Sandra Manninger is an architect, researcher, and educator. Born and educated in Austria, she co-founded SPAN Architecture with Matias del Campo in 2003.
Her award-winning projects have been published and exhibited internationally, including at La Biennale di Venezia, MAK, and Autodesk Pier 1, and have been included in the permanent collections of the FRAC, Design Museum in Munich, and the Albertina in Vienna.
Sandra Manninger has taught internationally at the TU Vienna, University for Applied Arts, DIA Bauhaus in Dessau, UPenn, Tongji and Tsinghua Universities, the University of Michigan, and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Architecture.
Recent Projects and Research
- ML and Robotic Construction
- AI and ML in Architecture and Design
Selected Publications
- 2021 del Campo, M., S. Manninger. Urban Fictions – Lines, Surfaces and Quasi-Intelligent Machines in Machine Learning and the City Reader, Wiley, London
- 2020 del Campo, M. and A. Carlson and S. Manninger
- A Question of Style – Style and Artificial Intelligence in Architectural Design, Springer, Singapore 2020
- How Machines Learn to Plan – Transferring Symbolic Style between Modern and Baroque Plans using GANs The 39th annual Conference of the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA)
- 3D Graph Convolutional Neural Networks in Architecture Design The 39th annual Conference of the ACADIA
- Hallucinating Cities The 11th annual Symposium on Simulation for Architecture and Urban Design (SimAUD), 2020
- Imaginary Maps – A Posthuman Urban Design Method based on Neural Style Transfer The 7th International Conference on Architecture and Built Environment S.ARCH, 2020
- 2017 del Campo, M., Manninger S.: Sublime Bodies, Architectural Problems in the Postdigital Age. Shanghai: Tongji Press
Honors and Awards
- 2019 Robotics Institute Award, University of Michigan
- 2019 Provost Teaching Innovation Prize, University of Michigan
- 2019 Architect Studio Prize, A New Visitors Center for CERN (Thesis)
- 2018 Architectural Competition Finalist, Austrian Pavilion, Expo Dubai, EU 2018
- 2016 Accelerate@CERN Fellowship Austria
- 2015 Best Paper Award – DADA2015, International Conference on Digital Architecture
- 2012 Architectural Competition Award 4th place, Media Center University for Music and Performing Arts Vienna, EU
- 2011 Architectural Competition First Price, Public Gallery, Design for a Mobile Gallery, AT
- 2008 Architectural Competition First Price, Austrian Pavilion, Expo Shanghai, EU
- 2008 Architectural Competition, First Price, Brancusi Museum Paris, INT
- 2008 Finalist Designboom Crystal Vision Swarovski Competition, INT
- 2006 MAK Schindler Scholarship, INT
- 2005 Research Fellowship AT, the University for Applied Arts Vienna
- 2004 Experimental Tendencies in Architecture, AT
Courses Taught at New York Tech
- ARCH 776 Fabrication Optimization
- ARCH 781 Computational Design 1
- ARCH 783 Fabrication and Robotics 1
- ARCH 784 Fabrication and Robotics 2