Keynote Speakers

Faber et Machina

Mark Burry is Adjunct Professor of Urban Futures at Swinburne's School of Design and Architecture, where he leads the university's Sustainable Built Environment Initiative. The initiative fosters collaboration between vocational education and training (VET) and higher education, combining applied research with strong construction and manufacturing trade practice. Its current focus is expanding access to affordable housing in financially constrained remote and urban communities.

He also directs iHUB, Swinburne's urban research platform and lead node in a national network. This role extends his earlier work as Founding Director of Swinburne's Smart Cities Research Institute, established in May 2017.

Mark is a consulting architect and Fellow of both the Australian Institute of Architects (AIA) and the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (ATSE).  His publications address the translation of theory into practice and digital design strategies for architectural work.  For 37 years from 1979, he served as Senior Architect to the Sagrada Família Basilica Foundation, contributing to the ongoing interpretation of Gaudí's design for his unfinished masterwork.
For the past 12 years Mark Burry has been a member of the SNSF Review Panel for the NCCR Digital Fabrication. We are grateful for his contributions and constructive critique, and are pleased that he will open the 2026 Symposium.

Integrative Computational Design and Construction for Architecture

Achim Menges is a registered architect in Frankfurt and full professor at the University of Stuttgart, where he is the founding director of the Institute for Computational Design and Construction (ICD) and the director of the Cluster of Excellence Integrative Computational Design and Construction for Architecture (IntCDC). He is a Max Planck Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart and has held visiting professorships at Harvard University and various other universities in Europe and the United States. His research focuses on computational design methods, robotic fabrication and construction processes, as well as advanced material and building systems. This work has also resulted in the design of several award-winning buildings. In recognition of his scientific contributions, he was awarded the 2023 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize by the German Research Foundation, widely regarded as the most prestigious and highly endowed research prize in Germany.

Industrial Craftsmanship and the Tectonics of Prefabrication

Danish architect Dorte Mandrup is the Principal and Creative Director of the Copenhagen-based architecture studio Dorte Mandrup, which she established in 1999. The studio is internationally recognised for their ability to create architecture that actively engages with the complexities of each place and contributes with new relevance. Using the entire context as a conceptual starting point, Mandrup employs an artistic, humanistic, and scientific approach to form designs that enhances the awareness and experience of each place. In recent years, Mandrup has distinguished herself in the architectural field with extraordinary projects like The Crafts College and The Wadden Sea Centre in Denmark, Ilulissat Icefjord Centre in Greenland and The Whale in Norway.

Dorte Mandrup has received numerous national and international awards and recognitions for her work. She headlined the curated international exhibition at La Biennale de Venezia in 2018, chaired the Mies van der Rohe Award in 2019, is Vice Chairman of Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, member of Akademi der Künste in Berlin, Honorary Professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Architecture, Design and Conservation, Honorary Fellow of The American Institute of Architects (AIA), Honorary Member of Académie d'Architecture, Adjunct Professor at Accademia de Architettura de Mendrisio in Switzerland and Kenzo Tange Design Critic in Architecture at Harvard GSD in 2025.

Humans, Machines, and the Space Between: Engineering Effective Human-AI Partnerships

Mennatallah El-Assady is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zürich, where she leads the Interactive Visualization and Intelligence Augmentation (IVIA) lab. Prior to her current role, she was a postdoctoral research fellow at the ETH AI Center and held research associate positions in Germany and Canada. Her doctoral research on human-AI collaboration earned the prestigious joint dissertation award of the German, Austrian, and Swiss Informatics Societies, along with an honorable mention for the VGTC VIS Doctoral Dissertation Award.El-Assady’s interdisciplinary work spans data analysis, visualization, computational linguistics, and explainable artificial intelligence, with a focus on designing interactive human-AI collaboration interfaces to enhance problem-solving and decision-making. Her work is driven by a passion for empowering individuals through co-adaptive processes between humans and AI agents.With extensive experience collaborating with political science and linguistics scholars, El-Assady led the creation of the LingVis.io platform and is currently developing the novel human-AI.io communication framework. She is also a co-founder and co-organizer of several influential workshop series, including Vis4DH and VISxAI.In recognition of her pioneering contributions, El-Assady was named a Eurographics Junior Fellow in 2023. Her groundbreaking work at the intersection of visualization and machine learning has also earned her the 2024 VGTC Significant New Researcher Award and the 2023 EuroVis Early Career Award.

Matthias Kohler is an architect and full professor of Architecture and Digital Fabrication at ETH Zurich. In 2000,  together with Fabio Gramazio, he founded the architecture firm Gramazio Kohler Architekten. In 2005, they established the world’s first robot laboratory for non-standardised manufacturing processes in architecture at ETH Zurich, thereby opening up a completely new field of research. Over the past decades, he has integrated computational design, robotic fabrication, and material processes, creating a new aesthetic sensibility. His work proposes a paradigm shift in architecture, where digital and material realms interweave, generating novel approaches to built realities. His professional and academic projects range from experimental installations to full-scale structures, such as EMPA NEST (2016) or the DFAB House (2019), the latter being the first inhabitable house that was computationally designed in an interdisciplinary collaboration and built entirely through digital fabrication. He is the co-author of the first anthology on the use of robots in architecture "The Robotic Touch – How Robots Change Architecture" (Park Books, 2014). From 2014 to 2017, Matthias Kohler headed the National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) Digital Fabrication and between 2023 and 2025, he was Dean of the Department of Architecture at ETH Zurich.