Karen Bar-Sinai

Karen Lee Bar-Sinai is a licensed architect and a co-founder SAYA/Design for Change. She was trained as an architect at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, holds an MSc in Cities from the London School of Economics (LSE), and a was a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She is recipient of the British Chevening award, as well as the America-Israel Cultural Foundation (AICF) award.

Karen Lee is currently a PhD candidate at MTRL. Her research focuses on the ways technology can reshape the approach to built environments and infrastructure; and how digital fabrication could be applied at a large scale to create intelligent and responsive built fabrics.

In the era of digital manufacturing, the ground should no longer be seen as a passive recipient of form, and the act of paving can no longer disregard the consequences on the land. Applying multiple additive and subtractive techniques in-situ can offer an alternative vision for construction. Robotic-based CNC milling can allow to shape grounds to the desired shape; then, 3D-printing can enable to apply selected and local materials with graduated properties across the surface, and finally, the embedment of sensors across the surface, can provide ways for it to respond to its environment in various forms of actuation. Manufacturing such informed surfaces can offer a high degree of customisation to the natural conditions, an economic and sustainable construction, and a precise, non-wasteful approach to building at large.

Publications

• T. Shaked, K. L. Bar-Sinai, and A. Sprecher, “Human Sensibility, Robotic Craft: Toward Autonomous Stonework,” in Design culture(s)-cumulus conference 2021, Rome, Italy, 2021.

• [DOI] T. Shaked, K. L. Bar-Sinai, and A. Sprecher, “Craft to site,” Construction robotics, 2020.

• K. L. Bar-Sinai, T. Shaked, and A. Sprecher, “Sensibility at Large: a Post-anthropocene Vision for Architectural Landscape Editing,” in 25th international conference on computer-aided architectural design research in asia: re: anthropocene – design in the age of humans, caadria 2020, Bangkok, Thailand, 2020.

• [DOI] K. L. Bar-Sinai, T. Shaked, and A. Sprecher, “A Pedagogical Protocol for Iterative Robotic Fabrication on Remote Grounds,” Archnet-ijar: international journal of architectural research, 2020.

• T. Shaked, K. L. Bar-Sinai, and A. Sprecher, “Autonomous in Craft: Embedding Human Sensibility in Robotic Fabrication,” in 25th international conference on computer-aided architectural design research in asia: re: anthropocene – design in the age of humans, caadria 2020, Bangkok, Thailand, 2020.

• K. L. Bar-Sinai, T. Shaked, and A. Sprecher, “Informing Grounds: Robotic Sand-forming Simulating Remote Autonomous Lunar Groundscaping,” in Acadia 2019: ubiquity and autonomy, 2019, p. 258–265.

• [DOI] K. L. Bar sinai and T. Shaked, “Northern Polarities Canadian Subarctic Impression,” Journal of architectural education, vol. 73:1, p. 100–101, 2019.