Emily Baker is an inventor, fabricator, architect, and educator. Her work investigates choreographies of construction augmented by emerging technologies, hand capacities, and delight. Full-scale constructed experimentation informs her creative practice, research, and teaching, centering on self-structuring material systems. Processes of digitally cutting and folding paper and steel have been central to her work, and she maintains an active fabrication practice.
She was awarded the AISC Early Career Faculty Award. She earned an ACSA Design Build Award for the Audi-Fab design/build studio sequence, and the work also received an AIA Design Merit award.
Her work, Study in Spin-Valence, is in the permanent collection of Cranbrook Art Museum, and her sculpture collaboration with mathematician Edmund Harriss, Curvahedra, is permanently installed on the campus of University of Arkansas. Her current collaborations include researchers from MIT and Princeton University on novel structural and construction systems, Zip-Form and Spin-Valence.
She holds degrees in architecture from University of Arkansas and Cranbrook Academy of Art. She teaches studios, structures, and fabrication at the University of Arkansas, and she previously taught at the American University of Sharjah and Tulane University.
While at MacDowell, Baker produced computational models and mockups in paper of variations on the Spin-Valence
kirigami space frame system, a structural lattice construction system that she previously developed. She also developed paper models for future sculptures in steel utilizing the Zip-Form system that she previously developed with Edmund Harriss, and produced an array of short-fused tests of augmented reality as a construction/fabrication tool using the Fologram interface with Hololens headset, including an outdoor ground drawing using sticks and a copper and brass soldered sculptural form.
