2026 • Proceedings of the 2027 Conference of the Building Technology Educators' Society

This conference will focus on ways in which tectonics and stereotomy and various supporting actions or activities are contemplated, explored, and defined in all areas of architecture and multiple building technologies. This conference invites exploration and rethinking of Semper's model.

Tectonics / Stereotomy

Architect Gottfried Semper, who was one of the most important theorists of the nineteenth century, created the following perspective on artistic activity in the field of architecture: textiles (weaving and enclosure), ceramics (molding and surface), tectonics (carpentry and joinery), and stereotomy (masonry and mass). This conference hopes to revisit those activities not only in historic measures but also in how education, perception, assignments, tools, and software propel us into the future. Did we drift from crafting buildings perhaps entirely as actions of stereotomy to buildings executed as tectonic explorations? Were there ever any buildings executed as a study in the properties of stereotomy? Were there ever any buildings executed entirely as a tectonic exploration? If the pyramid of Giza is a performance in stereotomy, does that make the Luxor Hotel and Casio in Las Vegas a tectonic construction? What is stereotomy and tectonics today if not perceived as typology? Can they be separated? Are they interlinked? Was it always a question of a hybrid?

Additive / Deductive

When we look at the range of the selected fields that Semper proposes it is not only about these materials but how they work together within their selected fields and how they work outside of their domains. At a different level and dimension, similar to that of the Earnes' film, "Powers of Ten," what are the governing principles that are used when combining the materials in homogeneous manner versus bybrid manner? What benefits the material and/or final product--additive or deductive reasoning? Is there a combination of the two, or can both be used simultaneously in a project? What are craft today, or more specifically, what are today's crafting techniques of joinery and structure, and how do they relate to the idea of permanence?

Past / Future

This session examines tectonics and stereotomy across cultures, geographies, and histories, foregrounding construction techniques as culturally embedded practices rather than neutral technologies. It encourages critical reflection on authorship, appropriation, continuity, and innovation, and asks how cultural knowledge embedded in material practices can inform future architectural education and production. While Semper’s categories emerged from a nineteenth-century European perspective, this session invites a broader, more plural understanding of material intelligence. How have different cultures developed distinct approaches to mass, joinery, enclosure, and surface in response to climate, resources, belief systems, labor structures, and social organization? What can contemporary architects learn from Indigenous, vernacular, and non-Western construction traditions—both historical and ongoing—that challenge dominant narratives of progress, efficiency, and permanence? How do the objectives in this conference define the pedagogical education of the architect in the past and in the future? How will the new emerging tools, in computer software and 3D printing, not only within academia but also in the execution of buildings, define or redefine education in a field that is in constant flux and evolution? How are past approaches defined, redefined, eliminated, or perhaps combined? We are not only designing/building for today but also building for the future. How is this communicated and emphasized to the students?  

Lightness / Heaviness

This session extends the discourse on tectonics and stereotomy to the scale of landscape and urban territory. While Semper’s model centers on building materials and craft, contemporary practice increasingly positions land itself as a constructed medium in which architecture, landscape, infrastructure, and building technology are deeply intertwined. Buildings participate in the making of landscape through the technologies that shape them, the materials from which they are formed, and the ways they are carved into, embedded within, terraced across, or suspended above terrain. Within this expanded field, heaviness and lightness operate not as opposites but as relational material strategies shaping how landscapes and buildings perform, endure, and adapt. Heaviness emerges through mass, compression, durability, and ecological anchoring in building forms, earthworks, retaining systems, embankments, excavations, and geological manipulations. Lightness appears through adaptability, reduced embodied carbon, minimal intervention, planted systems, tensile structures, shading devices, adaptable infrastructures, and suspended assemblies, where porosity, reversibility, and responsiveness define performance. Contributors are invited to explore how material systems and construction techniques generate architectural form while producing topographic, ecological, and energetic relationships between building and site. Topics may include stone and earth as stereotomic agents; water as form-giver; regenerative landscapes and climate-adaptive urban terrains understood through the dual lens of mass and atmosphere; vegetative and tensile systems as tectonic frameworks; and additive or deductive material logics that shape the urban ground. Landscape thus becomes a negotiation between ground and canopy, permanence and change, inertia and suspension.  

Editors: Anna-Maria Vissilia (Editor), Brittany Taplin (Editor), Mohamed Ismail (Guest Editor), Nik Nikolov (Guest Editor), Scarlet Gray Bernard (Guest Editor), Susan Schaefer Kliman (Editor)