of the education of architects.
Bard is a founding partner of Archolab, an award-winning research collaborative finding their bearings at the intersection of architecture’s emerging techno-future(s) and a historically grounded commitment to making. Archolab’s research includes Morphfaux, a project that recovers ancient techniques of applied architectural plaster through the lens of robotic manufacturing, and Spring Back, a reformulation of steam bending using advanced parametric modeling and digital fabrication tools. Archolab’s work has been recognized with Architect Magazine’s R+D Award, an Unbuilt Architecture Citation from the Boston Society of Architects, and a Merit Award from the Canadian Wood Council.
Bard received his M.Arch with distinction from the University of Michigan, where he also served on the faculty and as Director of Taubman College’s Digital Fabrication Laboratory. He holds a B.A. in literature and philosophy from Wheaton College and has worked for PLY Architecture (Ann Arbor, MI) and M1/DTW (Detroit, MI).