The GSAPP-CDP Smorgasbord grew out of discussions between the CDP faculty listed below who have contributed tutorials to this site. The site will evolve and be updated over time to include more tutorials based on the evolving seminars taught by the GSAPP Computational Design Practices program.
GSAPP-CDP pedagogy grew out of an evolving approach to flipped classroom teaching, which was encouraged in the Visual Studies and Visual Technology sequence of Masters of Architecture Program, directed by Laura Kurgan at GSAPP. This series of classes formed the basis of the Computational Design Practices Programs launched in July 2022.
The following group of people have produced tutorials as well as were actively engaged in launching the new program
Smorgasbord Concept and Development:
Dan Taeyoung - Dan is a teacher, spatial designer, technologist, and artist. His practice involves around collaborating to create architectural spaces and social cooperatives that embody how we might want to live and communicate together, as well as researching architecture and technology as environments for deep interpersonal communication. He is Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia GSAPP, teaching classes on tangible media interfaces, experimental design tools, and forms of representation. He is a former co-founder of spaces such as Prime Produce, Soft Surplus, and the Cybernetics Library.
Tutorials by:
Carlo Bailey - Carlo Bailey is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University GSAPP. He is also a Senior Data Scientist at VTS, a prop-tech company bringing advanced machine learning to the commercial real estate industry. His teaching and research focus on new methods in geospatial analytics, machine learning, big data, and visualization.
His work has been featured in numerous publications including The New York Times, Wired, MSNBC, Architect, and Entrepreneur Magazine. Carlo has lectured widely and co-authored numerous scientific papers that have been published by Springer and the International Journal of Architectural Computing.
Prior to his current positions, Carlo held senior roles within WeWork’s research and development team, where he was modelling the dynamics between people and space, and had stints at Topos, KieranTimberlake, and Foster + Partners.
Celeste Layne - Celeste Layne is an urban planner by training — software engineer by profession having previously worked at Paddle8 and Knotel. As an educator, Celeste has developed curricula for General Assembly’s Software Engineering Immersive. Currently, she leads courses in public interest technology and programming for spatial practices as an adjunct associate professor in the Architecture Department at Columbia GSAPP. The work she does there feeds her practice.
Celeste received a graduate degree in City and Regional Planning from the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design and is a co-founder of the Architechie New York Chapter, a community founded by architects and designers who now work in technology fields with a mission to bring more diverse backgrounds to the tech industry.
Danil Nagy - Danil is a designer, coder, and educator with a passion for creating technology to transform the building industries. Trained as an architect, he has developed expertise across a diverse set of fields including professional practice, research, and software development. Danil loves solving complex problems through software solutions that combine technical state-of-the-art with sensible design and a deep focus on user experience. His specialties are computational design, automation, and front-end web development. Danil teaches architecture and technology at Columbia University and runs his own consultancy called Colidescope.
Dare Brawley - Dare Brawley is a designer and researcher. Her work focuses on the interactions of data infrastructures, housing, and spatial politics using methods from critical urban studies and geographic information systems. She is currently a City Research Scientist with the Center on Housing Opportunity, Mobility, and Equity (HOME) at the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development.
At Columbia GSAPP she teaches courses on mapping and spatial research methods, and on drawing as a tool for collective decision making. Her work has been exhibited and published by the Venice Architecture Biennale, Storefront for Art and Architecture, The Architectural League, and the Chicago Architecture Biennial. She received her M.S. in Urban Planning from Columbia, GSAPP and holds a BA in Architecture from Barnard College. She recently co-edited Ways of Knowing Cities (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2019).
Jia Zhang - Jia Zhang is a Mellon Associate Research Scholar at Columbia University's Center for Spatial Research. She experiments with communicating quantitative and qualitative data visually. She is currently building projects that deal with public facing data of the urban environment and interactive tools that allow individuals to directly engage with urban information for their own well-being. Jia completed her PhD at MIT’s Media Lab.
Luc Wilson - Luc is a Director at Kohn Pedersen Fox and leads KPF Urban Interface (ui.kpf.com,) an urban technology team focused on computational design, software development, and data analytics. The UI team has worked on over 400 projects globally ranging from master plans to rezonings to supertall towers. His work and research has been published in both academic and popular publications from Architectural Science Review and the Economist to Wired and the New York Times
Violet Whitney - Adj. Assistant Professor,- Measuring the Great Indoors, Datamining the City, Sidewalk Lab classes. Researcher for future cities, geo-data + simulation, ai tracking, equity and entrepreneurship, sharing economy, parametric fabrication, networked human. Director of Project Management, Sidewalk Labs.
Zachary White - Zachary White is a designer, artist and researcher with a focus on experimental use of emerging technologies. His work explores critical and creative applications of digital representation, web development, physical computing, and fabrication. He is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia GSAPP, where he co-teaches Architectural Drawing and Representation I, and Director of Technology Development at FullStack Modular.
William Martin - William is a technologist, design researcher, and product leader. He is cofounder of Spatial Pixel, an AI research and design studio focused on empowering people with digital and spatial agency. Originally trained as an architect, he has held roles as an interaction designer, software engineer, professor (at Yale and NYIT), head of product, and director of product management. Most recently, he served as director of AI at Consensys, a web3 and blockchain software company. He teaches Spatial AI and Colloquium I in the MS CDP program at Columbia GSAPP.
