Digital Futures 2023: Novos Hibridismos

This session inaugurated the DigitalFutures talk series in Portuguese, bringing together five speakers from Brazil, Portugal, and Germany to discuss innovative computational methodologies applied to architecture and design. The event was part of the third edition of the DigitalFutures Summer Festival.

Mariana Cabugueira

Digital Architecture and the Metaverse

Mariana Cabugueira, Senior Architectural Designer at Zaha Hadid Architects, shared her journey from the School of Architecture in Lisbon and the Politecnico di Milano to the Architectural Association’s Design Research Laboratory in London. There, she trained in tools including Grasshopper, Maya, 3ds Max, After Effects, and C++ before joining ZHA’s competition cluster, where design must push beyond conventional boundaries. She discussed how Autodesk Maya serves as the studio’s primary tool and reflected on architects’ untapped potential in the metaverse, arguing that virtual worlds should be shaped by designers rather than game developers.

Rebeca Duque Estrada

Robotic Fabrication as a Bridge between Nature and Architecture

Rebeca Duque Estrada, PhD candidate at the Institute for Computational Design and Construction (ICD) at the University of Stuttgart, presented her research on fibrous tectonics and biomimetics. She demonstrated how biological composites such as collagen, cellulose, and chitin inspire new structural paradigms through their anisotropic properties and continuous filament logic. Her work included the Aero Chair, an ultra-light carbon fiber seat weighing just 300 grams and fabricated in three hours using a spider-web-inspired winding process, and the Maison Fibre pavilion at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale, a hybrid timber-fiber structure fabricated with collaborative robots that explored biologically-informed design at architectural scale.

Victor Sardenberg

Speculative Architecture and the Critique of Capital

Victor Sardenberg, doctoral researcher at Universidade Nova de Lisboa, delivered a provocative visual essay on architecture as image production. Through collages remixing iconic 20th-century buildings and a satirical startup pitch, he critiqued how neoliberal capitalism reduces architecture to a vehicle for capital accumulation, disconnecting value of use from value of exchange. He argued for the importance of utopian thinking and architects’ responsibility to imagine alternatives.

Paulo Duca

Selva Generativa and Computational Design in Practice

Paulo Duca, founder of Selva Generativa, presented his computational design practice rooted in a personal connection with nature from growing up on a farm in Bahia. His projects included Arena Arbor, a parametric event space designed and built in 30 days; Hotel Casulo with its biomimetic facade in Joao Pessoa; generative jewelry; geodesic dome classrooms; and urban parametric planning for Recife. He articulated his vision of a “generative jungle” where every artifact carries its own algorithmic DNA, capable of mutation and evolution.

Daniel Locatelli

Robotic System for Timber Assembly on the Construction Site

I presented my master’s thesis research, conducted at the University of Stuttgart with my colleague Nils Opgenorth, on developing a robotic fabrication system for gluing Cross-Laminated Timber (CLT) panels directly on construction sites. The work addressed a key limitation of CLT: panel connections remain the weakest point, constraining designs to linear spans and rectangular geometries. The proposed solution was a compact robotic clamping device that anchors into pre-drilled holes, applies pressure for adhesive curing, and can be removed and reused, eliminating the need for permanent fasteners or large-scale machinery.