Generative Design and 3D Design

9am - 10am

Niccolo Casas

BIO: Italian architect and professor Niccolo Casas is Principal and Founder at Niccolo Casas Architecture, a visiting faculty member at RISD Rhode Island School of Design, and a PhD candidate at The Bartlett UCL London. He runs a multidisciplinary practice for research and architecture that aims to combine several fields of specialisations so as to offer an innovative and unique vision of the academic discipline and profession. 

Casas’s work spans from architecture to couture and fashion-tech, and from design to data visualisation and medicine.

He has collaborated with—among others— the fashion designer Iris Van Herpen, the fashion-tech designer Anouk Wipprecht, the entertainment company Cirque du Soleil, the automotive companies Volkswagen and BMW, the multinational software and electronic corporations Intel and Autodesk, the 3D-printing companies Materialise and 3D Systems, the MIT research team EmbrLabs and the sport firm Sequoia. He has also participated in the National Academy Keck Futures Initiative (NAKFI) where, as co-investigator, he was awarded $150,000 for interdisciplinary projects at the intersection of science, art, engineering and medicine. 

Topic Talk: Architecture and fashion, analogical translations: encounters, tensions and thresholds. 

"One evening, I saw Beauty in my lap. – And I found her bitter – And I cursed her." – Arthur Rimbaud (Collection of poetry and prose pieces, A Season in Hell, 1873) Even though a lot has been said about how new digital techniques have radically influenced the research of designers towards beauty, style and elegance, not much has towards the sublime, mysteriousness and furthermore ugliness. 

While ugliness seems to be a domain relatively unexplored in architecture, other disciplines such as art,the movie industry,poetry and advertisement have always been open to the fascination of imperfection, horridness and abhorrence.

I propose to define the characteristics of a new sensibility to the aesthetic of ugliness emerging in contemporary architecture as well as analyze the origin of this sensibility and its implication in science and art. By investigating and applying the possibilities of hybrid technologies, as well as testing new design territories such as scripting, biogenetic and new materials I would explore ugliness as a new kind of aesthetic paradigm based on disease, downfall  and mutation.

10am - 11am

Moritz Waldemeyer

BIO: Moritz Waldemeyer is an internationally renowned artist based in London. His work occupies a diverse range of creative spaces,  from art and product design through to fashion and entertainment.

In 2004 he made his debut into the design world with an interactive chandelier for Swarovski and Ron Arad.

Following his early collaborative work for the likes of Hussein Chalayan and Zaha Hadid, Moritz soon established himself as an independent artist. He held his first two exhibitions in 2006 and 2007 and he participated in MoMA’s Design & the Elastic Mind exhibition in 2008. In 2013 his lighting product ‘My New Flame’, developed for Ingo Maurer, was unveiled as part of MoMA’s permanent collection.

Topic Talk - Maximizing the minimal

Moritz will talk about his philosophy of playful experimentation by forging links between technology, art, fashion and design. He will talk about  an innovative tool chain, seamlessly merging the latest in parametric design tools from the world of computational architecture with electronic circuit design software.

ADNZ CPD Points: 2 (design)

AIA Formal CPD Points: 2

Learning outcomes and AACA competencies:

• 4. Design: Schematic Design 
• 4.2 Evaluation of design options against values of physical , environmental and cultural contexts. 
• 4.3 Application of creative  imagination aesthetic judgement to produce  coherent design 
• 4.6 Investigation and integration of appropriate material selection for the project design.