Topic:
Technogenesis in Architecture
Academic Guest:
Bernard Stiegler
Organizers:
Andreas Kalpakci, Damjan Kokalevski
Participants:
Masoud Akbarzadeh is an architect and civil engineer. He received two Masters in Architecture from MIT, United States, and a Master of Science in Dynamics of Structures from Iran University of Science and Technology. His PhD research focuses on Three-Dimensional Geometrical Form Finding Methods. He is the percipient of SOM AWARD in Architecture in 2011.
José Aragüez is a New York-based architect and writer born in Málaga, Spain. He holds a Diploma in Architecture and Urbanism from the School of Architecture at the University of Granada; a MSc. Degree in Advanced Architectural Design and a Certificate in Applied Architectural Research, both from Columbia University; and a Graduate Certificate in Media & Modernity and a Master of Arts degree, both from Princeton University. He is currently a PhD candidate in the History and Theory of Architecture at Princeton University SoA. His dissertation looks at the work of the figure on the edge between architecture and engineering during the second half of the twentieth century, which he hypothesizes to be the medium through to write a historically situated theory of architectural form qua three-dimensional configuration.
Elena Chestnova is guest PhD-candidate from the Università della Svizzera italiana. She graduated in architecture from the University of Cambridge in the UK and from ETH Zurich. Her research is focussed on the relationships between architecture and globalization in the teaching work of Gottfried Semper 1850-1855.
Sasha Cisar is an architect and theorist. Currently he researches and teaches at the ETH / SuAT – Sustainable Architecture and Building Technologies on sustainability and spatialization of energy, economics and crisis in architecture and urbanism.
Kathrin Dörfler is an architect. She holds degrees in architecture from TU Graz and TU Vienna, as well as in Digital Art from the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. Kathrin focuses on the integration of digital and physical design and fabrication methods, through the study of feedback-based processes. Her research aims at the exploration of adaptive and flexible fabrication processes in changing and uncontrolled environments, as well as with changing and difficult to control material systems themselves.
Nick Drofiak has an MArch from the Welsh School of Architecture in Cardiff. His research explores how translation may be used to provoke an alternative apprehension of architecture. Using a camera obscura, his project stimulated a juxtaposition of buildings from Ivan Leonidov’s architectural fantasy the City of the Sun into the landscape of northern Siberia, where Leonidov had worked. This imagined manifestation was described by a native speaker of the local, endangered language Ket, which has not previously served as a tool for interpreting utopian architecture.
Marc Frochaux is an architect and art historian. He graduated from ETH Zurich and UNI Lausanne. His PhD research focuses on the notions of atmosphere and context in the Post-war teaching of architecture and the techniques of representation in educational processes.
David Ganzoni is an architect. He graduated from the ETH Zurich, Switzerland. He is currently preparing a PhD research which will focus on the representation of public space in the architecture education at ETH Zurich in the 1970s
Moritz Gleich is a media and cultural science scholar. He graduated from Freie Universität Berlin, and Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. His PhD research focuses on the architectural and media technological operationalization of built space in the first half of the 19th century.
Marcela Hanáčková is an art historian specialized on Central-East European modern architecture. She graduated from Charles University in Prague, where she obtained a BA in Human Sciences and a MA in Art History. Her PhD research is titled CIAM and the Cold War. Post-war Discussions on Modernism and Socialist Realism.
Martin Hartung is an art historian and curator. He graduated from Martin-Luther-University in Halle-Saale, Germany, and co-organized exhibitions at Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein; ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe; and The Museum of Modern Art, New York. His PhD research focuses on the built model in Modernism, with a focus on its role at the intersection of art and architecture.
Samia Henni is an architect. She graduated from the Academy of Architecture in Mendrisio, Switzerland, and the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Her PhD research aims at deconstructing the relations between conflict and place during the Algerian Revolution (1954-1962).
Andreas Kalpakci is an architect. He graduated from the Academy of Architecture in Mendrisio, Switzerland, and Yale University, United States. His PhD research focuses on the discourses and technologies employed in the organization of the International Congresses of Modern Architecture (1928-1959).
Damjan Kokalevski is an architect. He graduated from Vienna University of Technology, Austria and Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan. His PhD research focuses on the policies and initiatives of the United Nations sponsored rebuilding process of Skopje after the earthquake in 1963.
David López López is an architect. He graduated from the schools of Architecture of Madrid and Barcelona (UPM and UPC) and from the schools of Civil Engineering of Barcelona and Guimaraes (UPC and UMINHO). His PhD research focuses on the structural analysis of thin-tile vaults as formwork for concrete shells.
Nikola Marincic is an architect and computer programmer. He graduated from the Faculty of Architecture in Belgrade, Serbia, and recieved his MAS diploma at the Chair for Computer Aided Architectural Design at ETH Zürich. Currently he researches and teaches at the ETH / CAAD on pre-specific modeling and sound design for architects.
Clayton Miller is a mechanical engineer in the Architecture and Sustainable Building Technologies. His PhD research focuses on bridging the performance gap between building design, construction, and operations through the use of simulated and measured system-level performance
Romana Rust is an architect and has been educated at the University of Technology in Graz in Architecture and Technical Mathematics. In her research she focuses on the design and study of interactive feedback-based production processes and the development of tools and technologies for their application within the architectural domain.
Mejrema Zatric is an architect. She is a graduate of the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya in Barcelona and University of Sarajevo. Her doctoral project examines the acquiring of architectural knowledge about social space as an instance of agency, focusing on the urban research performed by architects in socialist Yugoslavia of the 1950s.
Abstracts:
Masoud Akbarzadeh
As a PhD student at the Institute of Technology in Architecture, Masoud Akbarzadeh is extending the traditional two-dimensional Graphic Statics to three dimensions. Graphic Statics is a highly beneficial method of structural design and analysis for architects and designers; it allows designing efficient structures using geometric constructions only. Although this method has been developed since 1725, it is only applicable to two-dimensional structures. The idea of three-dimensional Graphic Statics for the first time was proposed in 1864. However, the lack of computational and representational means at that time prevented the scholars to further this topic. Moreover, today, with the powerful means at hand, there is no existing method or implementation in three dimension that is as powerful and intuitive as the two-dimensional Graphic Statics is in two dimension. Masoud is using existing computational/representational tools in developing algorithms and techniques to prove and complement this historical proposition. The result of his research will extend Graphic Statics to three dimensions and gratify the ever-growing need of design and analysis of complex three-dimensional structures architects, designers, engineers and students.
José Aragüez
José Aragüez examines the work of the designer on the edge between architecture and engineering. By tracing the history of the disciplinary demarcation of the two disciplines, José identifies the characteristics that differentiate the various iterations of the hybrid figure since the eighteenth century from innovators operating after the mid 1960s such as Vittorio Giorgini, Michael Burt and Cecil Balmond. By way of addressing the question of disciplinary hybridity, his contribution tackles the possibility of a rearticulation of the concept of architectural form, as well as, by extension, of the basis of architectural theory.
Kathrin Dörfler, Romana Rust
The conventional approach to fabrication in architecture is to form a highly deterministic system, generally through the determination of shape. The fabrication phase follows upon a finalized design phase, thus rendering the frozen design into a materialized form. These processes are linear, pre-defined, deterministic and inflexible, and in automated applications they further don’t utilize the full potential of the machines involved. In contrast to that, the proposed research aims at the exploration of adaptive and flexible fabrication processes in changing and uncontrolled environments, as well as with changing and difficult to control (building) material systems themselves. Through establishing feedback based processes, novel ways of integrating the material environment and its dynamic physical processes within a digitally controlled design and fabrication environment will be introduced. Global control mechanisms will be extended by local, dynamic, integrative approaches that advertise self-organization and emergence. Consequently, the arising tension fields between design and emergence of “fabricated” architecture will be examined.
Nicholas Drofiak
Using a camera obscura, his project stimulated a juxtaposition of buildings from Ivan Leonidov’s architectural fantasy the City of the Sun into the landscape of northern Siberia, where Leonidov had worked. This imagined manifestation was described by a native speaker of the local, endangered language Ket, which has not previously served as a tool for interpreting utopian architecture.
Samia Henni
I will endeavor to examine the meaning of Jacques Derrida’s statement “architecture as the last fortress of metaphysics” in relation to Bernard Stiegler’s “Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus”. I do not pretend to understand metaphysics, but rather to think and rethink the politics of architecture.
Andreas Kalpakci
The CIAM (International Congress of Modern Architecture) entered the Postwar with a deep reorganization that quickened its bureaucratization. This was done in the attempt to revive the organization after the war by expanding it to a global scale. Yet, in order to achieve this scale, CIAM organizers had not only to think of communication strategies to operate throughout geographical distances, changes in time, language and technology; they also had to dissimulate these differences when the global scale was impossible to reach. This is the point of my contribution: while first I introduce the notion of an organizational life as a continuum, I then scrutinize the various techniques of communication in search of organizational life, advancing the hypothesis that technogenesis within Postwar CIAM consists primarily in the attempt to grammatize organizational life in order to consolidate CIAM’s goals. I will conclude with a contemplation of the limits and possibilities of grammatizing organizational life in architecture in the context of alphabetic and analogical technology.
Nikola Marincic
Intention of my work is to challenge digital design tools for modeling architecture, with recent conceptual and technical advances in information technology, culminating with search engines and social media. My work started with one year of research in tracing genealogies of design medium, digital design tools and information technology. During this time, major concepts and mathematical background had been extracted, outlined and referenced chronologically. Some of the hypotheses were made about the driving concepts of Information Technology, like: Abstraction of content, indexability, and connectability. Respective ones of digital design tools are thought to be: Simulation and Specificity. Viability of these hypotheses has been validated with current state-of-the-art tools in both fields of research, and led to the forming of my research question: Is possible to model architecture without specifying direct relation between representational symbol and concrete elements being modeled, but with relationability of architectural abstractions? If so, how can we design digital tools in a way that design doesn’t start from the empty file, but structure architectural abstractions from the abundance of existing data available on Internet? One of the fundamental ideas of the proposed solution is an abstraction of the building’s geometrical body. This is achieved by conceptually separating concerns of geometry and representation with those of content and relations. This separation is to be implemented using technologies of parametric models and Self-organizing maps working together within a single computational organ, operating on digital diagrams.
Merjema Zatric
Undertaking, recording and publishing urban research remains one of the most formidable of architects’ tasks. The abstraction of social space into manageable categories has been pioneered by the modern movement, and then revolutionized by the “community-and-identity”-minded architects of the 1950s. Led by the idea of the city as a repository of architectural knowledge, these architects employed new ways of abstraction of urban reality into concepts meant to be operative in design. By looking at examples of their research, this contribution addresses the technics of abstraction that underpin the production of architectural knowledge.
Schedule:
15. January – 17. January 2014, 12.00 – 16.00
Location:
Cabaret Voltaire, Spiegelgasse 1, 8001 Zürich