Instabilities and Potentialities: Notes on the Nature of Knowledge in Digital Architecture

Now that information technologies are fully embedded into the design studio, Instabilities and Potentialities explores our post-digital culture to better understand its impact on theoretical discourse and design processes in architecture. The role of digital technologies and its ever-increasing infusion of information into the design process entails three main shifts in the way we approach architecture: its movement from an abstracted mode of codification to the formation of its image, the emergence of the informed object as a statistical model rather than a fixed entity and the increasing porosity of the architectural discipline to other fields of knowledge. Instabilities and Potentialities aims to bridge theoretical and practical approaches in digital architecture.

Chandler Ahrens is an Associate Professor at Washington University in St. Louis as well as a co-founder of Open Source Architecture (OSA), which is an international transdisciplinary collaboration developing research and commissioned projects. His focus is on the intersection of material investigations, environmental phenomena and computational design processes. He was on the board of directors for Association for Computer-Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA). His work with OSA has received several design awards and is part of the collection at the Fonds Regional d’Art Contemporain (FRAC) in Orleans, France. He was a co-curator of the Gen(h)ome Project and co-chair for the exhibition, Evolutive Means, ACADIA2010.

Aaron Sprecher is Associate Professor at the Technion Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning. In parallel, he is co-founder and partner of Open Source Architecture, a collaborative research group that brings together international researchers in the fields of design, engineering, media research, history and theory. Aaron Sprecher taught at Syracuse University School of Architecture and McGill University School of Architecture. His research and design work focus on the synergy between information technologies, computational languages and digital fabrication systems, examining the way in which technology informs and generates innovative approaches to design processes. He currently leads the Material Topology Research Laboratory (MTRL) at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology. He is co-editor of the book Architecture in Formation―On the Nature of Information in Digital Architecture (2013).