The Royal Danish Academy posts vacant PhD scholarship as of November 1st, 2024

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The Royal Danish Academy posts vacant PhD scholarship as of November 1st, 2024

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Job description

The PhD scholarship is posted in the following project: “Resource driven design and fabrication methods.”The Royal Danish Academy – Architecture, Design, Conservation invites applications for a PhD scholarship on the topic of: Resource driven design and fabrication methods.FrameworkThis call is for a 3 year fully funded PhD Scholarship integrated within the CITA (Centre for Information Technology and Architecture) research group at Institute of Architecture and Technology at the Royal Danish Academy – Architecture, Design, Conservation in the context of the EU EIC Project “RAW: Computation For A New Age Of Resource Aware Architecture: Waste-Sourced And Fast-Growing Bio-Based Materials”, funded by the European Union as part of Horizon Europe’s EIC Pathfinder program.. The PhD topic is digital design and fabrication with waste sourced timber and has a special focus on the development of methods to handle material variability in design and fabrication processes.The PhD student will be enrolled at CITA and supervised by the senior research team with project start November 1st, 2024. The application deadline is August 16th, 2024, at 12.00 noon CET.General Project SummaryRAW proposes a breakthrough resource model for architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) fostering a steep change in the way we design and fabricate our built environment, overcoming the fundamental limits that the natural variability sets within bio-based material streams for the green transformation of the industry. With a central focus on the alternative materials of waste-sourced and fast-growing materials, RAW assembles world-leading researchers and entrepreneurs in material sourcing, non-destructive material characterization, non-prescriptive computational design, and adaptive fabrication in a unique consortium to establish the foundation of a novel new resource model for AEC linking design, analysis and fabrication through a novel computational infrastructure and embracing the variability of resources, with the ambition to minimize waste, enable circularity, increase carbon storage in building and allow uptake of currently disregarded classes of bio-based materials and pave the way for novel aesthetic expressions and tectonics in architecture.The research takes place in an interdisciplinary and international consortium consisting of:

• The Royal Danish Academy (Center for Information Technology and Architecture)
• University Of Stuttgart (Institute of Building Structures and Structural Design (ITKE) and Institute of Computational Design and Construction (ICD))
• Danish Technological University (Department of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering)
• Lulea Technological University (Wood Science and Engineering)
• University Innsbruck (Department of Structural Engineering and Material Sciences)
• OMTRE A/S
• University of Leiden (Institute of Environmental Sciences).

It is expected that the communication, knowledge sharing and the ability to collaborate within the partnership through the use of labs and workshop facilities will grant the PhD with opportunities for extensive synergies with other research projects, support the scaling up and facilitate the PhD exchange.PhD FocusThe PhD takes place within the wider framework of the RAW project and will focus on reclaimed timber and its use in engineered timber, which is increasingly used for demanding building tasks.The current practice of high-volume timber production is based on the use of uniform timber grades. Pre-projects by the RAW consortium using virgin and reclaimed timber explore the utilisation of individual properties of timber elements to radically expand the wood qualities, that can be used in timber beams. Hereby, material is placed according to local performance demands in building elements, allowing to use large amount of low-quality timber, which is usually regarded as waste and incinerated.A major challenge in this context are the varying quantities, geometries and qualities of the waste-based resource and how to characterise, design and fabricate architectures with them. The PhD seeks to answer these questions and contribute to the development of the emerging circular practice with timber on material and data level.With a focus on reclaimed timber for novel Glue laminated Timber (GLT) assemblies and Timber systems the PhD examines data driven strategies to utilise the specific material data acquired from reclaimed timber with non-destructive testing and integrating the herein gained material performance predictions in digital design models. For this the PHD will work on the precise determination of individual timber qualities and collaborate with material scientist in RAW on utilising non-destructive technologies for quality assessment, as opposed to classical grading where heuristic rules bin the timber into classes with rather large property variations (CoV
20%) targeted for strength – the quantity with the largest aleatoric uncertainty – instead of stiffness – the determining quantity in timber construction.The PhD will develop with the RAW consortium a new resource driven non-prescriptive design model for biomaterial-based building elements, able to balance the specifications for building elements and the variability and availability of the resource. The PhD will develop herein a timber specific part combining the strengths of both simulation-based and data-driven methods for architectural design and material selection and allocation.

Utilising element specific data non-standard timber composites become tractable and emerging resource aware fabrication methods will be investigated, overcoming current limits in handling many individual elements of timber on a production floor. The data will allow for robotic deposition of individual elements in glued assemblies. Inline vision sensors in the fabrication process allow to (re-)identify timber elements based on cross checking their individual knot pattern with previously gained information overcoming current limits in the logistics for composite GLT systems and adaptive fabrication strategies with feedback loops are developed.The PHD project is finally embedded in larger considerations of future material resource flows and how circularity of building materials can be achieved. Within the context of RAW the PHD will partake in activities, that investigate the specific resource streams, processes and actors of waste-sourced timber and how this form and are formed by the research. As part of collaborative dissemination activities with the partners from industrial-ecology the PhD will have the opportunity to test and develop research results towards future industrial and societal perspectives in novel science fiction prototyping workshops. The resulting science fiction prototypes will be translated into more radical futures-scenarios and tested and developed in Master level Design Studios.MethodIn CITA, our mode of inquiry is characterized by an experimental and iterative process of physical and digital prototyping, testing, and evaluation which all form part of the research process itself. The PhD will collaborate with the wider project team of RAW on the development of three kinds of material evidence: speculative design probes allowing ideation, material prototypes enabling testing and demonstrators acting as full-scale proof-of-concepts and testbeds that integrate the developed methods.The PhD student will work directly and primarily with the tasks outlined above together with the support of the other project members. There is also a reciprocal obligation to contribute to other work-packages for the project where necessary. CITA’s participation in the project is led by Associate Professor Martin Tamke who will act as primary PhD supervisor in the supervision team, that can include further academic and industrial supervisors.Researcher’s Eligibility CriteriaA degree and master’s in architecture or other degree of equivalent relevancy is required. A demonstrated interest into bio-design, sustainability and timber will be essential.Furthermore, we expect that applicants demonstrate:

• Mature skills in appropriate computational modelling, simulation, machine learning and digital fabrication with timber.
• Knowledge into computational design strategies with variable resource.
• Competence in relevant programming and scripting languages
• Experience with adaptive systems and sensing.

Terms of employmentEnrolment takes place with a view to obtaining a PhD degree and leads to salaried fulltime employment for a period of three years in accordance with the agreement between the Danish Ministry of Finance and the Danish Confederation of Professional Associations, AC, protocol on graduate fellowships (annex 5). The salary consists of a seniority-based base salary and a non-pensionable allowance.The PhD program is structured under the provisions of Ministerial Order on the PhD Program at the Universities and Certain Higher Artistic Educational Institutions (PhD Order) no. 1039 of 27 August 2013 issued by the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Higher Education regarding PhD programs and PhD degrees.If you have completed a degree abroad, it will be assessed by the Danish Agency for International Education before employment can take place. Practical information can be found at .Application requirementsThere are no application forms. Applications must be written in Danish or English.Applications are submitted electronically and must include:

• A reflection on the stated architectural aims of the project in the form of proposed theoretical orientations, comparison to existing research, preliminary syllabus and a proposal of the principal methods to be employed in project development (max. 5 regular standard pages).
• CV.
• Documentation of educational merits, other qualifications and previous activities.
• A list of published papers/publications (if applicable).
• A list of anticipated publications and dissemination venues for the project.
• A portfolio of previous works and studies completed.

Please submit applications following the link below no later than August 16th, 2024, at 12.00 noon CET.For further information about the application requirements, please contact Ditte Dahl by e-mail at .Anyone who meets the requirement of an academic degree at a graduate level is encouraged to apply for the scholarship regardless of age, gender, race, religion or ethnicity.

Expected salary

Location

København

Job date

Sun, 07 Jul 2024 22:28:08 GMT

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