Agostino Nickl

Q1. What brought you here, to this point of wanting to embark on a doctoral programme at ITA?

Already during my undergraduate studies, I became interested in digital fabrication and digital design methods. Later, during my master degree at the Bartlett, I took things a bit further. Being taught by Smout Allen and You+Pea, I started to think about how video games and augmented reality (AR) relate to architecture. It became clear to me, that architectural practice is not fixed, but something to be constantly reinvented and reimagined. I still find it liberating to think that we, as architects, are not necessarily limited to bricks and mortar. Instead, we can think of space in much broader terms: the space we experience with geolocated apps, the space we look at through AR, and the space we navigate on the internet or in a videogame. In this sense, I think that the ‘digital’ not only started to allow us to design interesting shapes or to fabricate things robotically, but also fundamentally challenged the very idea of how we think of space, and what a building does to it. These are some of the notions that I explore in my PhD.

Q2. Your Master’s degree work was very timely, right?

My final year started when Pokémon GO came out! I remember having been intrigued to see how the city became a playboard to some, while others went to work. I was then not yet looking at artificial intelligence (AI), but more at how processes of scanning, playing and augmenting reality could open new ways of designing and building cities. My thesis project imagined a self-organized community building a new city – a Low-Res City – in which the boundaries between game and reality, digital and physical, get blurred. This also involved making a massive physical model, using all sorts of digital fabrication techniques, including novel ones, which I called augmented carving and papercasting.

Q3. Were you able to take your interest and skills into practice?

Yes! After Bartlett, I worked for several years as a designer and consultant at Arup Digital Studio in London. I was part of a very exciting, young team set up by Dan Hill, exploring how digital design methods, such as UX and human-centred design, could be applied to the built environment. In parallel, I was also teaching two design studios and a theory course. I was very lucky, to find myself on that dual track of practice and academic teaching.

Q4. And then…?

Combining these two worlds was also challenging at times, and I did not have much time to pick up my own research, which I enjoyed a lot during my studies. The thought of a doctorate crossed my mind sometimes. However, it was only during the pandemic that I took the initiative and applied for the ITA Fellowship position, which I was lucky enough to get. In a way, I went into lockdown in London and re-emerged in Zürich! It was a big change, but I am very happy to have found here a place to learn, play and explore.

Q5. Why ITA?

Since my undergraduate, I became familiar with, and excited by the work of Prof. Benjamin Dillenburger, a former student of Prof. Ludger Hovestadt. While doing research for my written thesis, I came across the publications that came out of the Chair of Digital Architectonics he set up, and, more recently, Studio Meteora. I knew that there was a great theoretical legacy in thinking about digital architecture. In this sense, it was obvious to me to apply for the ITA Fellowship with Ludger as a supervisor. In addition, the fellowship is fully funded, which means I can just focus on my research, making studying here a real privilege.

Q6. What makes ITA a unique research place?

Here I have access to a community of people I share many interests with – for example, AI, architecture, theory, and everything digital – this is special. I am lucky to have very interesting colleagues and great supervisors, with whom I can discuss my research. And then, it’s great seeing the amazing student work coming out of this place. As doctoral fellows, we are, of course, also encouraged to venture out. For example, I took mixed reality classes at the Computer Science Department at ETH, and philosophy seminars at TU Vienna.

Q7. Since being here, how has your research evolved? Where are you heading with it?

At the start, I was very focused on AR. Then, I moved towards more abstract ideas about how to get to terms with the digital world. Now, it is more about mathematical ways of thinking, and the invisible mechanics behind machine learning, which are rewiring the world as we speak right now. In my PhD, I explore how architects, with the help of AI, can play with things and the world they are part of in new ways.

Q8. Have there been any major surprises along the way?

Yes, I learned to code! And this is something that I could not foresee – I tried a couple of times, but I never had the time nor patience to commit myself properly. But with some encouragement from Ludger, and more time on my hands, I was able to focus on it for a couple of months. Now, rarely a day passes without me writing some lines of code.

Q9. Ultimately, what is the big idea behind your research? What mission are you on?

I am not on a mission, I am on a quest! The speed at which AI is developing today is astounding, AR is also coming of age. Not entirely unlike a quest in a video game, as a doctoral student, I am on a research quest to explore this digital world – without necessarily knowing where I will end up. And I don’t mean this metaphorically – a large chunk of my research is questing a huge corpus of multi-modal data. This requires custom methods to be invented, including coding machine learning models as mathematical landscapes to query and several guide models to help me not get lost. If this seems a bit far-fetched for architectural research, it is important to me to show that it is not. In a sense, architecture has always made use of cutting-edge technologies to join things in new ways, and today’s fast pace of development should not put us off but ignite our architectural imagination to figure out what to do with them.

Interview by Ewa Maciejewski, 15 June 2023.