Keynote Maaike Bleeker at  Rob | Arch 2026

On 28 August 2026 Maaike Bleeker gave a keynote lecture at Rob | Arch 2026, the conference for robotic fabrication in art, design and architecture in Aarhus.

In her work Maaike looks at performances of humans and non-humans, in the theatre and in other contexts. With her keynote ‘Imagining Robots in and within the Theater’ Maaike offered the audience, researchers and designers within architecture and the built environment, a new perspective on Human Robot Interaction.

Detangling Dependencies – the theme of ROB | ARCH2026 – set the stage for a critical examination of robotic workflows in architecture and design. Hosted by the Aarhus School of Architecture, the conference invited the community to enlarge the scope of our research by foregrounding considerations of material innovations, resource flows and circularity, data and intelligence, interactions and emerging practices.  

This year’s edition moves beyond the established implementations for realization of complex forms, and human-robot co-creation, by starting to question how technology, AI, computation and robotics, can begin mitigating the challenges faced by the construction industry and built environment.