Alumnus Nicholas Hoban: How Digital Fabrication Found It’s Way To Canada

Nicholas Steven Hoban was part of the inaugural year of the MAS ETH DFAB programme in 2015. This year changed direction of his career — and eventually, Canadian architectural education.

Nicholas Hoban is now Director of Applied Technologies at the University of Toronto's John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design. There he oversees one of the country's most advanced fabrication environments: a high-bay robotic cell at the heart of the Daniels building. The foundation for it, he says, was laid in Zurich.

In his alumni interview he takes us back the very first steps in the MAS ETH DFAB and remembers how as a student he and his colleagues had to define their own working parameters, spec their own equipment, and build out a functional robotic cell from the ground up. "That knowledge wouldn't have been afforded to us if I had just worked on a pre-set up robot," he says. When the time came to build the Daniels system, he already knew exactly what to do.

His research today focuses on timber. Nicholas works on lightweight active timber structures and reciprocal timber shells. The broader ambition there is to push North American construction, a field he describes as largely unchanged for a century, toward closer collaboration between academia and industry. Robotics and computational design, he believes, are the lever.