Architecture and Computation Lectures, Fall 2025
Mondays, Sept. 8, Sept. 15, Sept. 22, 2025
12pm - 1pm
Richardson Memorial Hall, Room 204
Tulane's Uptown Campus
This lecture is open to the public.
About the lecture:
Architecture and Computation Lectures, Fall 2025
Through three lectures, this series presents an introduction to key areas where architecture and computation converge: representation, machine learning, and construction robotics.
Code, algorithm, and representation
Monday, September 8th | 12pm-1pm
Drawing has long been the most common medium for representing a building as a composition of geometric objects. Code and algorithms extend this abstraction by allowing us to treat geometry—and, with it, drawing itself—as data, and they reframe design as an extended generative process. This lecture introduces code and algorithms as foundational constructs in computing and, lying behind every drawing, as alternative materials for exploration and representation in architecture.
Learning-based systems in architecture
Monday, September 15th | 12pm-1pm
While architectural engagements with artificial intelligence (AI) date back decades, the past ten years—marked by increasingly advanced and accessible learning-based models—have witnessed a surge of distinct explorations. This lecture provides a basic introduction to learning- based systems and offers a brief overview of these recent explorations in architecture, from building form generation to urban analysis.
Robotic technologies and the reconfiguration of building construction work
Monday, September 22nd | 12pm-1pm
The software and hardware systems, models, and user interfaces are everyday work artifacts, central both to developers of construction robots and to laborers working with them. Based on a Ph.D. dissertation, this lecture illuminates how labor has been engaged in the development of robotic systems and how these systems, in turn, reshape the work of laborers, offering an early view of the slow, emerging reconfiguration of construction work around robotics.
About the speakers:
Emek Erdolu is a Visiting Assistant Professor and the Architecture and Computation Fellow at
Tulane School of Architecture and Built Environment. Situated across design computation, human-computer interaction, and robotics, Emek’s individual and collective research have been published in Springer Construction Robotics journal, the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (PACMHCI) journal, and the International Journal of Architectural Computing (IJAC), and presented in venues such as the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S).
Emek’s current research, as part of the Tulane Architecture Fellowship, investigates how machine learning (ML) intersects with, extends, and potentially reframes established architectural design and research lineages. The research is grounded in a comprehensive review of over 600 published works on ML in architecture, examined alongside seminal works in form and typology studies, urban studies, and language-based architectural design practices. Prior to Tulane, Emek completed his Ph.D. in Computational Design at Carnegie Mellon University, where he also taught in the Master of Architecture and Master of Science in Computational Design programs. He was previously a researcher at the ETH Future Cities Laboratory, and over seven years in the U.S., China, and Southeast Asia, worked on projects with AECOM, HMD, Ecoland, and Nomad Studio. He has lectured and taught studios at the University of Pennsylvania, Singapore University of Technology and Design, National University of Singapore, and Bilkent University.
Questions? Please reach out to Emek Erdolu eerdolu@tulane.edu
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