A structural engineer, designer, and assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Princeton University, Sigrid Adriaenssens talks about designing structures that are efficient, save natural resources, and keep costs low. These buildings have a unique aesthetic quality that makes them interesting and enjoyable for the people who use the spaces they cover.

Sigrid Adriaenssens is a structural engineer and associate professor at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Princeton University, where she directs the Form Finding Lab. She has a PhD in lightweight structures from the University of Bath, United Kingdom.

She worked as a project engineer for Jane Wernick Associates, London, United Kingdom and Ney + Partners, Brussels, Belgium, where she found the form for the courtyard roof of the Dutch National Maritime Museum in Amsterdam (2011).

At Princeton, she co-curated the exhibition ‘German Shells: Efficiency in Form’ which examined a number of landmark German shell projects. She is first author of Laurent Ney: Shaping Forces (2010) and Shells for Architecture: Form Finding and Optimization (2014). The pursuit of better structural urban forms runs as a Leitmotif through her research and teaching.


This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx