The Edward and Mary Allen Lecture in Structural Design: Lucas Epp

Lucas Epp
The Edward and Mary Allen Lecture in Structural Design
Design + Build, Reconnected
Part of the MIT Fall 2025 Architecture Lecture Series. Presented with the Building Technology Group. 

Design and construction have bifurcated.  What might buildings look like if we returned to shaping natural materials in their rawest form?  Designers and builders, reunited in the pursuit of efficiency and beauty amid an increasingly code-constrained, risk-averse era.

Lucas Epp

Lucas Epp is a structural engineer whose work sits at the intersection of architecture, engineering, and craft.  His work advances timber and natural materials as primary, high-performance structural systems - from mass timber to long-span, free-form geometries.  He has pioneered modern all-wood structural systems and joinery techniques at the new National Performing Arts Centre in Barbados and the School of Architecture and Design at the University of Kansas, blending ancient craft with state-of-the-art computational design and robotics – and pointing toward new possibilities for timber architecture.

In 2021 he founded Branch, an in-house software venture creating the next generation of digital tools for structural design-to-manufacture, informed by direct feedback from engineers, fabricators, and field crews.

Epp has practiced across the UK, New Zealand, China, the United States, and Canada. He has taught at ETH Zurich, the Architectural Association, and MIT; serves on Canadian and American timber code committees; and has authored multiple industry guidelines. His practice points toward a near future in which structural engineering, fabrication, and software merge - a return to the master builder mindset.

This lecture will be held in person in Huntington Hall, 10-250 and streamed online.

Lectures are free and open to the public. Watch the webcast on YouTube.