Daniel Cardoso Llach

Daniel Cardoso Llach is an architect, design scholar, and researcher interested in issues of automation in design, interdisciplinary creativity, human-machine interaction, and technological cultures in architecture and design. He teaches architecture in the School of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University as an associate professor, where he chairs the Master of Science in Computational Design program and co-directs the CoDe Lab.

Cardoso Llach's work explores problems ranging from social and cultural aspects of automation in design, the politics of representation and participation in software, and new methods for using data to visualize design as a socio-technical phenomenon. His recent research includes a book on the cultural history of Computer-Aided Design and numerically controlled machinery that examines how postwar technological projects shaped conceptions of design informing current architectural practices: Builders of the Vision: Software and the Imagination of Design (Routledge, 2015).

A scholar committed to fostering critical and inquisitive perspectives on design technologies, Cardoso Llach has lectured extensively and conducted numerous workshops on computational design in universities across the globe including Harvard, Cornell, and MIT. His students’ work has been shown in venues including the New York Center for Architecture, the New York Guggenheim, the Beijing Biennale and TED. He has published articles and essays in AD, Design Issues, Thresholds, and IJAC among others. He has co-chaired the editorial board of SIGRADI, and regularly serves in the scientific committee of conferences and journals including IJAC, CAADRIA and SIGGRAPH.

Cardoso Llach holds a Master’s of Science and a Ph.D. in Architecture: Design and Computation from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a B. Arch from Universidad de los Andes. He has consulted as a computational design specialist for Gehry Technologies and Kohn Pedersen Fox, among others, and practiced as an independent licensed architect and media designer in his native Bogotá.