Zach Cohen, 2019-2021 Yessios Visiting Assistant Professor

The Knowlton School is pleased to announce Zach Cohen as a Yessios Visiting Assistant Professor for 2019-2021. The Fellowship provides a residency to investigate a specific project related to emerging digital fabrication tools and related technologies.

Zach Cohen, 2019-2021 Yessios Visiting Assistant Professor

The Knowlton School is pleased to announce Zach Cohen as a Yessios Visiting Assistant Professor for 2019-2021. The Fellowship provides a residency to investigate a specific project related to emerging digital fabrication tools and related technologies, and to produce within the Fellowship period a lecture, exhibition and workshops concerning that work.

Cohen earned his Master of Science in Architecture Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2018, where he received the Arthur Rotch Special Prize for Academic Achievement. He was a researcher at the MIT Self-Assembly Lab, and taught courses in digital fabrication and design at MIT and the Wentworth Institute of Technology. He also earned a Bachelor of Architecture from Carnegie Mellon University with highest honors.

Prior to his study at MIT, Cohen practiced at nARCHITECTS, Steven Holl Architects and Marvel Architects in New York. He recently co-founded his own architectural design practice called commoncraft, which is based out of Brooklyn, New York.

Through his research and practice, Cohen has cultivated a strong interest in conducting material investigations and philosophical through digital fabrication. He is specifically interested in methods of digital craft and the sociomateriality of architect-machine interactions. He has explored these curiosities through the development of a novel architectural design approach called “machine delay fabrication,” which he will evolve during his residency project at the Knowlton School.

Machine delay is the time taken by a machine to do its work; it is a phenomenon found in all machines. “Machine delay fabrication makes visible this latent, yet ubiquitous, phenomenon and our unknowing acquiescence to it. Further, and more importantly, it proposes machine delay as a technique to materialize the temporality of digital systems,” explained Cohen. “Once these delays are materialized, architectural designers can work with them in order to speculate on emergent material processes, alternative digital aesthetics, and reconfigurations of architectural design workflows.

Zach Cohen will join Yessios Visiting Assistant Professor Galo Cañizares during the 2019-2020 academic year at the Knowlton School.