Penn State University

PROJECTS 2025

Grounds for Construction

FINALIST TEAM

Kieron Cook, Kali Lewis, Aisa Shams, Ella Pedersen, Cameron Walsh

"Grounds for Construction" explores using coffee ground waste as a construction material through methods like robotic 3D printing, heat pressing, and robotic tamping. The project highlights robotic tamping to repurpose coffee grounds into reusable formworks for casting doubly curved architectural panels, demonstrating an innovative approach to sustainable fabrication and material reuse in architecture.

Instructor 2025

Dr. Benay Gürsoy is an Assistant Professor of Architecture and the founder and director of ForMat Lab at Penn State. Her research and teaching focus on computational making, digital fabrication, biofabrication, and shape studies. She earned her Ph.D. in Architectural Design Computing from Istanbul Technical University in 2016, where she was awarded the Best Ph.D. Dissertation Award. Gürsoy has presented and published her work internationally and has received several honors, including the 2010 Young CAADRIA Award, the 2015 CAAD Futures Best Paper Award, the 2021 and 2022 AIA Upjohn Research Initiative awards, and the 2022 SOM Foundation Research Prize.