Rate My Professor Peter Ortner

F. Peter Ortner is Assistant Professor and MArch and PhD Coordinator for Architecture and Sustainable Design at the Singapore University of Technology and Design, where he also holds the Cheng Tsang Man Early Career Chair. His research leverages computational techniques to create sustainable architecture and urban design, with a focus on introducing optimization into the design process for circularity to support zero-waste, carbon-neutral cities. Additional research pursuits include predicting urban metabolism data for urban design scenarios, applying computational design to challenges of urban resilience and automated mobility, and examining the changing role of architecture and the architect in complex, data-driven urban systems through insights from critical data studies.

Ortner received a PhD in Architecture and the Sciences of the City from École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), where his doctoral thesis was nominated for the EPFL and City of Lausanne prizes and he collaborated with the Media x Design Lab. He holds an MArch from Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where he received the Faculty Design Award, and a BA in Architecture cum laude with distinction from Yale University. He has practiced architecture in the United States and Switzerland. Ortner directs the Adaptive Design Lab and the Net Zero Futures Lab at SUTD. His selected publications include the 2019 PhD dissertation Architecture in the Data-driven City, the 2017 chapter Metric as Mediator: Data-driven negotiation over Heathrow’s Noise Landscape in The Noise Landscape: A Spatial Exploration of Airports and Cities, and additional works on topics such as circular urban design and artificial morphogenesis.