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Thomas Heatherwick wins the ACADIA Design Excellence Award for 2017

Disciplines & Disruption

Thomas Heatherwick wins the ACADIA Design Excellence Award for 2017

[UPDATE 7/17/2017—This article has been updated to reflect that another faculty member from the Bartlett School of Architecture will be attending in lieu of Frederic Migayrou, who was previously listed below.]

The Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA) has announced British designer Thomas Heatherwick as the winner of the institute’s 2017 Design Excellence Award.

Heatherwick, who founded his eponymous studio in 1994, will receive the award at this year’s ACADIA conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts where he will be a keynote speaker.

Running under the title Disciplines & Disruption, the conference will address how technology is impacting architectural design, as well as its methods and culture. Touching on advancements in fabrication, materials, and digital tools, Disciplines & Disruption will also look at how technology has connected—or in some cases, disrupted—once distinct facets of the discipline, making numerous realms of architecture more accessible. “Distinctions between design and making, building and urban scale, architecture and engineering, real and virtual, on site and remote, physical and digital data, professionals and crowds, are diminishing as technology increases the designer’s reach far beyond the confines of the drafting board,” reads a synopsis in a press release.

Heatherwick will headline the conference and appear alongside Ben Fry, founder of Information Design; Neri Oxman, a director at Mediated Matter Group and of MIT’s Media Lab; and Jessica Rosenkrantz & Jesse Louis-Rosenberg, founders of Nervous System. Other award winners, who will each deliver a mini keynote themselves, include Lisa Iwamoto and Craig Scott, Heather Roberge, faculty from the B-Pro program at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London, Wes McGee from the University of Michigan, and Bob Martens from the Technical University of Vienna.

“Thomas Heatherwick’s work epitomizes the high caliber of design innovation that ACADIA has sought to foster over the years,” Jason Kelly Johnson, ACADIA president and founder of Future Cities Lab in San Francisco told The Architect’s Newspaper, speaking of Heatherwick’s award. “From furniture to bridges to buildings, his work is consistently experimental, iterative, and well-crafted. It also synthesizes digital and analog techniques in ground breaking ways. Thomas’s upcoming ACADIA talk follows in a line of incredible awardee talks and keynote speakers including Zaha Hadid, Liz Diller, Greg Lynn, Manuel De Landa, and many others.”

The ACADIA conference will run from November 2 through the 4th.

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