University Design Research Fellows

Chandler Ahrens
Constance Vale
Kelley Van Dyck Murphy

Chandler Ahrens

Chandler Ahrens, AIA, is an Associate Professor at Washington University in St. Louis and a founding partner at AVV A. His research focuses on the intersection of material investigations, environmental phenomena, and computational design processes. Chandler co-founded OSA and a senior project designer at Morphosis Architects. He has been a Visiting Professor at the Confluence Institute for Innovation and Creative Strategies in Lyon, France and previously taught at Woodbury University in Los Angeles.

Constance Vale

Constance Vale is a registered architect and a founding partner of AVV A. She is also the Chair of Undergraduate Architecture and an Associate Professor at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research and creative practice span the interdisciplinary space between architecture, art, theater, and technology. Constance is also the editor and co-author of Mute Icons & Other Dichotomies of the Real in Architecture. She received a MacDowell Fellowship to develop her manuscript Digital Decoys: An Index of Architectural Deceptions. She has held previous teaching appointments at SCI-Arc and University of California, Los Angeles. Vale earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design and a Master of Architecture from Yale School of Architecture.

Kelley Van Dyck Murphy

Kelley Van Dyck Murphy (Team Lead) is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at Washington University in St. Louis and a founding partner of AVV A. She is the director of WashU’s Alberti Program: Architecture for Young People and the pre-college Architecture Discovery Program. Her design-based research explores the use of material processes and emerging technology to engage themes of identity, authorship, and context. This work often takes form through translation, exploring how material practice and craft are entwined with larger cultural narratives.

Previous Work

Flora Field

Flora Field is a digitally designed and fabricated reconsideration of architectural ornament in the form of a 3D-printed terracotta screen wall located in the courtyard of Adler and Sullivan’s iconic Wainwright Building. The Wainwright Building, known for its elaborate architectural ornamentation, is clad in terracotta formed by casting clay in individual hand-carved molds. This process has largely remained the same for centuries. By reconceiving the casting process of the Wainwright Building ornament as an additive 3D printed material system, the project explores the role of emerging digital technologies with an understanding of the history of clay-based building materials. This process replaces the unsustainable, fixed plastic materials of traditional 3D printing with clay: a sustainable, locally sourced, and reusable medium with deep roots in St. Louis’s rich architectural history. The project references Sullivan’s ornamentation while aspiring to engage passersby, instilling a new relationship with this historical building and downtown St. Louis.

Mini City

The Mini City is an immersive environment in which building form, public space, material characteristics, and atmospheres are controlled and transformed over time, similar to a film set. Research is being conducted in the environment to test future urban design and architecture proposals related to the development of smart technologies in cities. In order to work in relation to autonomous agents and machine vision, the project composites digital and hand fabrication techniques that shape three-dimensional form with those that apply two-dimensional color and image—3D printing, laser cutting, CNC routing, and wood shop tools—to best achieve equivalency with real-world conditions. Material qualities like color, texture, sheen, opacity, translucency, albedo, and luminosity are tuned to sensing technologies and layered onto architectural form and urban space.

View Finder

View Finder is a permanent installation commissioned by 21c Museum Hotel for their location in St. Louis, Missouri, in 2023. View Finder acts as a vision machine that directs visitors’ eyes to key views and creates a continuously transforming image of the surrounding city. Located on the edge of an elevated plaza, the large mass disrupts the view to the surrounding city and is punctured by a series of four voids lined with polished stainless steel. Each void is aligned to a specific view and its geometry is tuned to reflect certain elements in the environment, juxtaposing reflected flipped views with clear views that creates a kaleidoscopic effect. Our ocular lenses flip our view of the world on our retina, but our brain inverts that to perceive the world right-side up. View Finder requires us to think about the perception of images to understand the world around us and our position in it.