Ayodh Vasant Kamath

Assistant Professor

ayodhvasantk@rvu.edu.in

About
Publication & Works
Research Summary
Awards & Achievements

Ayodh Vasant Kamath earned a BArch at Sushant School of Art and Architecture, an SMArchS in design computation from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a PhD in architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. Ayodh has been a practicing architect, collaborating with craftspersons to digitally design and build with mud, bamboo, and other non-industrial materials. They have taught architecture to undergraduate and graduate students in India and in the US. Their current academic research on making grammars integrates computational models of design and construction with systems models of the environment. The applications of this work range from using machine learning to correlate and optimize workflows and supply chains for sustainability, to recognising and addressing epistemic injustices in architecture. Ayodh is in the process of cataloguing and digitizing the archives of Kamath Design Studio (circa 1975-2020).

"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge" - Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man

A Mathematical Formalization of Making Grammars

Making grammars model makers as perceiving their environment and acting to transform it. Shape grammars, which model designers as manipulating shapes, are then a special case of making grammars where perceiving is limited to seeing and doing is limited to drawing. This paper develops set-theoretical and graph-theoretical formalizations of making grammars. Existing set-theoretical formalizations of shape grammars show that designing is visual computing by demonstrating that a shape grammar can be devised to simulate any Turing machine. However, there are no mathematical arguments showing how making grammars describe computation. Using a previously published example of a shape grammar and its corresponding making grammar, this paper combines ideas from ecological psychology with methods from set theory and graph theory to show that, for each Turing machine, a making grammar can be devised which simulates it.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00004-023-00731-2

Kamath, Ayodh Vasant. 2022. “Making Information Modeling and Systems Ecology: A Non-Hylomorphic Toolkit for Building in the Anthropocene.” PhD, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania.
Kamath, Ayodh Vasant. 2020. “Making Grammars for Material and Tectonic Complexity: An Example of a Thin-Tile Vault.” Design Studies 69 (C).
Stevens, James, and Ayodh Vasant Kamath. 2018. “Cyborg Masonry.” In Transformative Pedagogies in the Visual Domain: Investigating the Visual as a Transformative Pedagogy in the Asia Region, 103–21. Common Ground Publishing.
Kamath, Ayodh Vasant. 2014. “Negotiating Converging Cultures of Designing and Making: Averting a Fourth Marginalization of the Hand.” In What’s the Matter? Materiality and Materialism at the Age of Computation, edited by Maria Voyatzaki, 431–46. Barcelona: European Network of Heads of Schools of Architecture.
Kamath, Ayodh Vasant. 2013. “Digitally Designed Architectural Form-Built Using Craft-Based Fabrication – Weaving a Complex Surface as a Bamboo Reticulated Shell.” In Open Systems: Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia, 623–32. Singapore.
Kamath, Ayodh Vasant. 2009. “Integrating Digital Design and Fabrication and Craft Production.” Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Research Interests:
Making grammars, shape grammars, e[m]ergy analysis, systems ecology, environmental design

Faculty Publication Award, O. P. Jindal Global University. 2022.
Graduate Student Fellowship, Penn Program for Environmental Humanities. 2017.
PhD Fellowship, University of Pennsylvania School of Design. 2016-2020.
Faculty Seed Grant, Lawrence Technological University. 2014.
Best Paper Award, Runner-up, 18th CAADRIA Conference, Singapore. 2013.
Merit Based Full Tuition Award, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 2008-2009.
Gold Medal for BArch Design Thesis, Sushant School of Art and Architecture. 2006.