Prospectives Lecture Series Autumn 2020

All events in this series will be held on Zoom. Check the schedule for times and registration links.

About

The B-Pro Prospectives History and Theory Lecture Series offers a platform for presentation, discussion and theoretical reflection upon the links between digital thought, architecture, and urban design. This year's series of talks emphasise the key role computation plays within complex design synthesis and their cultural implications.

This series encourages and inspires the current student body and interested professionals, by creating conversations about topics addressing academia, practice and beyond as well as overall disciplinary concerns and frontiers.

B-Pro, or Bartlett Prospective, groups together five of the school's graduate programmes with a unique philosophy and shared approach to the future of design, architecture and the urban environment. The B-Pro Prospectives lecture series is organised by Roberto Bottazzi and Emmanouil Zaroukas.

For this term's series, all events will be held in Zoom. Check the schedule for individual registration links to each event. 

Schedule

5 November | 13:00 | Andrew Witt

Exact Imagination

The precision of the sciences and unpredictable appetites of imagination have long been in productive tension in architecture. Yet in the last few years, through the training of artificial imaginations and the digitization of all human creative products, the boundary between quantification and imagination has dissolved. All manner of visual qualities can be quantified in unprecedented ways, and machine vision and its associated hallucinations provide an alternate lens into a posthuman world. In this lecture Andrew will peruse atypical applications of quantified, mathematical, and computational methods in design, touching on cultural and material questions around radical waste reuse, the mapping of the visual space of style, and how our autonomous robots perceive and perhaps imagine us. Through projects of Certain Measures, research at Harvard, and historical context on the intimate interactions of architecture and mathematics, Andrew will outline a fusion of mathematics, vision, and culture in a new practice of design.

Biography

Andrew Witt is co-founder, with Tobias Nolte, of Certain Measures, a Boston/Berlin-based design futures office that combines imagination and evidence, applying data science, machine vision, AI, and advanced geometric methods for scalable approaches to spatial problems. The work of Certain Measures is in the permanent collection of the Centre Pompidou, and has been exhibited at the Pompidou, the Barbican Centre, Futurium, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, among others. Andrew is also an Associate Professor in Practice of Architecture at Harvard GSD, teaching and researching on the relationship of geometry and machines to perception, design, assembly, and culture. Trained as both an architect and mathematician, he has a particular interest in a technically synthetic and logically rigorous approach to form.

Register for Andrew Witt's lecture

13 November | 13:00 | Anna-Maria Meister

Abstract

This lecture will look at two different German architecture schools which tried to introduce design computation four decades apart: on the one hand the HfG Ulm, arguably the first school to introduce cybernetics to the curriculum to automate design processes toward ostensibly objective "good design". On the other the TU Munich, the self-labeled "entrepreneurial" polytechnic school where the introduction of computers in the 1990s found much institutional and disciplinary resistance. Contrasting the two institutions, this lecture will investigate the medial and institutional superimpositions where the obsession to "dematerialize" the act of drawing was ultimately buried under ever higher piles of paper. 

Biography

Anna-Maria Meister is an architect, historian and writer, and professor of architecture theory and science at TU Darmstadt. She works at the intersection of architecture's histories and the histories of science and technology, focusing on on the production and dissemination of norms and normed objects as social desires in German modern architecture. Meister received a joint PhD degree in the History and Theory of Architecture and the Council of the Humanities from Princeton University, and holds degrees in architecture from Columbia University, New York, and the TU Munich. She was a fellow at the Max-Planck Institute for History of Science, Berlin, and a postdoctoral fellow at the TU Munich. Her work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Graham Foundation, the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, DAAD, and Columbia University, among others. Her writing has been published in Harvard Design Magazine, Volume, Uncube, Baumeister, Arch+ and as book chapter in Architecture and the Paradox of Dissidence (Routledge, 2013) and Dust and Data (2019). She is co-curator and co-editor of the international collaborative project "Radical Pedagogies"; the eponymous book is forthcoming with Sternberg Press in 2020.

Register for Anna-Maria Meister's lecture

18 November | 13:00 | Jose Sanchez

In his lecture, Jose Sanchez expands on research developed in his book ‘The Architecture for the Commons, Participatory Systems in the Age of Platforms’ diving into the study of how his most recent video game project Common’hood, attempts to address participatory strategies when addressing a public. His research connects software design, economic studies, and the use of Discrete Architectural systems as a value proposition and strategy for the construction of the Commons.

Register for Jose Sanchez's lecture

POSTPONED: Frédéric Migayrou

Neuronal Architecture

Biography

Frédéric Migayrou is Chair, Bartlett Professor of Architecture at The Bartlett School of Architecture and Deputy Director of the MNAM-CCI (Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre de Création Industrielle) at the Centre Pompidou Paris. He was the founder of the Frac Center Collection and of ArchiLab, the international festival of Prospective Architecture in Orléans. Apart from recent publications and exhibitions (De Stijl, Centre Pompidou, 2011; La Tendenza, Centre Pompidou, 2012; Bernard Tschumi, Centre Pompidou, 2013; Frank Gehry, Centre Pompidou 2014; Le Corbusier, Centre Pompidou 2015), he was the curator of Non Standard Architectures at the Centre Pompidou in 2003, the first exposition devoted to architecture, computation and fabrication. More recently he has curated Japan Architects 1945-2010 (21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, 2014), Frank Gehry (Foundation Louis Vuitton, Paris 2014) and Naturalising Architecture (ArchiLab, Orléans 2013). In 2012 he founded B-Pro, The Bartlett’s umbrella structure for post-professional architecture programmes.

24 November | 15:00 | Theodora Vardouli

Skeletal Visions: Architecture’s New Mathematic

What critical and historical insights on architecture's entanglements with digital technologies might we gain by examining a period of avid engagement with the modern mathematics of relations and structures before the advent of the personal computer? This talk follows the graph --a mathematical entity that consists of points representing objects and lines representing their relationships - across different knowledge communities and institutional settings that spearheaded computational approaches to architecture. Bringing together archival research and oral histories, it tracks graphs in the work of Christopher Alexander and the Center for Environmental Structure; Lionel March, the Land Use Built Form Studies Centre, and the Center for Configurational Studies; Yona Friedman and MIT’s Architecture Machine, as well as intersecting research agencies and organizations.

By unpacking the ways in which graphs subjugated the aesthetic and operational realm of architecture to abstract calculable structures, the talk reveals that despite its frequent association with lush geometric forms, digital architecture was built upon a profound ambivalence toward the visual realm endemic to mid-twentieth century architectural and mathematical modernisms. More broadly, this presentation puts forward “biographies” of technical practices as a generative method for getting to grips with architecture's technological contingencies and for unpacking representational and discursive tropes that reverberate in digital architecture.

Biography

Theodora Vardouli is an Assistant Professor at the Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture, McGill University. Her research examines histories, cultural meanings, and practical implications of algorithmic techniques for describing, generating, and simulating architecture. Vardouli's articles have been published in Leonardo, Design Studies, Perspective, Nexus, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing and several edited collections. She is co-curator of the exhibition Vers un imaginaire numérique (Montreal 2021) and co-editor of Computer Architectures: Constructing the Common Ground (Routledge 2020). Her in-progress book project historically situates the rift between the perceptual and operational realm of architectural geometry —what one sees on the screen and how one manipulates it— in transactions of twentieth century architectural and mathematical cultures.

Vardouli holds a PhD and a SMArchS in Design and Computation from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as a Postgraduate Diploma and an MArch from the National Technical University of Athens. Her research has been supported by the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the Fonds de recherche du Québec Société et Culture, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Onassis, Leventis, and Fulbright Foundations.

Register for Theodora Vardouli's lecture

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‘Procedural Liveability’ by Aafreen Rahiman, RC12, Urban Design MArch, 2020

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