A/Prof. Dr. Ir. Arch. Kristof Crolla is a licensed architect who combines his architectural practice, Laboratory for Explorative Architecture & Design Ltd. (LEAD), with his position as tenured Associate Professor and Associate Dean (Special Projects) at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) where he teaches in the Master of Architecture program and directs both the Bachelor of Arts & Science Design+ program and the Building Simplexity Lab (BSL) research group. 

After graduating magna cum laude from the Civil Architectural Engineering program at Ghent University in 2003, he practiced in Belgium at Bureau Buildings & Techniques and independently designed and built his first project, House for an Artist. He moved to London in 2005 to attend the Architectural Association School of Architecture and London AA’s Master of Architecture program Design Research Laboratory (DRL), from where his student work was exhibited at the 2006 Venice Architecture Biennale.  
He then worked for several years as Lead Architect for the Pritzker Prize-winning Zaha Hadid Architects, while teaching in parallel at the AA and other institutions worldwide. He has been invited as a jury critic, lecturer and tutor at numerous institutions throughout Europe, North America, Asia, Australia, Chile and South Africa. 

Crolla is currently based in Hong Kong, where he has received numerous design awards and accolades for his work focusing on the strategic integration of the latest technologies in the architectural design and implementation processes. He is best known for the projects “YEZO,” “Golden Moon,” and “ZCB Bamboo Pavilion” for which he also received the World Architecture Festival Small Project of the Year award in 2016.
In 2018, he completed his Ph.D. studies at RMIT, Melbourne, with the doctoral dissertation “Building Simplexity – The ‘More or Less’ of Post-Digital Architecture Practice” for which he received the 2016 RMIT Vice-Chancellor’s Prize for Research Impact – Higher Degree by Research. In 2019, he was appointed by the International Network for Bamboo and Rattan (INBAR) as a Task Force Expert Member – Bamboo Construction.