Maria Yablonina is an architect, researcher and artist working in the field of computational design and digital fabrication in architecture. Her practice explores new means of interaction with an architectural space through technology; custom, task-specific fabrication machines; and soft material systems. She works at the intersection of architecture and robotics, producing spaces and architectural objects that can construct themselves and change in real time, potentially becoming interaction devices.

Maria has been commissioned and exhibited by institutions including Milan Design Week, Ars Electronica, Kapelica Gallery (Ljubljana); and The Cooper Union. In her research, she has collaborated internationally with institutions including Autodesk Pier 9 (San Francisco), ETH Zurich, WeWork (New York), and Bartlett School of Architecture (London).

Currently Maria is a doctoral researcher and tutor at the Institute for Computational Design and Construction, Faculty of Architecture, University of Stuttgart.

Talk: Robot Ecologies: Smaller Machines = Larger Structures?

Today the discourse of digital fabrication in the context of architectural research is dominated by the image of an industrial robot arm performing complex movements to produce complex geometry. But what happens when we move beyond appropriation of available hardware towards architecture-specific machines and devices?

Envisioning an entire ecology of machine species designed specifically to manipulate material at an architectural scale opens up a conversation about the role of robotic creatures in architecture beyond construction. A smaller fabrication machine capable of navigating an existing architectural space and safely operating next to a human implies that a fabrication process can be executed on site, and more importantly does not have to be finite, venturing into the topics of adaptive and reconfigurable spaces.