Assistant Professor of Architecture Negar Kalantar has been awarded an NSF EAGER grant for a study entitled “Interaction of Smart Materials for Transparent, Self-regulating Building Skins.” Kalantar is a Co-PI on the two-year, $239,596.00 grant, collaborating with Dr. Zofia Rybkowski of the Department of Construction Science, Dr. Eugen Akleman of the Department of Visualization and the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and Dr. Tahir Cagin and Dr. Terry Creasy of the Department of Material Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University. The objective of this EArly-concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) is to harness the inherent properties of smart materials and explore their interaction and potential for use in active and multifunctional building skins.

As an extension of previous studios Kalantar has offered on Transformable Building Skins, she will lead two semester-long inter-disciplinary design/research studios that will investigate, fabricate, and test the interactions of smart materials used in innovative building skins. A team of material scientists, engineers, and architects will assist Kalantar in this endeavor.

Kalantar joined the Department of Architecture at Texas A&M University in Fall 2014. Her research and practice lies at the intersection of architecture, science, and engineering. In her Master’s and doctoral studies, she conducted design research to develop adaptable fenestration systems using optimized scalar and geometric forms to mitigate and/or influence light, heat, and/or sight. She has collaborated with firms in Dubai, Chicago, and New York, including SOM and Gensler. The results of her decade of experience developing transformable and adaptive designs have been presented at Technical University in Vienna and Berlin, the University of Maryland, Tehran University, Virginia Tech, and the New York 3Dprint SHOW. Her design research projects in Prototyping in Architectural Robotics for Technology-enriched Education qualified Kalantar to receive the 2011 XCaliber Award at Virginia Tech “for excellence as a group involved in technology-assisted teaching.” Kalantar teaches an advanced design/research/fabrication studio focused on interrogating digital platforms and additive manufacturing within the context of innovative building envelopes that are adaptable and demonstrate real-time morphological changes in the environment.