Olga Mesa will present an approach towards architectural design called Performance2 developed with Nathan Fash, her partner at Nuvola Studio, which pairs the social, cultural, and communicative forms of performance with quantifiable characteristics such as heat transfer, structural integrity, and energy use.
Projects at various scales and applications that take advantage of material properties and geometric principles will be presented to illustrate this perspective. The presentation will draw from the work of her non-profit, research, teaching and the beginnings of her creative process, pointing towards design that promotes a deeper understanding and appreciation of our environment, where architectural interventions are conceived as mediators that establish meaningful connections with our context instead of separating us from it.
Mesa is an Associate Professor at Roger Williams University and along with Nathan Fash, a partner of Nuvola Studio, a non-profit organization with the mission to leverage research, architectural design, construction, and material innovation to enhance education, the environment, culture, and communities.
As an architectural designer, researcher, and educator, Olga is interested in the accord between form, forces, and performance and how this interaction manifests in material systems. Her primary research involves investigating how formal orders emerge from processes and contextual forces, and how, with the inclusion of cultural parameters, architectural form can develop analogously to respond to a specific context. Her work in architectural design as well as her research on dynamic building skins, material systems and innovative fabrication techniques has been the subject of numerous conference presentations, publications, and workshops nationally and internationally.
Olga has taught architectural design studios and seminars at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Northeastern University (NEU), Graz University of Technology (TU Graz), and at the Universidad Tecnológica Equinoccial (UTE) where along with her students researched, designed, and built projects located in the Ecuadorian rainforest.
Co-director of Architecture at Roger Williams University, Olga has practiced professionally in the United States since 2000, among others at Harvard Material Processes and Systems Group (MaP+S), 3six0 Architecture and Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects. Olga earned a Master of Design Studies and Technology with Distinction from Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), receiving the prestigious Daniel Schodek Award for Technology and Sustainability. She holds a Bachelor of Architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) receiving the AIA Henry Adams Gold Medal for design excellence.
Learn more at https://www.nuvolastudio.org/
