Simon Schleicher

Lecture: Bio-inspired Mechanisms – Designing with flexibility.

Simon Schleicher is an architectural designer, researcher, and educator from Germany. He received a Masters degree from MIT in Architecture and a Bachelors degree from the University of Stuttgart. At the moment, Simon is working as Research Associate at the Institute of Building Structures and Structural Design (ITKE) as well as working on his doctoral thesis supervised by Prof. Dr. Jan Knippers.

In his research on bio-inspired compliant mechanisms, Simon aims to transfer bending and folding mechanisms found in plant movements to elastic systems in architecture. He was project manager for the first ICD/ITKE Research Pavilion 2010, which won the DETAIL prize and was nominated for the Mies van der Rohe Award. With his work, Simon has won further awards including the Gips-Schüle-Forschungspreis, the International Bionic-Award, the Ralph Adam Cram Award, the Imre Halasz Thesis Prize, the British Institution Award, and the Pininfarina-Förderpreis. During his study, Simon was recipient of a Merit-Based Full-Tuition Scholarship at MIT and received grants from the DAAD and from the prestigious German National Academic Foundation (Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes).