Lecture date: 2013-10-11
Architecture finds itself having to cope with new social and cultural complexities that demand systems that are open, adaptive and participatory. The lecture will explore organisational systems that examine a model of collective living constructed as an evolving ecology. As a response to models of accelerated urbanism that privilege top down master planning the lecture will explore experimentation that examines a generative and time based approach towards computational urbanism. The ambition of the research conducted by AADRL Director Theodore Spyropoulos and his students is to pursue a pattern logic that is poly-scalar, allowing bio-diverse patterns to operate between urban, building and material agency. The model of architecture and urbanism speculated here is not one embedded in a blueprint as with most man-made structures, but rather are correlated operations that are governed through emerging collective interaction.
The lecture will explore issues raised in Theodore Spyropoulos’ new book Adaptive Ecologies: Correlated Systems of Living. The publication includes essays by Mark Burry, Brett Steele, John Frazer, John Henry Holland, Makoto Sei Watanabe, Patrick Schumacher, and David Ruy.
Theodore Spyropoulos is an architect and educator. He is the Director of the Architectural Association’s world renowned Design Research Lab (AADRL) in London. He has been a visiting Research Fellow at M.I.T.’s Centre for Advanced Visual Studies working with the Interrogative Design Group and co-founded the New Media and Information Research initiative at the Architectural Association. He has taught in the graduate school of the University of Pennsylvania and the Royal College of Art, Innovation Design Engineering Department.
Theodore directs the experimental architecture and design studio Minimaforms with his brother Stephen Spyropoulos. The work of Minimaforms is in the permanent collections of the FRAC Centre, the Signum Foundation and the Archigram Archive. In 2008 their project Memory Cloud was named one of the top ten international art installations by the Telegraph. Recent exhibitions have included work shown at the Museum of Modern Art, Detroit Institute of Arts, ICA and the FRAC Centre.
Previously Theodore has worked as a project architect for the offices of Peter Eisenman and Zaha Hadid Architects.
