TEACHING TEAM

Sandra Häuplik-Meusburger

Studio Director

TU Wien, HB2

Sandra Häuplik-Meusburger is Senior lecturer at the Institute for Architecture and Design. Her teachings include design courses in space architecture and extreme environment architecture and a regular course on ‘Emerging Fields in Architecture’. Sandra is also director of the Space course at the Science Academy in Lower Austria. She is an architect at space-craft Architektur and expert in habitability design solutions for extreme environments.Over the last 15 years, she has worked and collaborated on several architecture and aerospace design projects. Sandra is Vice-chair of the AIAA Space Architecture Technical Commitee, and Co-chair of the IAA History Committee. She is author of several scientific papers and books, her latest is co-authored with Shery Bishop; Space Habitats and Habitability (Springer 2020).

Miriam Dall’Igna is Associate Partner at Foster+Partners‘ research and development team Specialist Modelling Group. Working as a computational designer, she has experience on research and design of complex structures for manufacturing and construction. She joined the company in 2008 and has worked with integration of environmental and structural design strategies through architectural geometry. Part of her tasks are the experimentation and implementation in architectural practice of state-of-the-art software and hardware. Miriam also works on research and innovation projects, with recent winning entries for Innovate UK, H2020 and NASA. She is currently focusing on the research of goal-oriented autonomous robotic systems and additive manufacturing for large scale construction. Miriam is Professor of Computational Methods and Complex Geometry at University of Westminster‘s School of Architecture and Cities.

Marina is a researcher of structural design, form-finding, and architectural geometry. Her interests revolve around the development of theoretical and computational frameworks of geometrybased methods for the design and analysis of materially efficient structures in the context of the built environment. Marina has a background in applied mathematics and physics, after which she specialised in computational design, at the ‘Emergent Technologies & Design’ master’s program at the Architectural Association, and in civil engineering at the University of Cambridge. She holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge, Department of Engineering, on geometry-based structural analysis and design for which she won the University’s CSAR award for ‘outstanding research with real world application’. She currently holds an R&D position at Foster + Partners, Specialist Modelling Group.

Workshop Basics & Tools Univ.-Assistant | TU Wien

Lukas Zeilbauer is Univ.-Assistant at the Institute of Architectural Sciences. His Department - Structural Design and Timber Engineering - primarily focuses on the material-appropriate structural design with special consideration of the aspects of resource efficiency, sustainability and reusability as well as on the topics of timber engineering. With a view to the continuous application of digital planning methods and technologies, the ITI team is experimenting with form, material and assembly principles using parametric algorithms and robotics. Lukas is mainly teaching Master courses, like several Design to Build Studios and Module lectures.

Georg Lobe

Workshop Basics & Tools Student Assistant | TU Wien

Georg Lobe is student assistent at the Institute for Structural Design and Engineered Timber Construction. His focus is on computational and structural design specializing in design to production.

Sabine Knierbein

Lecturer Public Spaces Associate Professor | TU Wien

Sabine Knierbein is the Head of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Urban Culture and Public Space at the Faculty of Architecture and Planning, TU Wien. Trained in landscape architecture, she received the first Dr. phil. degree at the Faculty of Architecture of the BauhausUniversität Weimar ever in the field of European Urban Studies. She is a founding member of the Thematic Group of Public Spaces and Urban Cultures of the Association of European Schools of Planning. Her research interests relate to the city as a collective political and democratic project, recent theory of urbanization through the lenses of everyday life and lived space, intersectional urban research methodology, ethnography of construction sites, concepts of truly open and public innovation, social inequality and disruptive and to intercultural philosophy of science with a spatial and urban focus.

Klaus Zwerger is Associate Professor at the TU Wien. Three long-term scholarships at Todai and a guest professorship at Hosei University provided ample opportunity to become familiar with Japan. Extensive field research in China, Europe and Southeast Asia resulted in several lecture series, numerous seminars and workshops in China and Europe. Working as a joiner and carpenter he collected experience with the material wood. His scientific research is focused on historic wood architecture. He specialized in comparing East Asian and European building traditions and published widely on this topic. Following his seminal book „Wood and Wood Joints: Building Traditions in Europe, Japan and China“ currently in translation into Chinese, his recent monograph on „Cereal Drying Racks. Culture and Typology of Wood Buildings in Europe and East Asia“ was published in 2020.

Laura Farmwald is an architecture student based in Vienna. Her work includes film, photography, design and site-related art installations from an architectural point of view. Since 2019 she has been working as a tutor at the Institute of Architecture and Design at the Technical University of Vienna. She holds a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Art and Industrial Design, Linz.