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A host of Illinois Institute of Technology College of Architecture faculty have been presenting research papers at international conferences over the past year. 

First, Assistant Professor Kim Il Hwan Kim presented his project, “Inflatable Formwork: Self-Erecting Pneumatic Formwork for Vertical Concrete Elements,” at the 45th annual conference for the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture in November 2025. For this project, Kim co-designed, with colleagues from Cornell University, a self-inflating mold that consisted of a series of large, inflatable bubbles that fit around setting concrete at a fraction of the cost traditional concrete formwork. 

Meanwhile, Assistant Professor Dillon Pranger, who directs the College’s Deconstruction/Reconstruction Lab, presented papers at two conferences. 

At the 114th annual conference of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture in March 2026, Pranger presented “(P)recast: Sustainable Masonry Unit Prototyping.” The paper proposes an onsite construction process in which brick demolition debris—essentially brick fragments—is collected and recycled by using artificial intelligence-enhanced “augmented reality” to place them like jigsaw puzzle pieces into reusable panels. The panels are then solidified through sand-casting. Pranger says that natural resource extraction has more than tripled in the past 50 years, driven in part by the increased mining of finite construction material ingredients such as sand, gravel, and clay. His proposed system would help diminish that unsustainable resource consumption. 

Pranger also presented a more expansive paper on building material reuse, “(P)Recast: Adapting Masonry Rubble as Future Building Resource,” at the Adaptive Reuse (to) Adaptive Architecture International Symposium in May 2026. The paper proposes a multidisciplinary investigation that aims to reduce material and energy consumption by developing new design typologies that consider each phase of a material’s journey from recovery to remanufacturing, design, and new construction. The project proposes leverage-emerging construction technologies such as 3D part scanning, digital twin modeling, computationally-driven material analysis, and augmented reality. 

Assistant Professor Youngjin Hwang has also recently presented two papers. 

At the Conference of the Architectural Research Centers Consortium for the European Association for Architectural Education in April 2026, Hwang delivered “Automated Building Geometry Correction Workflow for High-Resolution Urban Energy Modeling of Residential Buildings.” He explored how to more accurately update and create urban residential building energy models that use existing urban building energy datasets through automated processes. Such work, Hwang says, is essential for more realistically representing small residential building forms in computational simulations, so that more accurate investigations are feasible. 

In July 2025, Hwang presented “Thermal Performance Feasibility Study of a Ground Sourced Thermoelectric Heat Pump Fitted in Single Family Detached Homes in Different Climate Zones of New York State” at the American Society of Engineers’ 19th International Conference on Energy Sustainability. In his paper, Hwang presented a refrigerant-free and onsite fossil-fuel-free heat pump solution that uses a thermoelectric system. Hwang’s proposed pump is integrated with a previously presented dynamic modular wall heating and cooling system called HydroSIP, and it demonstrates improved heating and cooling efficiencies across various climate regions.

Finally, Associate Teaching Professor Nilay Mistry had a poster submission accepted at the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture annual conference in March 2026. His presentation, “Landscape Collaborations for Indigenous Earthworks in the Contemporary City: The Coiled Serpent and POKTO ČINTO,” highlighted two art collaborations with Artist X, the Chicago Public Art Group, and the American Indian Center. The two land art installations, situated at the edges of the two major rivers within Chicago, pay homage to ancestral terraforming and highlight Indigenous placemaking.  

“College of Architecture faculty, and this year especially a group of our younger researchers and practitioners, continue to push back the boundaries of design, especially in materials research and application, an area for which the College has been known since the time of Mies,” notes Dean Reed Kroloff. “We’re delighted with the ways they are representing and reconfiguring this important IIT tradition.”