Dr Aurel VON RICHTHOFEN
Dr Aurel von Richthofen is a senior researcher and investigator at the Singapore-ETH Centre, where he researches topics related to computational urban design, urban sustainability, and urban design education. He is a registered architect, urban designer, and experienced educator.
His transdisciplinary urban research encompasses three main areas:
- Development of computational urban analysis, design and communication tools based on urban elements, semantic webs and urban knowledge graphs.
- Research on sustainable urban design and circularity.
- Curriculum development in urban design education and science, technology and policy transfer, in particular through the courses in Advanced Studies in Urban Design, design studios at NUS and the ETH-Singapore Month.
Research
Aurel is co-investigator of the Cities Knowledge Graph Project, which aims to harness rapidly growing and diversifying data streams to improve the planning and design of cities. It will do so by developing an innovative digital platform, designed to combine data and share knowledge about cities, and to inject new precision and responsiveness to static instruments of planning, such as the city master-plan. The Cities Knowledge Graph research is an Intra-CREATE collaborative project under the urban systems theme. The project brings together expertise from external pageCambridge CARES and the Singapore-ETH Centre.
From 2017-2019 Aurel headed the Education Research Programme framing a loop between research and teaching at FCL. In this function he lead the courses on Advanced Studies in Urban Design for the Urban Redevelopment Authority in Singapore, experimental design studios With/Out Water at the National University of Singapore and the ETH-Singapore Month programmes.
He developed multiple educational formats for FCL and SEC ranging from online learning, executive course, summer schools, learning events, symposia, design charrettes, exchange programmes and design studios. From 2014-2016 he was the coordinator of the Alternative Construction Materials module. Before joining FCL in 2014, Aurel was lecturer at the German University of Technology in Oman. He was co-investigator on the research project external page‘Urban Oman – Towards Sustainable Patterns of Urbanisation’ funded by The Research Council, Oman.
Education
- Doctor in Engineering, with a thesis on Spatial Diversity and external pageSustainable Urbanisation in Oman, external pageInstitute for Sustainable Urbanism, Technische Universität Braunschweig, 2019
- Master of Architecture II, external pageSchool of Architecture, Princeton University, 2007
- Diplom Architekt, Department of Architecture, ETH Zürich, 2004
Practice
Registered Architect, German Chamber of Architects Berlin, Germany.
View more information about his external pagepractice and speculative research projects here.