James
McBennett

Background music: Lucky Chops playing Funky Town (1980) in the NYC subway with brass instruments.

I currently live in Denton, TX 🐎🤠🎓. I’ve called various places home, including Baltimore🔵🦀, New York City🥯🍕, Nashville🔥🍗, Dublin☘️🍺, London🎡💂, Copenhagen🇩🇰🚴, Rotterdam🇳🇱🚴🏻‍♀️, and Riyadh🔆🐫.

I studied architecture🛖🏠🏩🏯🏰🏫🏠🛖, eloquently defined as the “physical manifestation of a society’s aspirations,” by Professor Rahul Mehrotra. My interests span multi-modal cities🏢🚶🚴🚉🚌🚕🚗, automation, optimization and performance🖥️⏬🔋, digital fabrication and CNC🪓🤖🪑, complex geometry, extreme environments🥶🥵, and iterative prototyping🔁🥼. Following my undergraduate studies, I gained experience at the design firms KPF, JDS and OMA.

Additionally, I’ve developed online courses for HackadayU covering introductory📦🫖 and advanced computational geometry🖥️🧠📐. Currently, I serve as a faculty member in the Master’s on Advanced Computation for Architecture and Design (MaCAD) 🧮💻🔢 at the Institute of Advanced Architecture Catalonia in Barcelona (IAAC), where I also completed my Masters🎓.

My thesis explored graph machine learning, rhino.compute, and three.js. Presently, I am honing my skills in Houdini, which I initially utilized in my MaCAD Complex Forming project on Multi-Frame Swarms, as well as in Unreal, where I animated myself as a character on Mars, and in the field of AI.

Web Graph Machine Learning (2023), IAAC MaCAD Thesis with Ren Rainville

Mine(Us) Plus (2023) with Ren Rainville and Raghad Hammour on our process of spider-like hexapod robots that arrive on Mars years before human settlement carving out material below the Martian ground surface immediately followed by 3D printing that material above ground.

Multi-Frame Swarms (2022) – Testing SubD mesh constraint in Houdini3D

Multi-Frame Swarms (2022) – Creating roof geometry using swarm trails from Houdini3D

Work (recent) 💽

Work.pdf CV.pdf

Work (old) 📼

I love to learn new things through short online courses that range from “the influence of superheroes 🦸🏻‍♀️🥷🦸🏽‍♂️🦸‍♂🦹‍♀️ on pop culture” to “cooking using physics 🍳🔥”. Here is a final-project video that I submitted for CS50, a popular Introduction to Computer Science course. My favorite audiobooks 🎧📘 to listen to are about behavioral economics 🤪📈. My latest sourdough starter 🍞 is called Scrappy.

I am married to Carey 👸🏼. We record youtube 📽️ videos when we travel 🛵. I try to run 🎽 or swim 🏊🏻‍♂️ daily several times a week.

📸🐈 Instagram @jamesmcbennett
📄📊 LinkedIn @mcbennett
👉🧠 Creative Mornings @mcbennett

My favorite TED Talks 💡💬

There was once a time when I had watched every TED talk on the internet. The first TED talk that I listened to was Joshua Prince-Ramus presenting the work of OMA. TED massively expanded their library with TEDx in 2009. I launched TEDxGoodenoughCollege’s first ever event in 2011 and later helped TEDxDublin and TEDxLondon run some large events for 1000+ attendees. I was one of the first ever finalists for TED’s open call to speak on their main stage alongside Reggie Watts (who won), Joe Sabia, Cesar Kuriyama, and Joshua Walters who all shared their unique and deeply fascinating stories that night.