Wes McGee is an assistant professor of architecture and the director of FABLab at the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. His work revolves around the interrogation of craft and material performance, with a research and teaching agenda focused on developing new connections between design, engineering, materials, and process as they relate to the built environment through the creation of customized software and fabrication tools. Seamlessly integrating process constraints with design intent, his work spans multiple realms, including algorithmic design, computational feedback of material properties, and secondary and tertiary automation processes that integrate robotics with bespoken machines of architectural production. As a founding partner and senior designer in the studio Matter Design, his work spans a broad range of scales and materials, always dedicated to re-imagining the role of the designer in the digital era. In 2013 Matter Design was awarded the Architectural League Prize for Young Architects & Designers.

Wes has presented work at multiple national and international conferences on design and fabrication and has been published in recent books such as Fabricate, by Ruairi Glynn and Bob Sheil, Digital Fabrication in Architecture, by Nick Dunn, Performative Materials in Architecture, by Rashida NG and Sneha Patel, and Material Strategies in Digital Fabrication, edited by Christopher Beorkrem. In 2014, he will be chair of the Robotics in Architecture Conference, hosted at the University of Michigan, as well as a session chair at Fabricate 2014, hosted by UCL Bartlett/ETH Zurich.

This lecture is sponsored by WHLC Architecture.

Architects qualify for one hour of continuing education credit per attended lecture, thanks to the support of the Baton Rouge Chapter of the American Institute of Architects (aiabr.com).