Nathaniel Elberfeld
Nathaniel Elberfeld
Nathaniel Elberfeld is a designer and co-founder of Teltta, a research and computational design collective that engages systems of production, material knowledge, and labor forces in architecture and design. Teltta’s creative work has been exhibited publicly in galleries and museums including the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis and at Design Seaport in Boston, Massachusetts, and their scholarship has been published internationally.
Elberfeld received a B.S. in Physics from the College of William & Mary, an M.Arch from Washington University in St. Louis, and a Master of Science in Design & Computation from MIT. He has worked in the office of Joel Sanders Architect in New York City and taught undergraduate and graduate design studios, computational design seminars, and architectural theory as faculty at Washington University in St. Louis and the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design at the University of Arkansas. His studios and courses at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte engage computation in design epistemologies.
Explore his recent work
House for Three Households offers a shared retreat for a family of five adults with divergent daily habits, routines, and schedules. The house is organized into three independently assessed cabins which fuse through a shared pavilion of public space and program. The roof—partially hipped and partially flat— operates to both formally unify the distinct programmatic zones while also reinforcing their spatial legibility. A serpentine wall of concrete block mediates the interface between the private and public realms, houses the service elements, and references the nearby bluff edges.
A Case for Lace | Textiles and architecture share a long, intertwined history from the earliest enclosures to contemporary high-tech tensile structures. More recently, architectural designers are capitalizing on the characteristics of textiles that are difficult or impossible to reproduce with other material systems: textiles are pliable, scalable, and materially efficient. As industrial knitting machines join robotic systems in architecture schools with fabrication-forward agendas, much of the recent developments in textile-based projects make use of knitting. In this paper, we propose an alternative textile technique, lacemaking, for architectural fabrication.
Opening Keynote: AIA Dallas Empowering Conference 2024 | “Testing Grounds: Critical Inquiry in Design” presented experimental work and research that challenges and expands the domains in which architects usually operate. Learn more about the conference or read more about the research.