Shelby Doyle

Bio

Research Interests

Shelby Elizabeth Doyle, AIA is a registered architect and Associate Professor of Architecture where she is the Stan G. Thurston Professor of Design Build at Iowa State University College of Design, co-founder of the ISU Computation & Construction Lab (CCL), and director of the ISU Architectural Robotics Lab (ARL). The CCL and ARL the result of Doyle's ISU Presidential Impact Hire to rethink digital fabrication and design-build. The CCL works to connect developments in computation to the challenges of construction: through teaching, research, and outreach. 

The central hypothesis of CCL and Doyle's work is that computation in architecture is a material, pedagogical, and social project; computation is both informed by and productive of architectural cultures. This hypothesis is explored, through the fabrication of built projects and materialized in computational practices. The CCL is invested in questioning the role of education and pedagogy in replicating existing technological inequities, and in pursuing the potential for technology in architecture as a space of, and for, gender equity.

Doyle is currently a Mellon Research Fellow for the Canadian Centre for Architecture's The Digital Now: Architecture and Intersectionality, the 2023 President of ACADIA - the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture - and a 2022-25 At-Large-Director for the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA). 

Doyle received a Fulbright Fellowship to Cambodia, a Master of Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and a Bachelor of Science in architecture from the University of Virginia.

Her work at ISU has been recognized by several national awards: the Association for Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) Creative Achievement Award, the Autodesk / Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA) Emerging Research Award, and the Building Technology Educators Society (BTES) Emerging Faculty Award. She has published in the Journal of Architectural Education (JAE), the International Journal of Architectural Computing, and Columbia University’s Avery Review, as well as in proceedings for national and international meetings.

Doyle previously held a joint appointment at Louisiana State University as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Architecture and a Research Fellow in the LSU Coastal Sustainability Studio, an interdisciplinary think tank. At the CSS Doyle was a project lead on the upcoming Shifting Foundation Exhibition and examined design methods for architecture in the Mississippi River Basin and Louisiana Gulf Coast through teaching and research. A summary of this work can be found at Fabricating the Delta.

This outlook and process began as a Fulbright Research Fellowship in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, where Doyle spent fifteen months living, teaching, designing, and researching. The project is entitled  City of Water: Architecture, Infrastructure and the Floods of Phnom Penh  documents the relationships between water, architecture, and infrastructure in Phnom Penh. The resulting research and design projects explore the nature and agency of design in relation to these topics, with a focus on education and public outreach as tools for engaging with Phnom Penh’s urban transformation under the governance of an authoritarian regime. Doyle was introduced to Cambodia while working at CookFox Architects on the design of Friends Center at the Angkor Hospital for Children in Siem Reap. She was previously an instructor in the University of Houston Mekong Summer Program in Phnom Penh, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, Bangkok, Thailand, Yangon, Myanmar, an instructor at the Parsons – The New School for Design in the School of Design Strategies, and the GSD Career Discovery Program.

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