Ramon Elias Weber is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at UC Berkeley‘s Department of Architecture in the College of Environmental Design. At Berkeley he started the Spatial Systems Laboratory that works at the intersection of architectural design, building science research and digital technology. The lab is investigating how computational design methods and simulation tools can create more sustainable architecture.
He earned his PhD in Building Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was conducting research with the Digital Structures Group and the Sustainable Design Lab. His personal and professional work has been published and presented internationally in both scientific and design venues such as Nature X Humanity in SF MoMA, the Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial and Ars Electronica, as well as the Journal Solar Energy, Building and Environment, 3D Printing and Additive Manufacturing and ACADIA. An updated list of publications of design and architectural technology research can be found here and exhibitions here.
He graduated with a Master of Science in Media Arts and Science from the MIT Media Lab where he was part of the Mediated Matter Group as a Research Assistant. Previously, he received his master’s degree in Integrative Technologies and Architectural Design Research with distinction from the University of Stuttgart and holds a bachelor’s in architecture from ETH Zurich, where he conducted research at the Block Research Group, the Institute for Computational Design and Construction (ICD), the Institute of Building Structures and Structural Design (ITKE) and was a designer at the lightweight composite construction company FibR. He worked for two years at Zaha Hadid Architects in London, where he was involved in projects across all scales and design research in the inhouse ZHA|CODE research group.
Presidential Fellowship at MIT 2020/2021, Scholar of the Norman Foster Foundations ‘Robotics Atelier’ 2019, Frei Otto Award 2017 by the Architects and Engineering Federation of Stuttgart AIV, Sonderpreis by the German Wood Council Deutscher Förderpreis Holzbau 2019 and nomination of the animated Short ‘Fragile’ at the swiss film festival for young filmmakers in Zurich 2011.
Published professional projects were featured at: Nature X Humanity — SF MoMA 2022 (San Francisco, USA), Material Ecology — Museum of Modern Art MoMA 2020 (New York, USA), Nature — Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial 2019 (New York, USA), Shell Structures — 13th International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale 2012 (Venice, Italy), Fondazione Berengo — Palazzo Franchetti 2016 (Venice, Italy). As an architect he was involved in the design of the Science Museum (London, UK) and the Danjiang Bridge (Taiwan).