ACADIA 2011 Conference: Integration Through Computation

The ACADIA 2011 Annual Conference will explore integrative trajectories and areas of overlap that have emerged through computation between design, its allied disciplines of engineering and construction, and other fields, such as computer science, material science, mathematics and biology. The conference will highlight experimental projects in which methods, processes, and techniques are discovered, appropriated, adapted, and altered from elsewhere, and digitally pursued. The aim of the conference is to project a fundamentally different attitude towards collaboration, one that needs not be limited to the professions and disciplines comprising the building industry. It will do so by featuring the work of designers and researchers who engage design as a broadly integrative endeavor by fluidly navigating across different disciplinary territories, and who deploy algorithmic thinking, biomimicry, computation, digital fabrication, material exploration, and/or performance analyses to discover and create processes, techniques, and products that are qualitatively new. Some take scientific and engineering ideas as starting points of the design investigation. Others are embracing mathematics and geometry as a rich source of ideas for articulating form, pattern, surface and structure in architecture. Many are increasingly looking for inspiration in nature to discover new materials and new material behaviors, which can enable an architecture that can respond dynamically to changing environmental conditions. They all rely on computational techniques for design explorations. The conference will project integrative design as an emerging trajectory for architecture as it enters a post-digital phase and as it embraces ideas, concepts, processes, techniques, and technologies from elsewhere (just like before only more so). www.acadia.org/acadia2011