This years ACADIA 2016 conference: Posthuman Frontiers: Data, Designers & Cognitive Machines has announced Mario Carpo (Reyner Banham Professor of Architectural Theory and History, the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL London) and Elizabeth Diller (founding partner of Diller Scofidio + Renfro) as confirmed keynote speakers.
In 1999, working alongside Ricardo Scofidio, Ms. Diller was awarded the MacArthur Foundation “genius” award, becoming the first in her filed to do so. Now, Diller will also be receiving the ACADIA 2016 Lifetime Achievement award, an esteemed accolade that represents recognition by colleagues worldwide of consistent contributions and impact on the field of architectural computing and design culture.
Co-Founder and Design Partner of Future Cities Lab, San Francisco and recently elected member to the ACADIA Board of Directors and ACADIA President, Jason Kelly Johnson cited how “Diller’s pioneering work at the intersections of architecture, art, technology and philosophy” made her an “ideal” choice as a keynote speaker.
Johnson went on to add that “the ACADIA community will celebrate Diller’s critical explorations integrating design, computation, and theory into a radically inventive and culturally relevant body of work from installations to buildings to urban landscapes.”
Mario Carpo was also seen by Johnson as a pivotal speaker for ACADIA 2016. “Carpo’s keynote will bring a much needed theoretical and historical perspective to the conference,” Johnson noted, going on to say, “His research is a catalyst for critical discussions related to digital design, technology and culture.”
Carpo has a strong pedigree in the field of architectural research, focusing on architectural theory, cultural history, and the history of media and information technology. Notable publications include The Alphabet and the Algorithm, The Digital Turn in Architecture 1992-2012 and his award-winning opus: Architecture in the Age of Printing which has been translated into several languages.
The conference will focus on design work and research carried out in the fields of practice and academia that relate to “procedural design, designed environments and autonomous machines“. More specifically, ACADIA 2016 will concentrate on contemporary trends in computational design that has been used to develop “quasi-cognitive machines” and “integration of software, information, fabrication and sensing to generate mechanisms for interfacing with the physical realm.” Papers that touch on relative disciplines such as material science, biology, art, computer graphics, civil engineering, and human-computer interaction have been called to contribute to the discussion.
“Every year the ACADIA conferences bring together a world-class group of designers, architects, engineers, fabricators and thinkers exploring the intersection of computation, digital technologies and architecture,” said Johnson. “In North America it has become the event to present, explore and debate emerging ideas in the field.”
This years event will be held at the University of Michigan Taubman College in Ann Arbor, Michigan and the conference itself will run from October 27 – 29, 2016.
