815 Sherbrooke Street West, Room 311, Montreal Quebec, H3A 0C2 Canada
Theodora Vardouli researches design and architecture’s entwining with digital technologies and computation. She is an Associate Professor at the Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture at McGill University where she directs the Computational Design Exploratory (CoDEx). Before joining McGill University, Vardouli completed a PhD in Design and Computation from the MIT Department of Architecture.
Vardouli is the author of Graph Vision: Digital Architecture’s Skeletons (MIT Press, 2024), a book examining architecture’s relationship with mathematics and computation in the first postwar decades with focus on the material and symbolic prevalence of graphs. She is co-editor, with Olga Touloumi, of Computer Architectures: Constructing the Common Ground (Routledge, 2020) and, with Daniel Cardoso Llach, of Designing the Computational Image, Imagining Computational Design (Applied Research and Design Publishing, 2023) – a book based on the eponymous exhibition curated by Cardoso Llach (Pittsburgh 2017) and expanded in collaboration with Vardouli for Canada (Montreal 2021). Along with Cardoso Llach, Vardouli co-founded Lattice Space, a platform for critical and creative research at the nexus of design and computation. For a full list of publications, see here.
Vardouli’s scholarship has been recognized with the 2022 Best Paper Award by the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA) and the 2022 Mahoney Prize, for an article co-authored with David Theodore, by the Special Interest Group for Computing Information and Society (SIGCIS). Her research has received support from the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Fonds de Recherche du Québec – Société et Culture. Vardouli is also an Onassis, A.G. Leventis, and Fulbright Foundation scholar.
Between 2021-2025, she served an External Examiner the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. She was a member of the editorial board for the journal Technology, Architecture + Design (TAD) and is an editorial board member of Designing, the journal of the Design Research Society.
Background
PhD in Architecture: Design and Computation Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Dissertation: Graphing Theory: New Mathematics, Design and the Participatory Turn (Advisor: George Stiny)
SMArchS in Design and Computation Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Thesis: Design for Empowerment for Design: Computational Structures for Design Democratization (Advisor: George Stiny).
Postgraduate Diploma in Design-Space-Culture National Technical University of Athens
Thesis: Designing (for) the Unpredictable: From Megastructure to Biostructure (Advisor: Dimitris Papalexopoulos)
Diploma (MArch equivalent) in Architectural Engineering National Technical University of Athens