Shota Vashakmadze

Shota Vashakmadze completed his PhD in 2025 at the University of California, Los Angeles. He also holds a B.Sc. in Architecture from the Georgia Institute of Technology and an M.Arch. (professional degree) from Princeton University. His dissertation, entitled “The Integrated Environment: Computing and Architectural Work, 1968–1985,” examines the intersection of architectural computing, environmental design, and architectural practice. He studies how architects think about and use computation in pursuit of appropriate intellectual and technological responses to environmental change.

His upcoming publications include an article on the automation of architects’ offices in the 1980s, and a contribution to the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians entitled “Energy and ‘Green Building’ Since the 1970s.” He is also a past Doctoral Fellow at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, and has professional experience in design and software development in New York.

Most recently, Vashakmadze served as Lecturer at UCLA. There he led a cluster course experimenting with novel ways to teach climate change through the lens of the built environment. Starting this fall, he will teach in our professional design studio stream and offer a new graduate seminar on environmental history, computational tools, and climate change in architecture.