Each year, Van Alen sponsors applicants seeking funding for architecture and urban design-related projects from the New York State Council for the Arts (NYSCA). We’re thrilled to congratulate this year’s recipient, Frank Melendez! Frank will be preparing his manuscript of Soft Robotic Architectures, a book focusing on recent robotics research in architecture. He will examine trends in the design of architectural systems that use soft robotic technologies to create new architectural forms, spaces, membranes, wearable devices, and interfaces that engage the human body and environment through adaptive feedback and haptic interactions.

Frank Melendez is an architectural designer, educator, and researcher. He is a partner at Augmented Architectures and bioMATTERS, LLC, based in New York City and London, and teaches at the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture, City College of New York. His practice, teaching, and research engage topics pertaining to architectural drawing, computational design, emerging materials, digital fabrication, and robotics. Frank is the author of Drawing from the Model (Wiley, 2019) and co-author of Data and Matter (Routledge, forthcoming 2020). He has held academic appointments at Carnegie Mellon University and Louisiana State University, and his work has been supported through grants, fellowships, and memberships including, the New York State Council of the Arts (NYSCA) / Van Alen Institute, the MacDowell Colony and NEW INC.