Area Head, Technology MDes area group

Andrew Witt is an Assistant Professor in Practice in Architecture at the GSD, teaching and researching in the relationship of geometry and machines to perception, design, assembly, and culture. Trained as both an architect and mathematician, he has a particular interest in a technically synthetic and logically rigorous approach to form.

He is also co-founder, with Tobias Nolte, of Certain Measures, a Boston/Berlin-based design futures and technology incubator that combines imagination and evidence for systemic and scalable approaches to spatial problems. Their clients include Audi, BMW, Futurium (the German federal museum of the future) and the Dubai Futures Foundation. The work of Certain Measures is in the permanent collection of the Centre Pompidou, and has been exhibited at the 2018 Pompidou show “Coding the World,” Le Laboratoie, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, and Ars Electronica, among others. Witt’s personal work has been featured at the Storefront for Art and Architecture. In 2017 Certain Measures were finalists for the Zumtobel Award in both the Young Professionals and Applied Innovation Categories.

Witt is a fellow of the Canadian Centre for Architecture and the Macdowell Colony, a Graham Foundation grantee, a World Frontiers Forum Pioneer (2018) and Young Pioneer (2017), and a 2015 nominee for the Chernikov Prize. Witt has lectured widely, including at the Venice Biennale, Library of Congress, Yale, Princeton, MIT, The Bartlett, The Berlage, Stanford, UCLA, Berkeley, ETH, and EPFL, and his research has been published in venues such as Log, Project, AD, Detail, Harvard Design Magazine, Surface, Space, Linear Algebra and its Applications, and Linear and Multilinear Algebra, and Issues in Science and Technology.  He is the author of “Light Harmonies” the first book devoted to the Rhythmograms of German proto-computational photographic hacker Heinrich Heidersberger.

He was previously Director of Research at Gehry Technologies and a director at GT’s Paris, France office, where he solved complex geometric challenges for clients including Gehry Partners, Ateliers Jean Nouvel, UN Studio, and Coop Himmelb(l)au, for projects such as the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Louvre Abu Dhabi, and Qatar National Museum. He also developed prototypes for new software design tools such as GTeam (now Trimble Connect, acquired by Trimble in 2014).

Witt received an M.Arch (with distinction, AIA medal, John E. Thayer Scholarship, Frederick Shelden Travelling Fellowship) and an M.Des (History and Theory, with distinction) from the GSD. He has an Erdős number of 3.