Kyle MertensMeyer
Designer, Researcher, Founder
MArch | MDes | LEED APKyle MertensMeyer is a designer, researcher, and three-time founder whose work spans architecture, technology, and the spaces where they converge. Since 2008, he has delivered over $1B in built work across four continents while founding companies spanning design practice to AI-native software. His career traces a consistent line: from studying and shaping physical environments to building the technologies that make those environments responsive, intelligent, and adaptive.
Kyle's work resides within systems of ecology, parametrics, and information, breaking large-scale vision into actionable outcomes for himself and his teams. Each project is rooted in context: understanding how sun, wind, and rain inform; how technology and media frame; how historical and anthropological layers reveal. He believes "we have to envision a better future while staying relevant to the needs of the present," and that the most significant challenges we face extend beyond the act of design itself. This philosophy has driven outcomes ranging from nonprofit work in Haiti to AI-native software that transforms how developers evaluate land.
We are now at the precipice of a new era, one in which humans and robots increasingly cohabit a built environment that was never designed for such cohabitation and currently lacks the frameworks to host synthetic beings. Kyle's research examines how AI shapes what's possible in the built environment and how synthetic ecology will transform regulatory systems for zoning and building codes.
Kyle has taught design and technology at Tongji University and holds a Master in Design Studies from Harvard GSD, where he studied across the university's schools of design, business, law, and government, as well as a Master of Architecture from Judson University. His work has received 53 awards and nominations from institutions including the AIA, IIDA, World Architecture Festival, and Norman Foster Foundation.