The Graduate School of Design is pleased to announce the appointment of Andrew Witt (GSD MArch ’07, MDesS ’02) as Assistant Professor in Practice in Architecture, effective July 1, 2014.
At the GSD, Witt is currently Lecturer in Architecture and the co-founder of the Design Geometry Lab, where he collaborates with manufacturers, software developers, and cultural institutions to research the mathematics of morphology, including the generative, historical, and industrial implications of geometry on architecture. He previously served as Director of Research at Gehry Technologies (GT), where he developed prototypes for new design tools, and as director at GT’s Paris office, where he consulted on parametric design, geometric approaches, and integrated practice for clients including Gehry Partners, Ateliers Jean Nouvel, UN Studio, and Coop Himmelb(l)au. Witt has lectured widely, including at Yale, Princeton, the Bartlett, MIT, Stanford, UCLA, ETH, EPFL, and Angewandte.
Trained as both an architect and mathematician, Witt has particular interests in technically synthetic and logically rigorous approaches to form. His work explores the interrelationship between perception and topology, as well as the relationship of architecture into deductive and convergent methods encapsulated in digital processes. Witt has been involved in developing novel mathematical, mechanical, and material methods to realize some of the world’s most geometrically complex buildings.
His recently released book, Light Harmonies: The Rhythmic Photographs of Heinrich Heidersberger documents an ongoing historical project to excavate the epistemic underpinnings of digital design in the productive exchanges between mathematics, machinery, and architecture in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His work is also published in AD, Log, 306090, Surface, Space, Linear Algebra and its Applications, and Linear and Multilinear Algebra, and is exhibited at the Storefront for Art and Architecture.
Witt received his MArch (with distinction, AIA medal) and an MDesS (History and Theory, with distinction) from Harvard GSD.