Sumer Singh

artist.engineer.architect

Studio

An artist.engineer.architect working at the intersection of art, architecture, engineering, computation, automation and physical AI.

Now
Co-founder, CEO & CTO of MASIV · since 2017
Studio
Founder & principal, Sumer Singh Studio · since 2013
Public art
Lead artist, Genesis Centre sculpture and the Northeast LRT Extension artwork, City of Calgary
Objects
Co-founder & designer, MTHARU · Western Living Maker of the Year 2021
Engineering
Mechanical engineer, 2008–15 · oil and gas, heavy industrial construction, heavy lift
Teaching
Sessional instructor, University of Calgary, 2020–25 · computational design and digital fabrication
Education
BSc Mechanical Engineering, Windsor · M.Arch, Calgary · MaCAD, IAAC Barcelona

His family name, Matharu, means sword-hilt maker: a 500-year lineage of artists, blacksmiths, poets and makers from Punjab.

Radically speed up housing.

By any means and technology necessary: computation, prefabrication, robotics, physical AI and AI-run construction operations. And stay ahead of the future of how housing will be designed, built and lived in.

Ventures

  • MASIV

    Mercedes + Singh Innovative Ventures. Design. Fabricate. Build. (Co-founder, CEO & CTO · since 2017) A vertically integrated construction technology company building homes in the age of AI, with one mission: abundant, beautiful and affordable housing, built at the speed of software. Based in Calgary, it works across scales, from objects…

  • Superstudio

    The housing operating system. (MASIV venture) Superstudio takes a home from site to build in one connected platform: analyse a site, design the housing, generate permit-ready drawings, coordinate prefabrication and manage construction. Every step works from the same graph-based…

  • ConOps

    An AI operations team for construction. (MASIV venture) ConOps runs the coordination work of a construction project through plain language: tasks, schedules, site issues, trades and procurement. Ask it in a sentence and it does the follow-through. ConOps owns procurement through Blitz, and works…

    • Blitz: ConOps’ procurement engine. Blitz finds suppliers and trades, requests quotes, follows up by email, text and phone, compares the quotes and recommends who to…

  • Sumer Singh Studio

    Architecture, art, design and research. (Founder & Principal · since 2013) An interdisciplinary architecture, design and research practice that brings computational design, material innovation and digital fabrication together. The studio makes sculpture, public art, furniture and large-scale installations.

  • MTHARU

    Furniture and objects. (Co-founder & Designer) A Calgary furniture and objects brand. Pieces such as Plote, Prov, Jouir and Fe have shown at ICFF in New York.

Under construction

  • Tardibear

    An AI companion and operating layer for Grasshopper. Built in-house to solve our own office’s Grasshopper pain. Tardibear organises definitions without moving them, explains what a file does, builds new logic from a plain-language request using native components first, and teaches…

  • Spar

    Let the models argue until the answer is right. A command-line tool that has Claude and ChatGPT review and challenge each other’s work, turn after turn, until neither can find anything left to fix — using the plans you already pay for. No more copy-pasting between two chat windows.

    Source code

  • m8

    A companion for life and business. A private operating system for running a family and several companies at once. m8 keeps track of open loops, drafts the follow-ups, and asks before anything goes out to another person. It is a personal R&D bed for the agent ideas that end…

Selected work

  • Northeast LRT Extension Public Art

    Lead Artist, 2026–ongoing. Selected by Calgary Arts Development through an open call that drew 102 eligible applications, to create a site-responsive artwork for a new station plaza on the Northeast LRT Extension, City of Calgary.

  • Chinook Facade

    Lead Artist and Fabricator, 2022-ongoing. MASIV, Calgary, AB

  • Centre Street LRT Station Public Art Infrastructure

    Computational design, tectonics, detailed design, fabrication and installation with MASIV, 2022–. City of Calgary

  • Genesis Centre Public Art Project

    Lead Artist, 2022–ongoing (unveiling 2026). City of Calgary Northeast Public Art Initiative. Designed by Sumer Singh Studio and fabricated in aluminum and steel by Mercedes + Singh — one of the first major public artworks in Calgary’s…

  • Hyperboloid Sculpture

    Design Collaborator and Fabrication Leader, 2021. Rio Banquet, Calgary, AB

  • New Primitives

    Lead Artist and Material Investigator, 2020-2023. Exhibited at Collectible Design Fair Belgium

  • Garden Garage

    Lead Artist and Material Investigator, 2020-2023. Studio North, Calgary, AB

  • Rise and Reflect

    Artist collaborator and Fabrication Leader, 2020-2021. By Cassie Suche on International Avenue, City of Calgary

  • Neo-Scagliola

    Lead Artist and Material Investigator, 2019-2023. Exhibited at Collectible Design Fair Belgium and ICFF New York

  • Mount Pleasant 517

  • Capitol Hill House

  • Fe

    Our take on Gerrit Rietveld's 1934 zig zag stool in steel—ductile and elastic for a gentle rocking motion. Bar (29") or counter (26") height. Raw black steel or zinc-plated dichroic finish that develops colour over time. MTHARU.

  • Jouir Collection

    A philosophical exploration into material usage with form. The design explores continuity through the form, and the idea of ornamenting scars through the welding process. The continuously rolled sheet of raw black steel is welded using…

  • HyperCluster

  • Kamino

    An exploration of how objects meet the ground using the form itself. Sharp contrast between the body and LED light highlights organic versus manmade. The simple shape is highly customizable—currently in cement, latex, and basalt; our…

Research and interactive models

  • Agent Body Swarm

    Nov 2026 · Browser model, three.js. A multi-agent form-finding system you can run in the browser. Agents climb from a set of roots, steering by cohesion, separation and alignment; each carries an orientation frame that it aligns with…

  • Strange Attractors, live

    Nov 2026 · Browser model, three.js. The curve family behind the 2018 Strange Attractors study and the Strange Boids Pavilion, as a live model. Particles are integrated through Lorenz, Rössler, Aizawa or Thomas systems with a…

  • Boids and the Strange Boids field

    Nov 2026 · Browser model, three.js. Reynolds flocking in three dimensions with the three rules as live weights. In Lorenz goal the flock chases a point travelling along a Lorenz attractor, and records its trails as ribbons: that is the…

  • Pavilion Spine

    Nov 2026 · Browser model, three.js. The Strange Boids Pavilion (IAAC 2021, with Salvador Calgua) rebuilt as a live model. A Lorenz trace is resampled and smoothed by a flocking pass, then relaxed with knot repulsion, springs between…

  • Coagulated Outcomes, live

    Nov 2026 · Browser model, three.js. The tile system from the ACADIA 2020 Coagulated Outcomes workshop, collapsing in the browser. Every part is a node with arms on some of its six faces; wave function collapse fills a 3D grid so that…

  • Mesh to Strips, live

    Nov 2026 · Browser model, three.js. The Ivy panelization and GeoOpt studies as a live model. A doubly-curved canopy or shell is re-ordered into continuous ribbons of triangles over its dual graph, by a greedy shortest walk, a Kruskal…

  • Micromegalic Tracer

    Nov 2026 · Browser model, canvas. The pixel-tracing definition from the Micromegalic Inscriptions study (after Matteo Mauro's drawings), running on any image. Seeds scattered over the picture are pushed along sine and cosine vectors…

  • Cymatics

    Nov 2026 · Browser model, canvas. Sand on a vibrating plate, from Sumer's cymatics form-finding work. Each grain is shaken in proportion to the local amplitude of a Chladni standing wave and slides toward the nodal lines, where the…

  • Topography Fins

    Nov 2026 · Browser model, three.js. The shop-signage proposal as a live model: a field of fins whose depth follows a terrain, with lettering carved into the field, so it reads as a landscape section along the street and as text from the…

  • Modular House

    Nov 2026 · Browser model, three.js. The zoning-envelope and module-breakdown steps from the MaCAD thesis and the Capitol Hill modularization study. A lot, its setbacks and a height limit give a buildable envelope; the house inside it is…

  • Temple Grammar

    Nov 2026 · Browser model, three.js. A simplified version of the rules written for each tradition in Ancient Civilizations. A stepped plan polygon is stacked in tiers, tapered along a profile and turned a little at every tier, as in the…

  • Ancient Civilizations

    Oct 2020 – Mar 2021 · Mercedes + Singh research, Calgary. A generative-design study that reads Hindu, Mesoamerican and East Asian temple architecture as algorithms. Each tradition was catalogued (form, ornament, material, construction) and rewritten as a…

  • Micromegalic Inscriptions

    Dec 2020 – Mar 2021 · Mercedes + Singh research, Calgary. A study of the pixel-tracing drawings in Matteo Mauro's Micromegalic Inscriptions, rebuilt as a looping Grasshopper definition (Anemone). Points scattered over an image are pushed along sine and…

  • Ivy Panelization: Mesh to Strips

    Nov 2020 – Jun 2021 · Mercedes + Singh research, Calgary. How do you turn a doubly-curved mesh into something a shop can cut and fold? This study used mesh-graph tools (Ivy) and a custom shortest-walk routine to re-order triangulated faces into continuous…

  • Shop Signage from Calgary Topography

    Sep – Nov 2020 · Mercedes + Singh research, Calgary. An unbuilt proposal for the studio's own storefront. The lettering is carved out of a field of fins whose heights are driven by Calgary's topography around the shop, so the sign reads as a landscape…

  • Capitol Hill Residence: Modularization Study

    Oct – Nov 2020 · Mercedes + Singh research, Calgary. A feasibility study on splitting a single detached house (the studio's Capitol Hill House) into factory-built modules. Seams were located where structure and services could be separated cleanly:…

  • VR / AR Workflow: Rhino to Unreal, Unity and Quest

    Oct 2020 – Jan 2021 · Mercedes + Singh research, Calgary. A documented pipeline for taking parametric geometry from Rhino and Grasshopper into walkable virtual reality on a standalone headset. Two routes were built and compared: Rhino → Datasmith → Unreal…

  • Strange Attractors

    2018 · Mercedes + Singh research, Calgary. Computational and generative design algorithms inspired by chaos theory. A patterned form arising on the basis of mathematical appropriations of a chaotic system is also known as a "strange…

  • Discrete Vectors

    2020 · Mercedes + Singh research, Calgary. Computational and generative design algorithms inspired by discrete vector algorithms. Controlled vector propagation using finite boundary conditions.

  • The Pursuit of Singularity in AEC: The New Master Builder in the Age of Decentralized Technology

    Oct – Dec 2021 · IAAC, Master in Advanced Computation for Architecture & Design, thesis. The MaCAD thesis: a prefabrication framework for automating the end-to-end construction of a single detached house in Calgary, built as a proof of concept on a real RC-2 lot. Where most prefab…

  • Lunar Fab-Lab and Convention Centre

    Jan – Mar 2021 · IAAC, Master in Advanced Computation for Architecture and Design (MaCAD), BIM Studio. A studio project for a fabrication laboratory and convention centre at Shackleton Crater, near the lunar south pole, designed as an Industry 4.0 factory: a triangulated dome re-meshed from a…

  • Second Life: Matching Waste-Stream Materials with CLIP

    Apr – Jun 2021 · IAAC MaCAD, AI in Architecture studio. The AEC industry uses roughly 400 million tonnes of material a year and produces about 100 million tonnes of waste. Second Life is a tool that makes reclaimed building elements findable at design…

  • Neon Landscapes: Pix2Pix and StyleGAN

    May – Jun 2021 · IAAC MaCAD, Generative Design seminar (faculty Stanislas Chaillou and Oana Taut). Generative art made truly generative: the synthwave and vaporwave cityscapes that circulate as album art and video loops were scraped into a dataset and used to train models that produce new ones. A…

  • Strange Boids Pavilion

    Oct – Dec 2021 · IAAC MaCAD, Digital Tools for Complex Forming (faculty Rodrigo Aguirre, assistant Hesham Shawqy). A pavilion grown from chaos theory, picking up the strange-attractor research from the studio years before. A Lorenz attractor seeds a point cloud; a flock of boids moving through it pulls the curve…

  • Coagulated Outcomes: Wave Function Collapse Meets Reinforcement Learning

    Oct 2020 · ACADIA 2020 "Distributed Proximities", workshop "Coagulated Outcomes". A two-day workshop outcome from ACADIA 2020. A wave-function-collapse tile system was wired to a reinforcement-learning agent (Unity ML-Agents) whose reward combined density, directionality, the size…

  • Techno Relics: A Framework for Computation, Materiality, and Fabrication in the Anthropocene

    Oct 2023 · ACADIA 2023 "Habits of the Anthropocene", Denver · Proceedings vol. 2, pp. 294–303. Human-made materials are now a distributed part of the environment and nature has started to absorb them into new compositions, blurring the agency of people, nature and technology. The paper names…

  • The Master Builder in the Age of Mass Customization and Industry 4.0

    Jan – Mar 2021 · IAAC MaCAD, Theory seminar (faculty Maite Bravo). Master builders have always existed: people who held the knowledge of architect, engineer and trades in one head and built without disciplinary hand-offs. This research argues that the division of…

Teaching

  • Research Studio 5: Prefabricated Hybrid Solutions for AEC using Mass Customization

    University of Calgary, Masters of Architecture, School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, Fall 2020

  • Research Studio 6: Materiality and Fabrication in the Age of the Human Epoch

    "Svyambhav, the Sanskrit word for the 'self-born' aesthetic, as distinct from rupa, the man-made form imposed through human artifice .. " - Anish Kapoor: Making Emptiness, by Homi K. Bhabha and Pier…

  • Block Week: Model Thinking: Giving Agency to Material Behaviour

    Model Thinking provides a design method to depart from traditional physical model making as a purely representation tool. It rejects the deep-rooted hierarchy between the designer and materials, and…

Press