Alexandra Waller
Alexandra Waller
Alexandra Waller is an Assistant Professor in the David R. Ravin School of Architecture and a cofounder and principal of Teltta, a research and design collective. Teltta’s work engages novel workflows and holistic systems of production, prioritizing the dialog between computation, material, craft, and context, and investigating the complex relationship between made objects and their broader ecologies. 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.
Waller’s teaching and research focuses on the foundations of design and computation, design methods, and drawing systems and analysis. Previously, she has served on the architecture faculty of Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Arkansas. Waller received a Master of Science (SMArchS) in design and computation from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Master of Architecture from Washington University in St. Louis, where she was the recipient of the Hugh Ferriss Award for Architectural Drawing, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in interior design with a minor in art history from James Madison University.
explore her recent work
House for Three Households | The 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 accessed 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. Both the equal configuration and the independent operation of the cabins helps to simplify the shared funding of the house and allows each household to follow their own domestic routines without encumbering the others.
Beyond Braiding: Transcending Artifact-centered Conceptions of Craft in Digital Fabrication | Craft traditions have motivated recent scholarship and projects by practices and pedagogies with diverse research agendas in digital fabrication. Despite the varied research landscape, many of these projects focus on the craft artifact itself and disengage from the broader ecologies in which it is traditionally created. This paper establishes a positioning framework for craft-based digital work and introduces new terminology to define its theoretical boundaries and to disambiguate the increasingly crowded space of “digital crafts.”
WALLESSNESS | Teltta was recognized as an emerging practice in architecture and design through Boston’s Design Seaport competition. Their project WALLESSNESS explores the potential of textile craft traditions at an architectural scale, substituting masonry blocks with lightweight structural modules made by hand braiding heat-activated carbon fiber strands.