Negar Kalantar

Associate Professor, Interior Design and Architecture

Dr. Negar Kalantar research and practice lies at the intersection of architecture, science, and engineering. By bringing together digital and analog fabrication work-flows across scales, her interdisciplinary research practice broadly investigates the potency of transformable design principles, helping to create adaptive designs, building components and interior spaces that are adaptable and demonstrate real-time morphological changes into users and environment. Her current research focuses on applications of additive manufacturing technology (3-D printing) as a catalyst for innovation, to expand new ways of design in interactive and responsive environments. The main strength of her cross-disciplinary research is to bridge the recent advancements in additive manufacturing technologies with large-scale structures. She focuses on applications of robots in additive manufacturing technology as a catalyst of shifting not just how infrastructures are constructed today, but also transforming the way infrastructures are designed and built in the future from beginning to end.

Kalantar is the recipient of several awards and grants, including Autodesk Technology Center Grant 2018, the Dornfeld Manufacturing Vision Award 2018 (a National Science Foundation-sponsored accolade recognizing visionary concepts with the potential to influence the future of manufacturing investigation and education), 2017 Montague Teaching Excellence Scholar Award, the National Science Foundation EAGER Award 2015 for Initiative Research on “Interaction of Smart Materials for Transparent, Self-regulating Building Skins”, and X-Grant 2018 from the Texas A&M President’s Excellence Fund on developing sustainable material for 3-D printed buildings.

Kalantar has expertise in additive manufacturing (3D printing) and robot technologies. Before joining CCA, she was an assistant professor of Architecture at Texas A&M university where she headed up the Advanced Infrastructure Materials and Manufacturing (AIMM) Lab at the Center for Infrastructure Renewal (CIR).

She has been organizing national and international workshops on Additive manufacturing, robotic and material advancement in manufacturing and architecture. The outcome of her research was presented at Technical University of Vienna and Berlin, ETH Zurich, University of Maryland, Tehran University, Virginia Tech, Texas A&M University and New York 3Dprint SHOW. She has collaborated with firms in Dubai, Chicago and New York, including SOM and Gensler.