Technology is the answer...but what was the question?
In the last two decades, the emergence of computation and digital fabrication in architectural discourse has spawned a genre of technologically enabled design research and pedagogy that has focused on generating, optimizing, describing, and fabricating complex forms and material constructs. However, in parallel, the world as we know it is experiencing major geopolitical shifts, environmental crises, and housing shortages. How can design research leverage technology to respond, provoke, or engage with wider social and environmental issues to affect positive change in the world as we know it? In this context, the disciplinary imperatives for design novelty and technological innovation become the foundation for questioning, challenging, and changing the status quo of how the world around us operates.
Join us for a conversation surrounding the agency of design technologies as catalysts for exploring issues of urban ecology, affordable housing, and spatial justice.
Presenters:
Larry Sass, Ph.D., MIT
Ersela Kripa, Texas Tech Univ.
Dana Cupkova, Carnegie Mellon School of Architecture + Epiphyte Lab
Moderators:
Alvin Huang, USC Architecture
Kyle Konis, Ph.D., USC Architecture
Larry Sass: Associate Professor @MIT Architecture
Lawrence (Larry) Sass is an architectural designer who conducts research in areas of design studies, computer science, and digital fabrication. He earned his B.Arch at Pratt Institute and his Ph.D. from MIT. Currently, he is an associate professor of architecture at MIT. His research publications demonstrate new ways to incorporates digital design and fabrication into the production of housing.
Ersela Kripa: Assistant Professor @Texas Tech University
Ersela Kripa is an assistant professor at Texas Tech College of Architecture, a registered architect, and founding partner of AGENCY, an architectural research, design, and advocacy practice established in New York City in 2010 with Stephen Mueller. Born and raised under communist dictatorship in Albania, Kripa’s work is particularly focused on uncovering the machinations of the securocratic regimes that surveil and control public lives. She is recipient of the 2010-2011 Rome Prize in Architecture, the 2018 Emerging Voices Award from the Architectural League of New York, two MacDowell Colony fellowships, and the New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship. Kripa’s work has been exhibited at the 12th Architectural Venice Biennale, the Hong-Kong Shenzhen Urbanism Biennale, Storefront for Art and Architecture, among others. Her work has been widely published in Scapegoat, MONU, Volume, The Architect’s Newspaper, Domus, and others.
Dana Cupkova: Associate Professor @Carnegie Mellon School of Architecture
Dana Cupkova is co-founder and design director of EPIPHYTE Lab, an architectural design and research collaborative centered on issues of human perception, environmental ethics and large scale ecology. She currently holds an associate professorship at Carnegie Mellon School of Architecture, where she serves as the graduate program track chair for the master of science in sustainable design program. Her design work engages the intersection of the built environment and ecology through computationally driven processes, thermodynamics, material formations relative to embodied energy, and experimentation with geometrically-driven performance logic.
