Tuesday, 26.05.2026, 17:15 live @ i.sd Foyer

Responsive Envelopes | Regional Transitions

How do we design for change? How do we anticipate and stage transformation? The world is anything but stable. Firmitas may no longer be the aspiration of an architecture of our time. In this lecture, Kathy Velikov and Geoffrey Thün will present a series of projects developed by RVTR that explore the priority of transformation and range from dynamic material systems prototyping to the wholesale re-imagining of regional economies informed by energy and carbon transitions. (www.rvtr.com)

Kathy Velikov and Geoffrey Thün are professors of architecture at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College where Velikov serves as Associate Dean for Research and Creative Practice, and Thün serves as Associate Vice President for Research: Social Sciences, Humanities and the Arts.
They are founding partners in the research-based practice RVTR, a platform to advance environmentally adaptive, technologically enabled, and climate positive built environments through speculation, prototyping, and visualization of responsive architectural material assemblies, resilient multifunctional urban infrastructures, and territorial practices for decarbonization. These operational scales are tied together through a complex systems approach; one that articulates the multiplicity of actors, forces, and contexts surrounding a given situation and leverages these multivalent and sometimes contradictory agents toward ecologically integrated and synthetic design work.
RVTR’s design research has been widely published and exhibited, including at the Venice Bienalle, and their work is supported by a wide range of federal agencies, philanthropies and industry partners. Velikov and Thün are co-authors of Infra Eco Logi Urbanism (Park Books, 2015). Velikov is co-editor of Ambiguous Territory: Architecture, Landscape, and the Postnatural (Actar, 2022)