Caitlin Mueller recognized as "Innovator of the Year" by "Architectural Record"

Innovator of the Year
Caitlin Mueller | Associate Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Caitlin Mueller is an associate professor at MIT, with appointments in Architecture and in Civil and Environmental Engineering. She leads the Digital Structures research group, directs the Building Technology program, and serves as associate director of the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium. Trained in architecture, structural engineering, computation, and building technology at MIT and Stanford, she joined the faculty in 2014. She presented her work at Record’s inaugural Sustainability in Practice conference at MIT in 2023.

Her work at MIT advances a vision for building design and construction that unites these disciplines with computation to create structures that are sustainable, high performing, and delightful. Her group develops computational design and digital fabrication methods that integrate efficiency, performance, material circularity, and architectural expression. This work spans robotic assembly of optimized trusses, fabrication of low-cost earthen and concrete systems, and algorithmic strategies for reusing salvaged wood and reassembled concrete parts. Through the ODDS & MODS program with architect Sheila Kennedy, she engages students in climate-focused design pedagogy centered on material circularity.

Mueller’s work has been widely recognized, with accolades from the Association for Computer Aided Design In Architecture (ACADIA) and Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ASCA). It has also been realized in practice through the Sueños con Tierra y Concreto pavilion in Mexico City (2022), four installations at the 2025 Venice Biennale, and Remembering the Future, a tensile sculpture by artist Janet Echelman enabled by software from Mueller’s team (2025). She is co-founder of two startups: Forma Systems, which develops software for shape-optimized structural components, and Pixelframe, which advances a reconfigurable circular concrete kit of parts.