Nijat Mahamaliyev

Nijat Mahamaliyev is an architect, researcher, and computational designer working at the intersection of digital fabrication, material intelligence, and machine agency. He holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Istanbul Technical University and a Master of Advanced Studies in Digital Fabrication from ETH Zürich, where his thesis on 3D bioprinting, supervised by Andrea Ling and Prof. Benjamin Dillenburger, explored living bacterial systems as active design partners rather than passive media, work subsequently published in 3D Printing and Additive Manufacturing.

As a researcher at ETH's Digital Building Technologies (DBT), he contributed to Picoplanktonics, the official representation for the Canada Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Biennale of Architecture, utilising robotic control strategies for living materials; the project continues with Picoplanktonics 2.0, exhibited in Budapest. He also worked on Tor Alva, a 3D-printed concrete tower, documenting and laser-scanning the printing process to analyze deviations between digital model and physical result, and co-supervised OrnaNet, a master's thesis on a machine-learning platform for predicting fabrication deviations/ornaments in robotic concrete extrusion. As Operational Co-lead of the Immersive Design Laboratory (IDL) at Design++, he developed real-time XR platforms for architectural sensing and degradation analysis, including La Cathédrale Immersive, an AR application developed at PCBM that uses object localization. At the IDL, he also taught Immersive Realities, a seminar week on crafting virtual experiences through realtime acoustic simulation via game-engines.

His research treats the agency of materials, biological systems, and AI models not as noise to be eliminated, but as design partners to be negotiated with.