Chandler Ahrens

Chandler Ahrens is an associate professor at Washington University in St. Louis as well as a co-founder of Open Source Architecture (OSA), an international transdisciplinary collaboration developing research and commissioned projects. His focus is on the intersection of material investigations, environmental phenomena, and computational design processes. His teaching has been recognized with an Emerging Faculty Award from the Building Technology Educators Society. His work with OSA has received several AIA design awards, a Chicago Athenaeum New American Architecture Award, and is part of the permanent collection at the Fonds Regional d’Art Contemporain in Orleans, France. He is the editor of “Instabilities and Potentialities, Notes on the Nature of Knowledge in Digital Architecture” (2019), co-curator and editor of the “Gen(h)ome Project” (2006), and co-chair and editor for the exhibition “Evolutive Means, ACADIA2010.” He was on the board of directors for ACADIA.

Prior to OSA, Ahrens has worked for several large international architectural firms, including nine years as a senior project designer at Morphosis Architects, where he was responsible for notable builds such as the New Academic Building at Cooper Union in New York; Hypo-Alpe Adria bank in Udine, Italy; Emerson College in Los Angeles; the U.S. Embassy in London; and Phare Tower in Paris, France. He has been a visiting professor at the Confluence Institute for Innovation and Creative Strategies in Lyon, France, since its inception in 2014.