Ajay Manthripragada and Ramon Weber join Department of Architecture

"We are excited to continue to build upon the excellence of our faculty with these new colleagues who really stood out in two extremely competitive search processes,”  says Lisa Iwamoto, chair of the Department of Architecture. “Both will bring valuable expertise and fresh insights to the department in their respective areas of the discipline.”

We are delighted to welcome Ajay Manthripragada back to Bauer Wurster Hall. He taught in the department as a lecturer before an appointment at the Rice School of Architecture as a Wortham Fellow, where his teaching and research focused on novel approaches to historical precedent in design practice. He continued to the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he taught both core studios and a seminar that engaged current debates on the value and nature of an architectural canon. He has also held teaching positions at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, and the Rhode Island School of Design. 

He arrives in Berkeley fresh from a year-long fellowship at the American Academy in Rome as winner of the Lily Auchincloss Rome Prize in Architecture. In Rome, he investigated ancient and new applications of architectural terracotta, connecting material traditions of southern Italy to those of the Malabar Coast in India, a region that has become the focus of much of his work.

Manthripragada is the founder of an award-winning architectural practice that is currently designing projects in India and California, including a junior college dormitory in Mangalore and an artist’s studio south of San Francisco. Past projects include the porcelain panel–clad Page House and Gallery in Berkeley. 

Manthripragada is a Berkeley alum (BA Architecture) and earned his MArch from Princeton. Among other distinctions, he was nominated for the Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize as an emerging practitioner. He has published in Log, domus, and Cite.

This fall, Manthripragada is teaching ARCH 207a, the graduate lectures colloquium, and the undergraduate architecture studio ARCH 100A, which he will go on to lead as coordinator in future years.  

We are thrilled that Ramon Weber is joining the department. Weber works at the intersection of architectural design, building science research, and digital technology. He defended his PhD in building technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was conducting research with the Digital Structures Group and the Sustainable Design Lab. In his work, he is investigating how computational design methods and simulation tools can create more sustainable architecture. 

Weber’s work has been published and presented internationally in both scientific and design venues such as SFMOMA, the Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial, and Ars Electronica, as well as in the journals Solar Energy, Building and Environment, 3D Printing and Additive Manufacturing, and ACADIA. Weber holds a MS in media arts and science from the MIT Media Lab, where he was part of the Mediated Matter Group. He received his master’s degree in integrative technologies and architectural design research with distinction from the University of Stuttgart and a bachelor’s in architecture from ETH Zurich. He conducted research at the Block Research Group, the Institute for Computational Design and Construction (ICD), the Institute of Building Structures and Structural Design (ITKE), and he was a designer at the lightweight composite robotic construction company FibR. 

Weber worked for two years at Zaha Hadid Architects in London, where he was involved in projects across all scales and design research in the inhouse ZHA|CODE research group. As an architect in his home country of Switzerland, he regularly participates in design competitions and aims to bring innovations in digital fabrication, structural design, and sustainability from research into practice. 

This fall Weber is teaching the undergraduate structures course, ARCH 150.

We look forward to the contributions of both Manthripragada and Weber and the profound impact they will have on our students.