Expertise

Topics:  Advanced Manufacturing, Architecture, Energy, Sustainability, Computational Design

Industries: Research, Architecture and Planning, Education/Learning

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.

Media Experience

Epiphyte Lab creates architecture "with empathy to all species"  — Dezeen
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".

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

Cardoso Llach Curates Computational Design Exhibition  — Carnegie Mellon University News
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.