Karl Ahlund

Brief description of my doctoral project: The Living Model: From Architectural Intent to Fabrication Intelligence through Relational Data

Buildings are produced through disconnected phases where each handoff between design, engineering, and fabrication loses vital context that came before it. My research develops graph-based relational data models and tools that encode architectural intent, fabrication operations, and assembly dependencies into a knowledge structure that grows throughout the development of a building. Using automated timber construction as a testing ground, the project combines robotic fabrication with generative AI to enable material-aware generation of building components. The goal is a temporal system where architects, engineers, and fabricators work from the same connected source of information that adapts and grows throughout the development and future use of the building.