Zachary Angles
Zachary Angles is a M.Arch candidate at MIT. His research interests are located at the intersections between architecture, fiction, and world-building. His thesis, “Narrative Tactics for Making Other Worlds Possible,” explores how architectural design can use world-building to address societal and ecologic externalities in our uncertain times of resource scarcity and climatic crisis. He edited thresholds 45: MYTH published by the MIT Press in 2017 which brought together disciplinary voices to explore how architecture makes myth and myth makes architecture. He has organized and taught workshops on world-building around the globe.
Eliyahu Keller
Eliyahu (Elie) Keller is an architect and a researcher from Jerusalem, Israel. Elie holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Israel and a Masters in Design Studies with distinction from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he has served as as a research assistant for the Harvard-Mellon Urban Initiative and was a member of the Berlin Portal Research Group. His graduate thesis, titled ‘Representing Force’, looks into the work of the American visionary architect Lebbeus Woods in Havana.
Elie’s current work and interests engage the intersection of critical theory, representation, and political agency within the design disciplines. His research focuses on visionary and experimental architectures and imaginary worlds in various media, during and after the late 20th century, and examines them as reactions to socio-political, cultural, scientific and technological advancements and transformations.
Matías Morales
Matías Morales is a graduate student of the Master in Literature program at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. He is currently finishing his thesis on imaginaries of Santiago’s San Cristóbal hill in recent Chilean narrative (José Donoso, Alberto Fuguet, Nona Fernández). He has also published the fragmented essay Un parentesco recobrado (El Trueno, 2014), a reading of Georges Perec’s Un homme qui dort. His research focuses in the connection of literature, city meandering, and memory. He has worked as an editor for LOM (a publishing house based in Santiago) and has contributed articles on the topics of music and literature to different webzines.
Valentina Rosales
Valentina Rosales is a psychologist from Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago (Chile), and a graduate student of the M.A. in Literature program at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.
Her psychology research explored the capacity of cinema and paint to tell the story and represent the history of the Spanish Civil War and the subsequent cultural discontent. Her current academic work focuses on storytelling, memory, imagination and the abstract construction of new realities both in the arts and sciences. As an extension of her thesis research, she writes essays concerning human evolution and the development of creative tools for problem solving and literary production. Creatively, Valentina has worked as a screenwriter, and is currently developing a composition of ink-drawings and short stories.
Rixt Woudstra
Rixt Woudstra is a fourth year Ph.D student in the History, Theory and Criticism Program at MIT Architecture. She studies 20th-century architecture and planning in Europe and Africa. Her current research explores relations between the welfare state, housing, and the notion of ‘existenzminimum’ in interwar Europe and postwar sub-Saharan Africa. She has written on Le Corbusier’s plan for Addis Abeba, MoMA’s exhibitions on public housing in the 1930s, Carlo Enrico Rava’s housing projects in Italian-occupied Libya, and Ernst May’s work in Kenya and Uganda in the 1940s. She holds a B.A. in Art History and a M.A. in Architectural History from the University of Amsterdam (both cum laude), and studied at the Università degli Studi di Firenze.
She has presented her work at conferences such as the Society of Architectural Historians, the European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies, the “Revisiting CASE” symposium organized by MIT in 2015, and participated in the “Wohnungsfrage Academy” in Berlin, co-organized by Columbia University and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt. Her research has been supported by grants of the Reale Istituto Neerlandese a Roma, MIT’s Presidential Fellowship, and the MIT International Science and Technology Initiative, and the Schlossman Research Fellowship.
Brandon Clifford
Brandon Clifford is an Assistant Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Principal at Matter Design and contributes as an advisor to the Storytelling Space Group. Brandon received his Master of Architecture from Princeton University in 2011 and his Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the Georgia Tech in 2006. From 2006-2009 he worked as project manager at Office dA (NADAAA) in both Boston and New York. Brandon also served as editor of Pidgin Magazine from 2009-2011 and the 2011-2012 LeFevre Emerging Practitioner FellowatThe Ohio State University Knowlton School of Architecture.
In 2008 Brandon founded the award winning practice Matter Design with Wes McGee. The practice solidified with Matter Design’s success in design competitions such as the international West Cork Arts Center competition and the provocative winning entry for the 10up competition, Periscope: Foam Tower. Brandon is a highly acclaimed designer winning prizes such as the Design Biennial Boston, the Architectural League Prize for Young Architects and Designers, as well as the prestigious SOM Prize launching an ongoing research project into volumetric architecture. His work is published widely in journals, magazines,and conference proceedings, as well as recent books such as ‘Young Architects 15: Range’, ‘Archive: Design Biennial Boston’, ‘Performative Materials in Architecture and Design’, ‘Stereotomy: Stone Architecture and New Research’, and ‘New Fundamentals of Natural Architecture’. His recent authored work includes ‘Volume: Bringing Surface into Question’, ‘Range: Matter Design’, and ‘Volumetric Robotics: MIT Architectural Design Workshop’. Brandon is dedicated to re-imagining the role of the architect in the digital era.
Igor Fracalossi
Igor Fracalossi is an architect from the Federal University in Ceará (Brazil, 2009), Master of Science in Architectural Theory and Criticism from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile (Master in Architecture Program, 2012), and PhD candidate in Architectural Design from the same institution (Doctorate in Architecture and Urban Studies).
He has been developing a casuistic, objective and constructionist method on observation of architecture through collective descriptions and exploratory drawings, which is the base of his researches and his work as editor in charge of Architecture Classics, Articles, and Poetry and Architecture sections of ArchDaily Brazil, from 2011 to 2015. This method evolved in a series of workshops for graduate students in Brazil, during the past two years. In 2014, he received the juri’s first prize of the 1st International Architecture Biennial of Argentina, with a short essay about the Butantã House by Paulo Mendes da Rocha. He has written about over a hundred works of architecture. Recently, in his PhD research, his efforts has been the construction of physical models as a way to understand and make explicit the process of projection and construction of a work of architecture.
José Rosas Vera
José Rosas Vera is the Head of the PhD Program in Architecture and Urban Studies at the School of Architecture at PUC, Chile where he is additionally a Professor; he is an advisor to the Storytelling Space Group. He received a Masters of Urban Development a the Catholic University of chile in 1984 and a PhD of Architecture at the School of Architecture of Barcelona in 1986. He is currently the Dean of Architecture, Design, and Urban Studies at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. He has served as Director of the School of Architecture between 1997-2000. Since 1977, José has taught undergraduate and graduate courses at PUC. He has collaborated extensively on large scale infrastrural and urban projects and has completed a number of lauded buildings. He is the author of numerous publications, some of his contrubutions have been compiled in the form of 2 books, 8 book chapters, and over 50 journal articles since 1977.