Staff

Georg Vrachliotis is a Professor for Theory of Architecture and Digital Culture at TU Delft. From 2016 Georg was dean of the Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT) Faculty of Architecture and Chair for Architecture Theory (2014-2020). Previously he conducted research at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture at ETH Zürich. He studied architecture at the Berlin University of the Arts and did his PhD at the ETH Zürich in 2009. 

Besides that he was a visiting researcher at the Center for Cognitive Science of the University Freiburg, at the Spatial Cognition Center of the University Bremen, and at the UC Berkeley Department of Architecture in California. From 2006 to 2010 he was a guest lecturer on architecture theory at the TU Wien in Vienna. Georg Vrachliotis is member of the advisory board of the magazine ARCH+ and external examiner at Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL London.

He curated the exhibition “Fritz Haller. Architect and Researcher” at the S AM Swiss Architecture Museum in 2014 in collaboration with the Institute for History and Theory  (gta) at ETH Zurich (catalogue published by gta Publisher in 2014, with Laurent Stalder), the exhibition “Sleeping Beauty. Reinventing Frei Ottos Multihalle” (catalogue published by Spector Books in 2018) on the occasion of the 16th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale in 2018. Most recently he curated the exhibition "Models, Media and Methods. Frei Otto's Architectural Research" at the School of Architecture at Yale University (2020).

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Theory of Architecture and Digital Culture

“My vision is to intellectually strengthen the discipline of architecture for the emerging age of artificial intelligence and to work towards a more social environment.” 

- Georg Vrachliotis

Dennis Pohl is Postdoctoral Researcher at Theory of Architecture and Digital Culture at TU Delft, and visiting senior lecturer at the Department of Art History at Goethe-University Frankfurt. His research interest lies in a material and cultural history of the digital in architecture. In his PhD research titled “Designing Europe: The Architecture of Territory, Politics, and Institutions,” he analyzed how architectural design techniques historically impacted political planning in post-war Europe. Dennis was a research fellow at the DFG research group “Knowledge in the Arts” at the Berlin University of the Arts (2015-2018), and DAAD fellow at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University New York (2018). He was co-director of the AA Visiting School Brussels “The House of Politics,” and contributed to the project “Eurotopie” in the Belgian pavilion at the 16th Architecture Biennial in Venice. He guest-edited issue 239 of the journal ARCH+, entitled “Europe: Infrastructures of Externalization.” His writing has appeared in ARCH+, Archiv für Mediengeschichte, History and Technology, Migrant Journal, as well as a number of collected volumes.

Since April 2021, Seyran Khademi is an Assistant Professor at the chair of Theory of Architecture and Digital Culture and the co-director of AiDAPT lab  (AI for Design, Analysis, and Optimization in Architecture and the Built Environment). Her research interest lies at the intersection of Artificial Intelligent, Computer vision, and Deep learning in the context of visual data for Architectural Design. In 2017 she was appointed as an interdisciplinary postdoctoral researcher between the Computer vision lab and Architecture faculty working on the ArchiMediaL project, regarding the automatic detection of buildings and architectural elements in visual data focusing on Computer Vision and Deep Learning methods for archival data and street-view imagery. Seyran received her Ph.D. in signal processing and optimization in 2015 from TU Delft, supervised by Professor Alle-Jan van der Veen, followed by postdoctoral research on Intelligent Audio and Speech algorithms. She received her MSc. degree in Signal Processing from the Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, in 2010 and her BSc degree in telecommunications from the University of Tabriz in Iran.

Marija Mateljan is a PhD researcher at the chair of Theory of Architecture and Digital Culture, and a teacher in the Complex Projects graduation lab at TU Delft. At the intersection of Architecture, Computer Vision and Media Studies, her PhD research explores interfaces between design representation and description, visual reasoning, design methods, and the digitalisation of cultural techniques. Considering the importance of architectural representation for design and communication, she investigates if and how architectural visual data, e.g. drawings, diagrams, renders, photos, could be re-used by state-of-the-art technologies to develop new building design methods employing data circularity. Between 2015 and 2021, Marija worked at KAAN Architecten on various Dutch and international projects, including Museum Paleis het Loo, currently under construction, and the New Schiphol Airport Terminal. Marija is experienced in design development and interdisciplinary coordination in various project phases. Her experience in practice made her interested in Computer Vision, specifically its potential to recognize patterns in architectural visual data, connecting to a more conceptual level of building design by utilizing domain-specific knowledge and visual cognitive capabilities. Before joining KAAN, she worked as a freelance architect in Rotterdam. In 2014 she obtained her MSc degree in Architecture with honours at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment at TU Delft. Prior to her studies in Delft, she completed her undergraduate studies at the Faculty of Architecture in Zagreb.

Angela Rout,  joined the Faculty of Architecture and Built Environment (ABE) at TU Delft as an Assistant Professor, and recipient of the distinguished Delft Technology Fellowship (DTF) for Top Female Academic Scientists. Her research investigates methods and implications for leveraging emerging data resources for societal benefit, within the discipline of architecture. Previous to her post at TU Delft Angela was appointed as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of British Columbia, where she was team lead for a two year research collaboration exploring opportunities for sensor data to inform resilient and equitable community design. In 2020 she received her Ph.D. from the University Calgary in Computational Media Design, where she developed approaches for leveraging spatio-temporal data from smartphones to aid in master planning processes and design practice. 

Architects communicate their designs through various visual abstractions of the physical space; including orthographic drawings, photos, and 3D models. Semantic similarity learning for architectural drawings is a PhD project of Casper van Engelenburg that started in October 2021, focusing on understanding visual patterns in floorplan image data. He develops deep contrastive learning frameworks that enable us to learn low-dimensional, task-agnostic representations of architectural drawings. This research line builds a foundation for large quantitative analysis of archival and linked visual data. Besides theoretical work, his aim is to connect it to the practice by enhancing Architectural-specific search engines.

Fatemeh Mostafavi is a PhD researcher in Theory of Architecture and Digital Culture Group at TU Delft. She is a member of AiDAPT lab, where  data-driven intelligence and model-based engineering come together to support long-term, adaptive, and evidence-based abstraction and synthesis of structural and architectural choices, towards a more sustainable and resilient built environment. Her research proposes a machine learning (ML) framework to learn environmental features from the large-scale existing architectural plan data to augment the architect’s intuition towards environmental design.  The goal of her research is to develop AI-based decision-making model to assist in the analysis and generation of spatial zonings while taking environmental factors into consideration.

Fatemeh obtained her master’s degree in Building Science - Architecture and Energy at Shahid Beheshti University of Tehran in 2021. Formerly, she got her bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering at Shiraz University in 2017. She has cooperated in a number of research-based projects in the building physics area in collaboration with Shahid Beheshti University, namely “Renewable Energy feasibility study of Energy Parks”, “Developing National Standard of Lighting Energy Consumption”, and “Evaluation of National Buildings’ Products and Services”. Also, she authored the manuscript titled “Energy Efficiency and Carbon Emission of High-rise Buildings A Review: 2005-2020”, which was published in Building and Environment journal in 2021.

Gent Shehu is a PhD Candidate between the Section of Urban Design and the chair of Theory of Architecture and Digital Culture at TU Delft. His research investigates the typological transformations and overall spatial and cultural implications of using digital technologies in horticulture. His focus is on the contemporary Glasshouse: that finely attuned nineteenth century building type, inside which human, plants, architecture, and AI interchange information—across scales and interfaces—to meet the cultural and societal demands of the twenty-first century.

Gent holds a master’s degree of Architecture and Urban Design, with high honours, from Polis University (2018), and a post-master’s degree, cum laude, from The Berlage Center for Advanced Studies in Architecture and Urban Design, TU Delft (2021). Since 2018, he has worked as a freelance architect from his eponymous studio in Skopje, and prior to joining The Berlage, he collaborated on an architectural and urban design project with an Austrian firm.

His research and design projects have appeared in The Plan Journal, Forum A+P, among others, and have been exhibited in various venues in Europe. Gent has contributed to numerous publications from The Berlage Center for Advanced Studies in Architecture and Urban Design, namely: Facades for a Canal House (2020), The Asset Class No.1 (2022), Travel Agency (forthcoming 2022), Architecture on Display: On the History and Contemporary Approaches to Exhibiting Architecture (forthcoming 2023), and Project Global — Power (forthcoming 2023).