The Matthias Rippmann Memorial Prize

DigitalFUTURES Award / the Matthias Rippmann Memorial Prize is awarded to a leading practitioner or researcher who has developed a digital tool, body of research, written text, or any other contribution that revolutionizes architectural research in the Digital Future.

The Matthias Rippmann Memorial Prize 2025


Carlo Ratti

Carlo Ratti (born 1971 in Turin, Italy) is an Italian architectengineer, inventor and author. He is a professor of the practice at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he directs the MIT Senseable City Lab. Ratti is also a founding partner of CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati, an international design and innovation firm with locations in Turin, New York and London.

Additionally, he holds positions as Distinguished Professor in the Department of Architecture, Built Environment and Construction Engineering at the Politecnico di Milano and Honorary Professor at TTPU Tashkent.

Ratti was named one of the "50 most influential designers in America" by Fast Company and highlighted in Wired magazine's "Smart List: 50 people who will change the world". Ratti has been featured in Esquire magazine's "Best & Brightest" list and in Thames & Hudson's selection of "60: Innovators Shaping our Creative Future". Blueprint magazine included him as one of the "25 People Who Will Change Architecture and Design", Forbes listed him as one of the "Names You Need To Know". 


The Matthias Rippmann Memorial Prize 2024


Jane Burry

Jane Burry is Adjunct Professor at the Centre for Design Innovation at Swinburne University of Technology. Formerly Professor Burry was the Dean of the School of Design in the Faculty of Health Arts and Design at Swinburne University of Technology and prior to that she was Professor and Director of the Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory (SIAL) at RMIT University.

Jane’s research focuses on mathematics and computing in contemporary design. In 2020, she is Co Chair and co editor of Fabricate 2020, Making Resilient Architecture, she is lead author of The New Mathematics of Architecture, T&H, 2010, editor of Designing the Dynamic, Melbourne Books, 2013 and coauthor of Prototyping for Architects, T&H 2016 and has over a hundred other publications. Jane has practiced, taught, supervised and researched internationally, including many architectural projects and involvement as a project architect in the technical office at Antoni Gaudí’s Sagrada Família church in Barcelona.

Recent research explores the opportunities for leveraging digital fabrication with simulation and feedback to create better, more sensitive, human-centric spaces. By manipulating geometry and materiality within the design, architecture can fine tune the acoustic, thermal and air flow aesthetics for higher quality, energy efficient environments. Other partnered research investigates rich environmental data gathering and its application to designing better urban environments.


The Matthias Rippmann Memorial Prize 2023


Jenny Sabin

Jenny E. Sabin is an architectural designer whose work is at the forefront of a new direction for 21st century architectural practice — one that investigates the intersections of architecture and science and applies insights and theories from biology and mathematics to the design of responsive material structures and ecological spatial interventions for diverse audiences. Sabin is the Arthur L. and Isabel B. Wiesenberger Professor in Architecture and the inaugural Chair for the new multicollege Department of Design Tech at the Cornell College of Architecture, Art, and Planning where she established a new advanced research degree in Matter Design Computation. She is principal of Jenny Sabin Studio, an experimental architectural design studio based in Ithaca and Director of the Sabin Design Lab at Cornell AAP. Her book, LabStudio: Design Research Between Architecture and Biology, co-authored with Peter Lloyd Jones was published in July 2017. In that same year, Sabin won MoMA & MoMA PS1’s Young Architects Program with her submission, Lumen.


The Matthias Rippmann Memorial Prize 2022


Daniel Piker

Fosters and Partners, Kangaroo, and McNeil.


The Matthias Rippmann Memorial Prize 2021


Sigrid Adriaenssens

Dr. Adriaenssens’s research focuses on lightweight surface systems and how they can be optimized and realised to interact with extreme structural or environmental loading. This includes research on flexible and rigid shells and plates, submerged flexible membranes and nets, and metamaterials with applications for a resilient urban environment. The applications range from adaptive building shading devices to large-scale inflatable storm surge barriers and are sometimes inspired by systems that evolved in biology, art or architecture. Dr.Adriaenssens’ research spans analytical approaches to study non-linear mechanics, seeking new numerical form finding, optimization and machine-learning approaches and fluid-interaction models as well as experimental aspects based on prototyping of small and medium scale systems using CAD/CAM and robotic construction.


The Matthias Rippmann Memorial Prize 2020


Matthias Rippman (RhinoVAULT2)

A brief introduction on Dr. Matthias Rippman’s contributions, visions and achievements on RhinoVAULT 2

The Rhinoceros® plug-in RhinoVAULT, developed by Dr. Matthias Rippmann at the Block Research Group (BRG) of ETH Zurich, emerged from research on structural form finding using Thrust Network Analysis (TNA) and was developed to facilitate the creation and exploration of compression-only, funicular structures.

RhinoVAULT provides an intuitive method for funicular form finding, adopting the same advantages of techniques such as graphic statics, but offering a viable extension to fully three-dimensional problems. The designer can control the many degrees of freedom of highly indeterminate three-dimensional equilibrium systems to explore structural form. Since its release in 2014, RhinoVAULT has been downloaded by more than 30’000 designers, and it has been used to design surprising free-form funicular shells all over the world.

Because of the tragic passing of Dr. Rippmann, development of RV has stopped. In order to provide continued form-finding exploration and fun, the BRG has developed the brand-new open-source framework, RhinoVAULT 2 (RV2), based on COMPAS.

The Block Research Group (BRG) at the Institute of Technology in Architecture at ETH Zürich is led by Prof. Dr. Philippe Block and Dr. Tom Van Mele. Research at the BRG focuses on several core areas, including analysis of masonry structures, graphical analysis and design methods, computational form finding and structural design, discrete element assemblies, and fabrication and construction technologies. The central goals of our geometry-based approach are to understand the real demands of complex structural design and engineering problems and to develop new algorithms and efficient, accessible tools for structurally informed design.