I’m Dr Camilo Cruz Gambardella, a Research Fellow at Monash University’s Future Building Initiative, where I work on questions of digital transformation in architectural design and construction in the context of rapidly mainstreamed AI tools. I am also a collaborator with SensiLab.
My research examines how AI technologies are reshaping architectural practice: where and how these tools can meaningfully support design work, what their limitations and ethical implications are, and how architects and allied professionals need to adapt their skills, workflows, and expectations in an industry increasingly shaped by AI-driven production. A central concern across my work is ensuring that digital systems remain transparent, interpretable, and accountable—particularly as they become embedded in professional decision-making.
My background in generative and evolutionary design was developed during my time as a Research Fellow at SensiLab, where I worked on quality-diversity search, cellular automata, and other computational methods that explore variation, constraints, and emergence in design systems. That experience continues to inform how I think about AI today: not as an autonomous creative agent, but as a situated tool whose behaviour, assumptions, and outputs must remain legible to designers.
Before joining the Future Building Initiative, I spent six years researching and teaching computational design across the University of Melbourne and the University of Chile. Earlier in my career, I worked as an architectural designer and visualisation artist in Toronto and Santiago, contributing to practice-led projects, installations, and exploratory computational studies.
This site is a space to share ongoing work, tools, and reflections on how architectural practice is being reshaped by digital systems—and to invite discussion around their consequences.
Research focus
- Digital transformation of architectural design and construction in the context of widespread AI adoption
- Critical examination of where AI tools can and should be used in professional practice
- Ethical, epistemic, and labour implications of AI-mediated design workflows
- Research software, publishing pipelines, and collaborative tooling that support traceability, reuse, and critical reflection
Academic & career timeline
2023–present Research Fellow, Future Building Initiative, Monash University Research on AI-driven digital transformation in architectural practice, including professional readiness, ethics, and constraint-aware computational workflows.
2018–2023 Research Fellow, SensiLab, Monash University; Researcher Assistant, University of Melbourne Generative and evolutionary design research; teaching computational design; development of experimental design systems and publications.
2014 - 2018 PhD researcher, Melbourne School of Design, University of Melbourne
Before 2014 Teaching and Research Fellow, University of Chile Architectural designer & visualisation artist, Toronto and Santiago
Education
- PhD in Architecture & Computational Design, University of Melbourne
- Master of Urban Design, University of Toronto
- BArch + Professional Masters (Architecture), Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
Download the CV (replace the text file with a PDF when ready).