Enlarging the Computational Spectrum

Enlarging the Computational Spectrum: Exploring AI’s Expanding Role in Architecture, Art and Technology

Curated by Dr Philippe Morel and Elly Selby, Enlarging the Computational Spectrum: Exploring AI’s Expanding Role in Architecture, Art and Technology is a lecture series dedicated to uncovering the profound and evolving consequences of computation and AI in contemporary and 20th-century architectural and artistic practice, and technology.

Through the insights of leading scholars and practitioners – including Ludovico Centis, Bernard Geoghegan, AA Cavia, Catherine Mason, Sotirios D. Kotsopoulos, Kas Oosterhuis, Rebecca Fiebrink and Maya Christodoulaki – this series will critically engage with how computational methods are reshaping, or have historically impacted, both creative processes and theoretical discourses.

From algorithmic design to AI-generated art, from digital fabrication to speculative research on post-human landscapes, each lecture will provide a unique lens on the expanding influence of computation. Beyond technical applications, the series aims to foster a broader understanding of how critical and scholarly perspectives can help navigate the ethical, conceptual, technological and societal implications of AI.

Open to all students at The Bartlett, this series offers a vital opportunity to engage with groundbreaking ideas and expand the discourse on architecture’s computational future. Additional lectures will follow in Term 3. 

05 March | 14:00 | Ludovico Centis | G.12, 22 Gordon Street & Zoom

The Obsolescence of Mankind

The lecture deals with a crucial event of the 20th century – the discovery and subsequent use of atomic power for military and then civil use - and the spaces related to it. At the same time, it addresses two issues that are indeed timely: the first is the overwhelming role of technology in our lives and the fact that we are not able anymore to fully control it (the “promethean gap” philosopher Guenther Anders referred to); the second is the fact that the extreme nature of the Manhattan Project and its legacy introduced in scientific thought and practice a completely new paradigm, one of non-graduality.

We can recognize this non-graduality—this “unthinkability”, as intended by Herman Kahn in his book “Thinking about the Unthinkable”(1962) —also in many events that increasingly affected our lives since the beginning of this millennium: the epochal effects of climate change, the economic crisis of 2008, the combined effects of earthquake and tsunami in Fukushima in 2011, the Covid-19 pandemic that hit us globally, the overwhelming evolution of artificial intelligence. Events that exceed what we consider plausible, out of scale both in psychological and cultural terms.

The research presented in the frame of the lecture engages with spaces where the non-graduality paradigm took shape and first manifested. It does so through the exploration of memories and landscapes related to the atomic bomb and its legacy. Following the path opened by Simon Schama with his groundbreaking work “Landscape and Memory” (1995), individual and collective memories, tangible landscapes and landscapes of the mind are intertwined in a seamless narrative.

Ludovico Centis is an architect, founder of the office The Empire and co-founder and editor of San Rocco magazine. He has been a partner at the architectural office Salottobuono from 2007 to 2012. Centis holds a PhD in urbanism (Università Iuav di Venezia) and is currently assistant professor in urbanism at the University of Trieste. His research focuses on the ways in which individuals and institutions, as well as desires and power, shape cities and landscapes. Recent monographs and edited volumes include Reyner Banham: A set of actual tracks (2024), The Lake of Venice. A scenario for Venice and its lagoon (2022, with Lorenzo Fabian) and A parallel of ruins and landscapes (2019).

This lecture will be held in Room G.12, 22 Gordon Street, first come, first seated.

You can also attend on Zoom:Register on Zoom

More information

• Study Architectural Computation MSc

Image: CP-1 graphite brick. Picture by Alberto Sinigaglia, 2017