New Frontiers - CAADRIA2010

 New Frontiers - CAADRIA2010 - 7-10 April 2010

 

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KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

We are pleased to present three Keynote Speakers. The Keynotes will be held at the beginning of each day setting the tone for the presentations and discussions. Please refer for details to the Conference Program. More information about the Keynote Speakers are listed below.

 

Nader Tehrani
Nader Tehrani Principal - Office dA - Prof. MIT

Nader Tehrani received a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Bachelor in Architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1985 & 1986 respectively. He continued his studies at the Harvard Graduate School of Design where he received a Masters of Architecture in Urban Design in 1991.  Tehrani attended a post-graduate program in History and Theory at the Architectural Association in London. A tenured Professor of Architecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tehrani has also taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Rhode Island School of Design, and Georgia Institute of Technology, where he served as the Thomas W. Ventulett III Distinguished Chair in Architectural Design.

In the academic context, Nader Tehrani has helped to restructure the core curriculum of MIT.  His areas of research have been focused on material applications, the building industry, and new means and methods of construction, especially in the area of digital fabrication. His participation in the Immaterial/Ultra-material Exhibition at the GSD is paralleled by his installations at the Museum of Modern Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, and the Georgia Institute of Technology, investigating, among other media, pieces in wood, steel, rope and polycarbonate. In the professional context, Nader Tehrani is a principal at Office dA, where he has received numerous international awards, including the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award in Architecture, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Architecture Award, the Harleston Parker Award, 5 I.D. Magazine Awards, and eleven Progressive Architecture Awards. Recent work of Office dA includes the Rhode Island School of Design Library, Helios House, a sustainable power station in Los Angeles, the Macallen Building, a LEED Gold certified condominium building in Boston, and Banq, a restaurant in Boston.  Current work includes three architecture schools- the renovation of the Hinman Building at Georgia Institute of Technology, the renovation and expansion of the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape & Design at the University of Toronto, and the new construction of the Faculty of Architecture Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne- as well as a border crossing station between the U.S. and Canada.

7 April 2010: Building Digital Pedagogies

"The tensions between architectural practice and academia have historically played out in different ways, lamenting on the one hand, that schools do not prepare student for the ‘realities’ of practice, and on the other, that practice never rises to the intellectual occasion of academia-- both of them building false adversaries in each other to conceal their respective myopia. The work, research and design speculation of Office dA has attempted to overcome this dichotomy as a vehicle of theorizing practice, while also injecting the politics of practice into the academic studio. This cross-fertilization has enabled us to define certain irreducible qualities of the architectural medium that permeate problems of form—from its inception to eventual fabrication. In a time when the definition of architecture is expanding in accordance with the impact of culture, media, and technologies, buildings have often come to characterize the margins of the architectural discipline. In turn, buildings have lost their primacy and do not always enjoy a commensurate attention to research, speculation, play and transformation.  For precisely this reason, much of Office dA’s ongoing work in the past two decades has been dedicated to material research in its engagement with geometry, and modes of aggregation; this triad informs each other in productive and resonant ways, examining and challenging architecture at its core, precisely because of the shift that has occurred due to digital manufacturing and fabricational techniques.  While this research may seem obvious, it is also not to be taken for granted; in a practice where the means and methods of fabrication are legally delegated to the realm of the construction industry, the architectural discipline has technically lost its dominion over the very built environment that it seeks to specify. Thus, the act of challenging the construction industry is a potentially subversive act: regaining access to building practices for the architect on the one hand, and dethroning the builder as the determinant of pricing, scoping, and detailing of the work of architecture. Maybe most importantly, the argument holds that buildings themselves contain embodied knowledge, polemical stances and theoretical postures, engaging debates through material, spatial and formal properties.

Meanwhile, as disciplinary specialization has taken hold in the professional world, the role of the architect has, in recent decades, been tailored to reduced scopes of concern: packaging fragments of architectural parts and processes: facades, master-planning, decorating, interventions; this fragmentation has made it increasingly difficult for architects to  command the broader spectrum of integrated thinking.  Pedagogies have accommodated, and even promoted this specialization, advancing architects in discrete areas while leading them to a broader form of impotence. In the face of this predicament, some pedagogies still yearn for a classic sense of certainty, offering principles, techniques and mission statements that seek to compensate for an otherwise pluralistic and fragmented cultural reality. Other pedagogies have targeted this emerging reality with theoretical acumen, while leaving ambiguous and open-ended the status of “building”-- which by its very nature requires specification, certainty, and closure. The work of Office dA has attempted to take on the uncertainty of research, exploration and invention in a condition that requires action, implementation and physical commitments. In turn, the speculative work of digital installations has served as the very means by which the building industry may be interrogated, while the world of professional commissions has become the testing ground for intellectual platforms, formal preoccupations, and fabricational protocols. Navigating these two trajectories, the work strives for a difficult synthesis, bringing the certainty of materials to the uncertainty of ideas, experiments and explorations."
Nader Tehrani

 

James Law
James Law Chief Cybertect - James Law Cybertecture International

He was born in Hong Kong and raised in the UK from the age of nine and realized his talents in architecture when he was just seven years old. A self-confessed gadget freak, James’ fascination with buildings, structures and technology began at an early age. His favourite past times as a child included making robots and building computers.

After completing a degree in architecture from University College London in 1992, under renowned visionary architect Peter Cook, James took up his first job as an architect at the firm of prestigious Japanese architect Itsuko Hasegawa in Tokyo in 1994. Following this foray, James moved back to Hong Kong in 1997 to take up a position as the Director of Gensler International, one of the largest design firms in the world, and to focus on technology projects.

A defining moment in James’ architectural career occurred in 2000 when he was invited to design of both architecture and technology of the Dickson Cyber Express Shopping Mall – the world’s first “Bricks & Clicks” retail complex in Hong Kong. This led to James coining the term “Cybertecture”, to symbolize a new kind of design which merges technology & architecture as a future design that brings people “Live The Future” .

8 April 2010: Beyond our Future: Designing through Cybertecture:

"In the evolutionary journey of mankind, our impulse to design, shape and building our world has been achieved through the acquisition of newer and newer tools that have kept pace with mankind's every active imagination. These tools, including the very important computer, has allowed man's mind to travel to new dimensions that range in scale from the nano to the galactic, from the detailed to the expansive, from the impossible to the possible, from the real to the virtual and back, from the work of the hand, to the work of machines and then to the work of the mind. This talk looks at the possibilities of the now and future, through the work of James Law Cybertecture International as well as other organisations and companies through the use of machines and computers to see into and build the future."
James Law

 

Larry Sass
Larry Sass Director - A/Prof. Digital Design Fabrication Group, MIT

He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture at MIT, where he conducts advanced research and teaching in the field of Digital Fabrication. He began his studies in the early 1990s, working with hyper-realistic rendering and animation programs for design exploration. Today research questions are based on the use of digital fabrication equipment and software to reason through design problems.

His ongoing research demonstrates that buildings can be designed and constructed in paperless environments - using CAD/CAM for fabrication. Current research projects are focused on the advancement of design tools for fabrication laboratories. His long-term goals are to develop design and fabrication tools that better mediate the relationships between - and engender ongoing communications with - designers, the physical and virtual models they produce, and the actual physical buildings that get constructed and need to be maintained.

Before going into academia, Professor Sass worked for several large architectural practices in Boston and New York between 1990 and 2001. He received his B. Arch. from Pratt Institute, and his M.S. Arch. and Ph.D. degrees from MIT. Professor Sass teaches four overly subscribed courses on digital fabrication at MIT, and serves as the Director of Digital Design and Fabrication Group within the School of Architecture.

9 April 2010: The Next Revolution: Digital Building Kits:

"Novice designers are gaining increased access to CAD tools for design computing and digital fabrication that were once exclusively used by expert designers. As evidenced by the rise in manufacturing incubation facilities novice can prototype their ideas in ways similar to expert designers. Also available for novice designers are online rendering consultants, online manufacturing and online ecommerce as a way to distribute and sell products. Discussed here are the reasons for this emergence, complications when using design and digital fabrication as a standard mode of production and new focus for experts."
Larry Sass

 
 

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