Brandon Clifford

Bran­don Clifford

Bran­don Clif­ford is cur­rently the Bel­luschi Lec­turer at the Mass­a­chu­setts Insti­tute of Tech­nol­ogy as well as Prin­ci­pal at Mat­ter Design.  Bran­don received his Mas­ter of Archi­tec­ture from Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity in 2011 and his Bach­e­lor of Sci­ence in Archi­tec­ture from the Geor­gia Insti­tute of Tech­nol­ogy in 2006.  Dur­ing this time he also attended L’Ecole D’Architecture La Vil­lette.  From 2006 – 2009 he worked as project man­ager at Office dA in both Boston and New York where his con­tri­bu­tions var­ied in scale and pro­gram — sil­ver­ware, instal­la­tions, restau­rants, a pro­fes­sional soc­cer sta­dium, and numer­ous urban plan­ning stud­ies.  Bran­don also served as edi­tor of Pid­gin Mag­a­zine from 2009–2011, the 2011-12 LeFevre Emerg­ing Prac­ti­tioner Fel­low at The Ohio State Uni­ver­sity Knowl­ton School of Archi­tec­ture, and the founder of the Mal­leab­list Move­ment in architecture.

In 2011 Bran­don was awarded the pres­ti­gious SOM Prize in archi­tec­ture and urban plan­ning. “We have lost the abil­ity to work with Vol­ume. So much of the dis­cus­sion sur­round­ing dig­i­tal design has focused on sur­face. This research is intended to mine the lost knowl­edge of stereotomy (the art of cut­ting solids, most typ­i­cally stone) as a way to inform our con­tem­po­rary meth­ods of mak­ing with the dimen­sion of vol­ume.”

In 2008 Bran­don founded the award win­ning prac­tice Mat­ter Design with Wes McGee as a way of rar­efy­ing the over­laps between their respec­tive back­grounds.  This rel­a­tively exper­i­men­tal dia­log was solid­i­fied when Mat­ter Design was selected as a final­ist in the inter­na­tional West Cork Arts Cen­ter com­pe­ti­tion.  Con­sis­tent with their back­grounds, Mat­ter Design is com­mit­ted to inno­va­tion and explo­ration of the design process at a vari­ety of scales.

Bran­don focuses on the real­iza­tion of dig­i­tal man­u­fac­tur­ing through mate­ri­als, means and meth­ods of pro­duc­tion, as well as the process and rep­re­sen­ta­tion of direct draw­ing to bet­ter influ­ence the built envi­ron­ment (oth­er­wise known as Archi­tec­ture).  Brandon’s research and work develop reci­procity between draw­ing and mak­ing through inno­va­tion as well as res­ur­rec­tion of past knowledge.

Bran­don Clif­ford CV | Printable

Bran­don Clif­ford Bio | Printable