Nick Safley

Nick Safley is an Assistant Professor of Architecture in the College of Architecture & Environmental Design at Kent State University, where he teaches architectural design and building technology. His teaching, research, and creative practice examine the relationship between architecture and technology after the digital turn, with particular attention to materiality, construction, and the architectural image. Across these domains, his work treats images not merely as representations, but as material agents capable of reorganizing tectonics, construction logic, and architectural meaning.

Safley’s research engages a contemporary condition in which digital tools play an active role in architectural production. Rather than treating representation as separate from making, his work collapses the distance between visual information and material construction into a continuous design process. By treating images as material—capable of being connected, composited, manipulated, and fabricated—he reframes tectonics as a practice concerned not only with physical assemblies, but also with the technical and cultural operations that bind images together. This approach renews longstanding disciplinary questions of detail, composition, and architectural character within contemporary culture.

His design research operates across two interrelated modes: one based on direct authorship, in which disparate references are combined into materially allusive architectural figures, and another that employs computational tools such as 3D scanning, simulation, and automated workflows to develop novel construction logics. Together, these approaches form a post-digital tectonic practice that remains grounded in material fabrication while critically engaging contemporary technologies. His design research has been disseminated through peer-reviewed writing, conferences, publications, exhibitions, competitions, and funded research, and has received national and international recognition for his design work.

At Kent State, Safley serves as coordinator of the Integrated Design Studio and fourth-year studios. In addition, he teaches core building technology lecture courses, advanced graduate design studios, and elective seminars that position the classroom as a laboratory for material and technological experimentation. His courses foreground construction processes, material behavior, and technologically situated design techniques while encouraging students to critically engage architectural history, questions of labor, and professional practice.

Safley received his Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Oklahoma in 2009 with Special Distinction and his Master of Architecture from the University of Michigan in 2013, where he was awarded the AIA Henry Adams Medal.