Ilmar Hurkxkens is head of the Geographic Design cluster at Boskalis and lecturer at the Section Landscape Architecture, Departement of Urbanism at the Delft University of Technology. His work focuses on the form and processes of natural granular materials using advanced surveying, modelling, and fabrication techniques. After graduating in architecture with an honourable mention from Delft University of Technology, he worked at the Chair of Landscape Architecture of Professor Christophe Girot, ETH Zurich, where he was DesignLab coordinator and member of the Landscape Visualization and Modeling Lab. He received the Young Researcher Award from the Volkswagen Foundation in 2013 and the Digital Culture Work Grant from the Migros Culture Percentage with Ungenau Robotics in 2018. He is co-founder of LANDSKIP, a laboratory centred on the production and deployment of new technologies for landscape transformation. In 2020 he was nominated for the ETH Medal for his dissertation “Robotic Landscapes” at the NCCR Digital Fabrication after which he completed a postdoc at Gramazio Kohler Research. Part of his doctoral research is published in the publication “Robotic Landscapes: Designing the Unfinished” by Park Books in Zurich 2022.
Learning Machines for an AI Powered Landscape
December 2024 ESSAY
Ilmar Hurkxkens, Powered by AI in ‘scape magazine, issue 2/2024. https://www.scapemagazine.com/scape224/
Circular Robotic Construction
January 2024 BOOK CHAPTERLauren Vasey, Petrus Aejmelaeus-Lindström, David Jenny, Ryan Luke Johns, Ilmar Hurkxkens, Coralie Ming, Marco Hutter, Fabio Gramazio, Matthias Kohler
In: A Circular Built Environment in the Digital Age
doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39675-5_9
A framework for robotic excavation and dry stone construction using on-site materials
November 2023 PEER REVIEWED
JOURNAL ARTICLEJohns, Ryan Luke, Martin Wermelinger, Ruben Mascaro, Dominic Jud, Ilmar Hurkxkens, Lauren Vasey, Margarita Chli, Fabio Gramazio, Matthias Kohler, and Marco Hutter
Science Robotics 8, no. 84
https://doi.org/10.1126/scirobotics.abp9758
Dynamic Landscapes
May 2023 ARTICLETerrain Voque: Pamphlet 27
Professur für Landschaftsarchitektur Christophe Girot, ed. Annemarie Bucher et al.
https://verlag.gta.arch.ethz.ch/en/gta:book_201e678b-b6ba-454a-b1b2-e7862d548970
Eroding Terrains: Developing Computational Design Tools for Interactive Site Erosion
May 2023 PEER REVIEWED
JOURNAL ARTICLEJames Melsom, Ilmar Hurkxkens
In: JoDLA. Journal of Digital Landscape Architecture
doi:10.14627/537740030
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