Technology, Technique, Techné: Creation vs Contingency

INTRODUCING LAUREN VASEY

A highly decorated Research Professor at ETH Zurich Lauren brings a wealth of knowledge in the realms of behavioural and adaptive robotic fabrication - curious to know more?

INTRODUCING ALVIN HUANG, SDA

Founder and Principal of award-winning Synthesis Design + Architecture (among many other things!), Alvin will be sharing his exploratory approach to research and technology as a means to challenge convention and imagine alternatives through an idea-driven architecture where form follows performance.

It can be said that the catalyst for every major advancement within the discipline of Architecture has been a parallel advancement of technology. Recently the introduction of computation within the field of Architecture has enabled new generative design techniques, new digital fabrication processes, and new performative building technologies. However, technology must also be understood as a form of contemporary cultural production that is not the end (solution), but rather the means (provocation). In this talk, Alvin Huang, AIA shares the exploratory practice of his firm Synthesis Design + Architecture, an award-winning design research practice that leverages technology as a means to challenge convention and imagine alternatives through an idea-driven architecture where form follows performance.

INTRODUCING ERSELA KRIPA - AGENCY

Ersela Kripa is a registered architect and a founding partner of AGENCY.

In her practice, Ersela works in urban and architectural ecologies to inform new ways of living, seeking productive and unexpected anomalies within urban contexts, and capitalizing on their potential through tactical interventions.

Ersela’s ongoing design research seeks to amplify the reach of local practices in informal environments, identifying opportunities for intervention and proposing agile minimal inventions she calls ‘Hackable Infrastructures’. Ersela tests her speculations with direct action, installing prototypes in urban environments, testing their effectiveness and gauging public response to refine relationships between design technologies, resources, and communities.

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.