Dana Cupkova

Associate Professor Carnegie Mellon University

  • Pittsburgh PA

Dana Cupkova is a co-founder and design director of EPIPHYTE Lab, an architectural design and research collaborative.

Contact

Carnegie Mellon University

View more experts managed by Carnegie Mellon University

Biography

Previously an Assistant Professor, Dana Cupkova holds Associate Professorship at the Carnegie Mellon School of Architecture and is a co-founder and design director of EPIPHYTE Lab, an architectural design and research collaborative. From 2005 to 2012 she was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Cornell University Department of Architecture. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of ACADIA and is Track Chair of SoA’s Masters of Science in Sustainable Design (MSSD) program.

Cupkova's design work engages the built environment at the intersection of ecology, computationally driven processes, and systems analysis. In her research, she interrogates the relationship between design-space and ecology as it engages computational methods, thermodynamic processes, and experimentation with geometrically driven performance logic.

Cupkova's design work has been published internationally in professional venues such as Dwell, The Architectural Review, Green Building & Design, The Cornell Journal of Architecture, Architect's Newspaper, International Journal of Architectural Computing and presented at many academic conferences.

Areas of Expertise

Advanced Manufacturing
Architecture
Energy
Sustainability
Computational Design

Media Appearances

Cardoso Llach Curates Computational Design Exhibition

Carnegie Mellon University News  online

2021-11-03

Specifically, the show illuminates the 20th Century emergence of new methods for design representation, simulation and manufacturing linked to digital computers' capacities for information processing and display, and reflects on their contemporary repercussions across architecture, art and design. Along with a selection of historical materials, works by 30 contemporary creators are displayed including Philip Beesley, Felicia Davis and Delia Dumitrescu, and Rafael Lozano Hemmer, as well as by CMU faculty including Dana Cupkova, Ramesh Krishnamurti, and Golan Levin. A team of the School of Architecture's Computational Design students, including Jinmo Rhee, Emek Erdolu, Erik Ulberg, Maria Vlachostergiou and Mali Tribune, contributed to the show's curation and design, and to the preparation of several interactive pieces on display in Montréal.

View More

Panel, Material Responsibility: Mollie Claypool, Dana Cupkova, and Achim Menges

ArchDaily  online

2021-09-17

Presentations from Mollie Claypool (The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL), Dana Cupkova (Carnegie Mellon School of Architecture), and Achim Menges (University of Stuttgart Institute for Computational Design and Construction), will be followed by a panel discussion with Taubman College faculty.

View More

Epiphyte Lab creates architecture "with empathy to all species"

Dezeen  online

2020-07-06

Dana Cupkova, an associate professor at the Carnegie Mellon School of Architecture, founded the firm in 2009 alongside her late collaborator Kevin Pratt, with the aim of creating architecture that "acts like an epiphyte".

View More

Social

Industry Expertise

Research
Architecture and Planning
Education/Learning

Accomplishments

Unrestricted University Fellowship

School of the Arts and Architecture at UCLA

Mimi Perloff Award

School of the Arts and Architecture at UCLA

Kate Neal Kinley Memorial Fellowship

School of the Arts and Architecture at UCLA

Education

School of the Arts and Architecture at UCLA

M.Arch.

Architecture and Urban Design

Slovak University of Technology

Professional degree of Engineer Architect

Architecture and Urban Design

Event Appearances

Greening the Urban Environment

CMUThink  Pittsburgh, PA

Articles

AI, architecture, accessibility, and data justice—ACADIA special issue

International Journal of Architectural Computing

2023

n recent years, the field of architectural research has trended towards rapid evolution as new digital technologies that integrate artificial intelligence (AI) into design, representation, and production have become more prominent. As with any paradigm shift and rapid emergence of transformative technology, new tensions and fears of human distancing away from acts of design and making arise. Outside of architecture, AI already plays a significant role in fields such as engineering, IT, and the social/political sciences, with a deepening discourse on its effect on humanity, and the ethics of its labor.

View more

Impact and collective empathy

International Journal of Architectural Computing

2020

The prevalence of ubiquitous computing offers new territories for engagement within design and technology. As the world’s resources decline and conditions of scarcity and inequality define many communities, the role of architectural design must shift towards amplifying impact. Investments in technological innovation have historically been used to augment or restore dwindling resources via efficient material productions and assemblies.

View more

Cradling Bodies: Trajectories of Minds, Objects and Enclosures

Digital Fabrication in Interior Design

2021

The trajectory of Digital Fabrication in Interior Design: Body, Object, Enclosure engages the effects of technology's poetics and pragmatics on style, materiality, formal language and spatial concepts. Embedded electromechanical systems within the body of a panel enable directed communication based on relationship of material mass, biofeedback and sensed human brainwave. In the century-long process of humankind humanizing nature, the power of our technology has asserted control over natural systems, and is finally reaching a breaking point.

View more

Show All +