Meet Maya Przybylski, Associate Professor and Associate Director, Undergraduate Studies whose teaching, design practice and scholarship work together to clarify and speculate on the opportunities existing within computation in relation to architectural design.
Alina Turean’s Muscular Architecture project from the ParaMat Studio in 2019.
In addition to teaching in core first year studios, Maya has developed many avenues for exposing WA students to think, apply and position computation in an architectural context. In particular, her offerings for third-year option studios, System Stalker Lab and Parametric Space and Material Systems, see students build skills in computational thinking and develop their own material systems.
Soft Materials: How do our relationships with data, code implementation, hardware configurations and algorithms change when we consider these soft materials as part of a project’s material assembly?
Her current Soft Materials research project, recognizes the increasing interconnection between computational elements, material elements and project outcomes currently being developed through software-enabled, software-embedded design practices. This SSHRC-funded research enables architects to more effectively work with soft materials to achieve greater levels of synchronicity between a project’s physical and digital components, ensuring that they are working towards the same set of values, objectives and outcomes. Without this coordination, the ambitions for such work – seizing the capacity of information communication technologies (ICTs) to empower new and inclusive ways to organize, use and shape the built environment – are undermined.
New Material Anatomies: dissecting material assemblies as an interrelated hybrid construction of both hard and soft materials. (with Cameron Parkin, student support from Vincent Min and Alice Huang)
Maya’s research crosses the divide between humanities- and scientific-focused venues. She recently contributed a chapter to Architecture and the Smart City (Routledge 2019) and is preparing a contribution to The Routledge Handbook of Architecture, Urban Space and Politics (2021).
LinkLab (with David Correa)
Maya founded DATAlab -- a research group expanding information-centric design methodologies for the built world through design research programs and activities. The LinkLab project, in collaboration with David Correa, explores the integration of building sensors in a new UW building via a responsive installation that combines computation, digital fabrication and ICT.
Working from home requires new forms of connection.
DATAlab is also developing a new website to enable enhanced connection and engagement with the school community during times of remote learning, teaching and working. Stay tuned for the launch of the new site in the coming days!