Dr. Ryan Luke Johns

Ryan is an architect and roboticist who completed his doctorate at ETH Zurich within both the Gramazio and Kohler Chair of Architecture and Digital Fabrication (D-ARCH), and the Robotic Systems Lab (D-MAVT). His PhD work focused on combining the autonomous excavator HEAP with planning algorithms and workflows for the large-scale assembly of dry-stacked walls from irregular objects such as stone and demolition debris. This work produced some of the largest robotically fabricated structures in existence, including a permanent 65-meter wall built in Oberglatt, Switzerland from almost a thousand unique boulders that were autonomously localized, digitized, and placed by HEAP. Ryan has over a decade of experience applying robotic technologies to manufacturing, construction and design, and he has taught courses on robotics at Princeton University, Columbia University, the Vassar College department of Cognitive Science, and Rensselaer Polytechnic. In the 2010s, his experimental work as co-founder and principal of the design/research lab GREYSHED resulted in an array of international exhibitions, publications, and funded research projects on the topics of augmented materiality and context-aware computational design.