Design x Technology Series: Quan Thai and Teng Teng

Come to CoAD for our first Fall 2026 Design x Technology Series talk featuring LTU assistant professors, Quan Thai and Teng Teng. Although speaking together on the same stage, their topics will be different.

Quan’s talk is titled, Soft Infrastructures: Mediating Space, Identity and Practice while Teng will speak on Beyond Boundaries: Reimagining How We Build and Design. 

These informative presentations will be led by Architecture Department Chair and Associate Professor Gretchen Wilkins and will provide our guests with a thoughtfully guided interview.

Soft Infrastructures: Mediating Space, Identity and Practice

Infrastructure can be understood as the tectonic, the fixed, and the measurable: those that form complex systems that physically connect buildings, spaces, and communities. This lecture instead frames the informal, the subjective, and the experiential: the soft infrastructures as a determinant for impactful making within the built environment.

Drawing on over a decade of practice across firms and scales ranging from built and conceptual projects, alongside work that bridges community and academia with the design studio, this talk positions the architect as a spatial interlocutor: one who mediates between systems to explore design through nonsingular methods. Tracing the overlap between the economic and social values embedded in a project, it highlights how architects mediate between hard and soft infrastructures to envision design processes as a spectrum to encompass broader needs beyond the normative.

Rather than treating practice, academia, and identity as fixed systems to operate between, this talk argues for a practice built on mediation as the operator — where divergent identities and differences converge through design, forming overlapping, widening circles around a larger question: who gets to shape space for whom, and on whose terms. 

Students who attend will better understand the research trajectory of faculty members, and hopefully wish to engage in research as a GRA or TA. 

Beyond Boundaries: Reimagining How We Build and Design

Contemporary construction remains fundamentally dependent on the assembly of discrete components. Materials are cut, trimmed, joined, layered, and finished through multiple stages of production, generating substantial material waste while separating architectural form from material performance and fabrication. As computational design enables increasingly complex geometries, this gap between what can be designed and how buildings are physically produced becomes more pronounced.

This lecture explores an alternative approach to architectural materialization based on multi-material additive manufacturing and functionally graded materials. Inspired by biological systems in which material composition changes continuously according to local functional requirements, the research asks whether architectural components can similarly transition between structural, thermal, and other performance characteristics without relying on conventional layered assemblies.

Central to this work is the development of a single-nozzle, active-mixing additive manufacturing system capable of continuously varying material composition during fabrication. Coupled with custom computational workflows, the system allows material distribution to be programmed alongside geometry and toolpath design. Experimental studies investigate combinations of dense structural materials and porous insulating materials, producing components in which load-bearing and thermal functions are integrated through continuous material gradients.

The lecture presents this research across multiple materials and scales, from thermoplastic and clay-based prototypes to large-scale robotic concrete printing. It also examines the development of low-carbon concrete incorporating diatomaceous material, where reductions in cement content, increased porosity, carbon uptake, structural performance, and printability are treated as interconnected design variables.

These projects frame additive manufacturing not simply as a new method for producing complex geometry, but as a means of reconsidering architectural tectonics. By coordinating geometry, material composition, structural behavior, environmental performance, and fabrication within a single computational framework, the work investigates how buildings might be produced with fewer discrete interfaces, less material waste, and more precisely tailored material use.

Participants will gain a practical framework for connecting computational design, material performance, and digital fabrication. 

CoAD students, this event counts towards your Experience Passport. 

CEU: This event equals 1 professional architecture credit towards licensure requirements. ​ Please note that LTU is not a registered AIA CE provider. By virtue of having a NAAB-accredited architecture program, the State of Michigan authorizes LTU to offer continuing education credit. A list of state-approved HSW subjects can be found on their licensing website by searching the page for 'HSW subjects for continuing education'.

As part of CoAD's Design x Technology Series, this event is free and open to the public. Guests may watch online or on campus. Register for the location/viewing details.

Quan Thai is a licensed architect, educator, and researcher whose work bridges professional practice, community engagement, and spatial inquiry. Assistant Professor at Lawrence Technological University, he previously served as the inaugural Emerging Practitioner Teaching Fellow at the University of Waterloo, where he conceived TO·BE·LONGING: Portraits of Queer Living. Through mapping, installations, and exhibitions, his research creates opportunities for communities to participate in spatial dialogue — drawing on participatory visual and spatial methods to support communities in asserting spatial agency, and examining how queer identity informs and challenges normative models of living and belonging.

His practice, Never Only Architecture, brings a decade of experience from firms including SvN Architects + Planners (Toronto), Atelier Barda (Montreal), and WORKac (New York City), bridging design excellence with critical inquiry. He has partnered with community organizations including The 519, the Toronto Society of Architects, and Friends of Ontario Place to ensure his research is grounded in lived experience, advocating for alternative spaces defined by inclusivity, safety, and joy. TO·BE·LONGING was presented at DesignTO 2026, where it received the festival's Founders' Award, with further presentations forthcoming at conferences across Canada and the United States.

Teng Teng, PhD is an Assistant Professor at Lawrence Technological University. His work focuses on developing high-performance building components through the integration of novel construction materials and advanced fabrication systems, with an emphasis on design computation, robotics, and digital fabrication.

He received his PhD in architecture and building technology from the University of Pennsylvania. He also holds two master’s degrees from Cornell University and the University of Washington. Teng has taught and collaborated widely at Penn, Cornell, UW, and multiple universities in Asia, leading courses and workshops in design computation, robotics, and fabrication.

Prior to academia, he worked at CallisonRTKL as a project architect and computational design lead, contributing to more than 30 projects across Asia, the Middle East, and North America. His research and design work have been widely published and exhibited, and in 2025, he got elected as a member of the Board of Directors of the Association for Computer-Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA).