Ken Marold is a creating-making educator, architect, and interdisciplinary designer whose teaching and research integrate design-build, digital fabrication, immersive media, and community partnerships. He serves as Architecture Coordinator and Lead Faculty for the American School Design Build (ASDB) program at the University of Oklahoma’s Christopher C. Gibbs College of Architecture, where he directs immersive, full-year studios that unite architecture and construction science through civic engagement. Through these initiatives, ASDB is helping shape the next generation of the American School, transforming a once intuitiondriven philosophy into an evidence-based, community-centered framework that couples experimentation with fabrication research, connects design to construction science, and repositions making as both a pedagogical and civic pursuit.
Marold’s creative scholarship investigates making as research that links material craft, digital technology, and human experience. His work spans three primary trajectories: Fabrication as Research, exploring digital-to-construction workflows, parametric modeling, CNC fabrication, and adaptive material systems; Simulation and Immersion as Research, developing VR/AR environments and NSF-aligned collaborations with the National Weather Center for environmental resilience; and Design-Build Pedagogy as Research, framing teaching and construction as applied inquiry that advances civic engagement and interdisciplinary learning.
Across his teaching in Architecture, Marold leads advanced design and fabrication courses including American School Design Build Studio, Envisioning Space, Matter + Code, and Gibbs Collective Creating. These courses bridge conceptual design, parametric modeling, and full-scale making through communityengaged projects and public exhibitions. His studios position students as active collaborators in the construction of built work, advancing a next-generation American School ethos that merges digital precision, analog craft, and collective experimentation.
In the School of Visual Arts, Marold teaches Mixed Reality Techniques, Game Engine Techniques, and Interactive Media Production, guiding graduate students to merge computational design, AI, interactive media, and immersive visualization. His pedagogy treats materials and technologies as active collaborators in learning, cultivating empathy, precision, and reflection through making.
An active practitioner and founder of Prairiefire Design Build and MakeCodePlay, Marold’s professional and exhibition work extends across architecture, fabrication, and interactive media. His projects include Biome Racer (Science Museum Oklahoma), Galileo’s World Interactive (Sam Noble Museum of Natural History), and Elemental Worlds (Science Museum Oklahoma), which explore play, simulation, and participatory learning through custom-coded environments. Additional works such as DriftLens, an evolving mixed-reality platform for psychogeographic navigation, and interactive installations developed through MakeCodePlay, investigate how computation and embodiment inform spatial experience. In design and fabrication, his work includes Outré West (Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center), Surface Flux (Factory Obscura), Renegades: Bruce Goff and the American School of Architecture (Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art), and Do Not Try to Remember (Venice Architecture Biennale). Across these diverse projects, Marold’s practice, teaching, and research continue the experimental ethos of the American School while reimagining it for contemporary design education—where making, technology, and community engagement operate as one continuous act of discovery
