Kyle Steinfeld

Kyle Steinfeld is an architect who works with code and lives in Oakland. Through his unique hybrid practice of creative work, scholarly research, and software development, he seeks to reveal certain overlooked capacities of computational design; he finds no disharmony between the rational and whimsical, the analytical and uncanny, the lucid and bizarre. His work cuts across media, and is expressed through a combination of visual, formal, and spatial material. Across these, we find an undermining of the authoritative and imperative voice that is so often bestowed upon the results of computational processes, and find in its place a range of alternative voices.

His creative work at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and Environmental Design has been exhibited at the NeurIPS workshop on Machine Learning for Creativity and design in 2017 and 2018, and has been published in Towards Data Science.

In his academic and scholarly work, he seeks to illuminate the dynamic relationship between the creative practice of design and computational design methods, thereby enabling a more inventive, informed, responsive, and responsible practice of architecture. He is the author of a number of works of software design tools, and has published widely on the subject of design and computation. He is the author of “Geometric Computation: Foundations for Design“, a foundational text that demystifies computational geometry for an audience of architecture students and design professionals. He has been the recipient of a number of research grants and fellowships; he was an IDEA fellow at Autodesk in 2014, and a Hellman Fellow in 2012.

As an educator, Kyle teaches core courses in design and architectural representation, and seminars in design computation at both the Graduate and Undergraduate levels.

In a previous life as a professional architect, Kyle worked with and consulted for a number of design firms, including Skidmore Owings and Merrill, Acconci Studio, Kohn Petersen Fox Associates, Howler/Yoon, Diller Scofidio Renfro, and TEN Arquitectos.

Kyle holds a Masters of Architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and a Bachelor’s Degree in Design from the University of Florida (UF).