Dr Alberto Pugnale

Biography

Dr Alberto Pugnale is an Architect and Senior Lecturer in Architectural Design at the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning of The University of Melbourne. He is a co-director of the Advanced Digital Design + Fabrication (ADD+F) Hub.

In 2003, he graduated in “Architecture Sciences” (Bachelor level) at Politecnico di Torino. In 2006 he graduated with Honours in “Architecture and Construction” (Master of Science level) at the same university, and in 2010 he got a PhD in “Architecture and Building Design”.

In 2007, he won the IASS HANGAI Prize, an international contest of research papers related to the field of shell and spatial structures for young researchers under 30. In 2008 he won a research scholarship granted by the ISI Foundation, Lagrange Project (Turin, Italy), related to the study of complex architectural and structural bodies. In 2023, he received the Tsuboi Award for the most meritorious paper published in the Journal of the IASS in the preceding calendar year.

From 2010 to 2012, he was Assistant Professor at Aalborg University, Denmark. He has been an invited lecturer in Italy, France, Switzerland, China, Mexico and the United States.

At present, he is a member of the ‘International Association for Shell and Spatial Structures’ (IASS) and of the ‘Society of Architectural Historians Australia and New Zealand’ (SAHANZ). He is also a reviewer for international journals and a member of the Editorial Board of the “Nexus Network Journal” and the “International Journal of Space Structures”.

For more information, check Alberto's personal website.

Recent publications

• Expertise, playfulness and analogical reasoning: three strategies to train Artificial Intelligence for design applications
• An Artificial Intelligence Agent That Synthesises Visual Abstractions of Natural Forms to Support the Design of Human-Made Habitat Structures

Featured projects

• Computing and design thinking