Yona Friedman
Yona Friedman
Born in 1923, Yona Friedman was a Hungarian-French architect and theorist whose utopian projects dealt with urban issues via the empowerment of the user, forever questioning the role of the architect within the instinctive human process of building. After escaping the Gestapo and being liberated from a concentration camp towards the end of WWII, Friedman was largely influenced by homeless refugees in Europe at the time. Before teaching at MIT, Princeton, Harvard and Columbia throughout the sixties, in 1958, Friedman published his acclaimed manifesto, “Architecture Mobile,” calling for a new type of citizen free from the strictures of work through the growing automation of production - a new style of architecture that would empower the people in a period of European reconstruction. Yona largely contributed to the Age of Megastructures (1960s), inspiring the Archigram group, Constant Nieuwenhuys and his New Babylon, Nicholas Negroponte’s research, as well as the Japanese Metabolist movement, as he said once in conversation, “It’s a funny story… It was started by me.” Mentored at a distance by Le Corbusier, Yona Friedman’s emphasis on participation sets him apart from his contemporaries – away from authoritarian character. In his work, spatial agency occurs in the valorization of the user above the architect, an attitude he brought to UNESCO and the UN in strategizing solutions for refugee crises throughout his life.
Chapter 2: Improvisation in Architecture: An Interpretation of Our Role
Ben van Berkel
Ben van Berkel
After graduating from the Architectural Association in London, Ben co-founded together with Caroline Bos, UNStudio in 1988 (originally Van Berkel & Bos Architectuurbureau, subsequently rebranded in 1998) which remains to this day a leading firm in architecture and research. UNStudio presents itself as a network of specialists in architecture, urban development and infrastructure that has designed and coordinated several world renowned projects, including the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart, the Erasmus Bridge in Rotterdam and Raffles City in Hangzhou to name a few. Ben has published several books through UNStudio's research into technology's influence in our built environment, and continues to be a prolific lecturer.
Chapter 7: Architects Never Die: Evolving Through ‘Smartification’
Jack Self & Tommaso Davi
Jack Self & Tommaso Davi
Director of the REAL foundation and Editor-in-Chief of the Real Review, Jack Self is an architect and writer based in London. Jack's architectural design focuses on alternative models of ownership, contemporary forms of labour, and the formation of socio-economic power relationships in space. His work has been shown widely, including at the Maxxi, Tate Britain, ICA and Design Museum and is author of Real Estate Without Debt, Home Economics (2016) and Mies in London (2018). He was previously Contributing Editor for Architectural Review (2009–2017), Editor-at-Large for 032c (2014–2018) and Editor at Strelka Press (2011-2013).
Tommaso Davi is a strategist, researcher, and a thought leader in the field of innovative built environment organizational systems, Urban Stacks, supporting various organizations operating in the built world and related industries while staying ahead of diversity and inclusion and digitalization trends enabling urban resilience. He guest-lectured in and co-founded the Urban Stack Initiative at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Tommaso is an Executive MBA candidate at ESCP Business School and a graduate of the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London.
Shajay Bhooshan
Shajay Bhooshan
As the co-founder of CODE - Zaha Hadid Architects' conputational design research group - Shajay is specialised in the conception and production of architecture from theoretical discourses to manufacturing technologies. As an expert in computation, Shajay also has specialised knowledge in programming, mathematics, in particular geomery and optimisation methods, computer-controlled industrial machines and robotics. He completed his Bachelor of Architecture at the Indrapastra Open University in India, Maste's from the DRL at the Arhiectural Association where he is now programme course master, and is persuing a PhD at ETH, in Zurich.
Francesco Catemario di Quadri
Francesco Catemario di Quadri
Born in 1994, Francesco completed his Bachelor of Architecture at the Architectural Association in London (2016) and is curently delivereing a Master’s thesis at Universidade Autonoma in Lisbon to become an architect. He has worked for architecture firms in Switzerland, Portugal, Singapore and in Miami, USA where he helped change the skyline. Francesco also regularly participates in startup world in both tech and industrial design at different capacities.
Nicholas Negroponte
Nicholas Negroponte
Co-founder of the MIT Media Lab (1985) and the Architecture Machine Group (1977), Negroponte was a pioneer in the field of computer-aided design, developing from software to robotics for architectural applications, including a predecessor to Google’s street view. The author of the 1995 bestseller Being Digital and influential publications The Architecture Machine: Towards a More Human Environment and Soft Architecture Machines, has served on the board of Motorola for almost 20 years and is a partner at a venture capital firm specializing in digital technologies for information and entertainment.
David Rutten
David Rutten
Creator of Grasshopper (while at Robert McNeel & Associates), a visual programmin language and environment that rusn within the Rhinoceros 3D design software hosting hundreds of thousands of users, David forever changed the course of design. Launched in 2007, the intuitive plugin has become a leading tool in facilitating and influencing a global parametric design phenomenon. He was awarded the ACADIA Innovative Research Award in 2012 for his profound impact in architecture and computation.
Chapter 6: The Inevitable & Utter Demise of the Entire Architecture Profession
Antoine Picon
Antoine Picon
Trained as an engineer, architect, and historian, Picon works on the history of architectural and urban technologies from the eighteenth century to the present. From 1988’s French Architects and Engineers in the Age of Enlightenment to 2015’s Smart Cities: A Spatialised Intelligence, Picon’s prolific writing has explored the relations between society, technology and utopia, but more recently, reviewing the changes brought by the computer and digital culture to the theory and practice of architecture. He has received a number of awards for his writings.
Fabio Gramazio & Matthias Kohler
Fabio Gramazio & Matthias Kohler
Professors Fabio Gramazion & Matthias Kohler, and founders of the design studio Gramazio & Kohler Architects (2000), have dedicated much of their efforts to combining the physis of built architecture with digital logics. Their research merges advanced architectural design and additive robotic fabrication. Together with leading researchers in architecture, material sciences, computation, and robotics, Gramazio and Kohler have opened the world's first architectural robotic laboratory at ETH in Zürich, through which they continue their ground-breaking research. The duo has also authored several highly regarded publications in the space, including Digital Materiality (2008), Flight Assembled Architecture (2013), The Robotic Touch (2014) & Robotic Landscapes (2022).
Peter Eisenman
Peter Eisenman
In search of tools with more comprehensive morphological possibilities, renowned architect, educator, theorist, and member of the "The New York Five" group, Peter Eisenman (1932) was an early adopter of architectural software. Although commonly associated to Deconstructivism, some have considered he invented the parametric aproach to design; repeating and adapting an architectural idea over time.
Phillip Bernstein
Phillip Bernstein
Phil Bernstein is an architect and technologist who is an Associate Dean and Professor Adjunct at the Yale School of Architecture where he has taught since 1988. He was a Vice President at Autodesk where he was responsible for setting the company’s future vision and strategy for BIM technology. He has also authored Machine Learning: Architecture in the Age of Machine Intelligence (2022), Architecture | Design | Data – Practice Competency in the Era of Computation (2018) and co-editor of Building (In) The Future: Recasting Labor in Architecture (2010 with Peggy Deamer), and consults, speaks and writes extensively on technology, practice and project delivery.
Patrik Schumacher
Patrik Schumacher
Born in 1961, and widely known for coining the term ‘Parametricism’ in 2008 through his Manifesto at the Venice Biennale of Architecture, and later, the article “Parametricism: A New Global Style for Architecture and Urban Design”, Patrik is the Principal, Director and sole partner of acclaimed Zaha Hadid Architects, where he has practiced since 1988. He has also founded, and now codirects, the Design Research Lab (AADRL) in 1996, a well established post-professional design programme at the Architectural Association in London.
Chapter 3: Architecture Comes Alive: From Responsive to Spontaneous Environments
Stelarc
Stelarc
World-renowned performance artist Stelarc (1946) is widely recognized by his tendency to take his body to extremes to reflect pervasion of modern technology. From aggressive surgeries, to extra robotic limbs, prosthetics and flesh-hook suspension, the Cyprus born Australian proposes that the human body has become obsolete. Heavily focused on the extension of the human body’s capabilities, he explores alternate anatomical architectures, interrogating issues of agency, identity and the advent of the post-human. He has been extensively published, most recently, Robots & Art (2016), and his notable MIT Press Stelarc: The Monograph (2005), an extensive collection of his prolific work.
Chapter 12: Contestable Bodies: Excess, Indifference & Obsolescence
Mario Carpo
Mario Carpo
Renowned architectural historian and critic, Mario Carpo's research and publications focus on history of early modern architecture and on the theory and criticism of contemporary design and technology. His long list of publications include many influential analytical writings, including Architecture in the Age of Printing (2001), Perspective, Projections and Design (2007), The Alphabet and the Algorithm (2011), The Digital Turn in Architecture, 1992-2012 (2012), The second Digital Turn: Design Beyond Intelligence (2017) and the forthcoming Beyond Digital. Design and Automation at the End of Modernity (2023). He is currently the Reyner Banham Professor of Architectural History and Theory at the Bartlett, University College London and the Professor of Architectural Theory at the Institute of Architecture of the University of Applied Arts (die Angewandte) in Vienna.
Theodore Spyropoulos
Theodore Spyropoulos
As an architect and educator, Dr. Theodore Spyropoulos is the Director of the Architectural Association’s world renowned Design Research Lab (AADRL) in London, Professor of Architecture at the Staedelschule in Frankfurt and resident artist at Somerset House. He has been a visiting Research Fellow at M.I.T.’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, and a teacher in UPENN, the RCA Innovation Design Engineering Department and the University of Innsbruck. In 2002 he co-founded with his brother the experimental art, architecture and design practice Minimaforms, whose work has been internationally recognized and exhibited. He has worked for the offices of Peter Eisenman, Zaha Hadid, Farjadi and Farjadi and Populous, and in 2013 was awarded the ACADIA award of excellence in educational work through the AADRL program.
Tom Maver
Tom Maver
Pioneer of computational deisgn, Tom Maver has been at the forefront of research and development in the field of information technologies applied to architecture and building design since 1970. Research Professor at the Glasgow School of Art and founder of eCAADe and CAADfutures sought to use computers to bring new stakeholders into the design process. At that time, when the technology was in its infancy, he founded ABACUS (Architecture and Building Aids Computer Unit, Strathclyde) a research group within the Department of Architecture and Building Science at the University of Strathclyde. Under his Directorship, ABACUS was to build, over the next 32 years (until 2003), an international reputation for effective R+D in the fields of CAAD, MultiMedia, Virtual Reality, Urban Models and Energy Efficient Building Design. Through ABACUS, Tom Maver pioneered the application of computers to architectural design. The work of ABACUS has been supported by major R+D grant funding from the UK Research Councils and by a number of European Union Research Programmes. This has led to around 200 publications/conference papers. Professor Maver is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland and of the Design Research Society and has life-time distinguished service awards from a number of international associations.
Next Chapter, Chapter 13: Do Not Resuscitate! Thoughts on the Origin of a Paradigm