digital aptitudes - Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture

SATURDAY, MARCH 3, 2012 - 2:00PM - 3:30PM
Post-Parametric Environments
Jennifer Leung, Yale University
Biochemical Injections - Architecture as a Biotechnical
Interface in a Post-parametric Environment.
Mina Yaney
Biochemical Injections is examining the potential of a creative, heterogeneous
and perpetually variable interface between architecture,
bio-technologies, postmodern philosophy as well as political
theory. The intersecting point between these four fields is identified
as the organic body, taken to mean all kinds of different bodies,
be they biological, chemical, physical or geological. What all
embodied entities share, is that one can clearly conceive of them as
an irreducible, corporeal, informational field which displays the relation
and performs the negotiation between different forces. This
difference of forces can be variably re-modulated and interfaced
through different biotechnologies. Since biotechnological practice
is circling around harnessing, manipulating and managing the
manufacturing, differentiating, propagating and fusing capacities
of tissues, cells, proteins and molecules, the notion of the organic
body is, hence, rendered as intrinsically open for re-modulation.
The biotechnological re-modulatability of the organic body opens
up a vast ethico-aesthetical paradigm on a molecular level and
clearly implies a re-modulation of the political, philosophical and
architectural as well. Hence, architectural design can be rethought
as inducing organic form from within - through modulation - rather
than mechanically imposing form from the outside. Can we specify
architectural approaches in which biotechnics may amplify, augment,
recombine and interface different life forces, forms of vitality,
and transformative productivity, governing the emergence of
environmental bodies of habitation?
Communication Theory as an Anti-environment for
Understanding the Effects of Technological Environments
upon Cultural Change
Isaac Lerner, Eastern Mediterranean University
Abstract: In order to deal with the bias of the ‘environment’ shaping
cultural and social prejudices in architecture and urbanism in
the information age, Marshall McLuhan’s communication theory
of cultural change provides a meaningful analysis of the effects of
technological environments, as a means of heightened perception.
In the current age, where the digital infrastructural environment
of cyberspace envelopes and transforms all pre-existing cultural
and natural habitats, the scale and pace of this transformation and
its psychological, sociological as well as material effects escapes
perception. McLuhan’s prose-poetic style and his mosaic form of
discourse satirize, or as he says “puts-on”, the reader in order to attune
perception so that understanding media effects is facilitated.
The interplay of cultures and the possibility for global cooperation
depends on harmonizing spatial biases as determined by the media
ecology (i.e. operational technological environments) and its effects
on group behavior. In terms of modern evolutionary theory,
such as the work of evolutionist David Sloan Wilson, at the group
level, altruistic or cooperative traits versus competitive or selfish
traits are selected for which sustains the survival of the group. In
this way, evolution occurs if there is another layer to the process
of natural selection which is the layer of group selection. This is the
layer, in terms of McLuhan’s work, whereby, by shaping our tools
we shape ourselves as a culture. By complementing modern evolutionary
group theory with McLuhan’s communication theory of
cultural change this enhances insight, and consequently provides
a means of anticipatory design, for architects and urban planners.
Risky Business: From Digital Fabrication to the Abstract
Workshop
Mark Cabrinha, California Polytechnic State University
The legal boundary separating architects’ conception from execution
is broached through a new genre of workshop practices enabled
by digital fabrication. The challenges and opportunities of
these workshop practices and their reflection on contemporary design
culture are made visible through a series of interviews I conducted
between 2005 and 2008. These interviews help to position
the pedagogical place of digital fabrication not as argument for the
design-build process, but rather in the formation of the image of
practice as an abstract workshop enabled through parametric design
tools. Abstractions develop from real world objects and experiences
becoming generalized, as abstractions, to apply to multiple
scenarios and situations, taking the general from the concrete. The
concept of the abstract workshop is grounded by material systems
but not fixed within one particular domain or application, and in so
doing, can leverage scale in the way direct fabrication never could.
The Parameters of the Posthuman
Ariane Lourie Harrison, Yale University
This paper recruits another “post”—the posthuman—to reflect on
the slippery status of the “post-parametic” environment, marking
our changing relationship to nature and registering what we term
an emerging architectural imagination of posthuman hybridity.
The posthuman interpretation of longstanding ecological concepts
of “hybridity” and “assemblage” allows us to explore the heterogeneous
urban environments produced in two realized works by
R&Sie (n) and The Living. The paper proposes that these examples
of contemporary architecture modify conventional understandings
of subject/object relations and instead address the posthuman “hybrid
subject”. Featuring animal subjects and vegetal cyborgs, these
works visualize the presence of human and non-human subjects as
assemblages which do not perform according to the “optimizing”
filters of parameterized behavior. Instead, A posthuman approach
to architecture expands the architectural subject beyond the human
user, extends the architectural building material to include
assemblages of inorganic and organic, and invokes the architectural
assemblage as a multi-scale territory. The post-parametic (or
posthuman) imagination suggests that what was formerly known
as nature is an environment bristling with hybrid subjects.
Digital Apptitutes + Other Openings - Boston, MA - 31