Co-chairs: Ila Berman, California College of the Arts; Ed Mitchell, Yale University 

The schedule below is subject to change. Please check back for the most up-to-date schedule and information. 

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PS: Paper Session   SFS: Special Focus Session

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Super Session | 101_1 Waste (lands) + Material Economies
Jason Payne, University of California, Los Angeles 
Hugh Hynes, California College of the Arts
Elizabeth Golden, University of Washington
Gundula Proksch, University of Washington
El Hadi Jazairy, University of Michigan
Rania Ghosn, University of Michigan 
Alan Berger, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Waste management and ecological issues have been absorbed into recent architectural pedagogy but are only yet being interrogated for the conceptual demand placed on the discipline. How might one transfer material research beyond the technology sequence? How do we understand waste, excess and progress as a biological and cultural imperative that might need reconsideration and reinvention within the contemporary architectural design paradigm?

Super Session | 101_2 Energy Circuits+Artificial Ecologies
Sean Lally, University of Illinois at Chicago
Marcelyn Gow, Southern California Institute of Architecture
Mason White, University of Toronto
Lola Sheppard, University of Waterloo
Helene Furjan, University of Pennsylvania

The question of ‘environment’ has never been so prevalent within architectural discourse, asking us to interrogate the many assumptions that have governed our approach to energy and ecology within contemporary practice. Energy Circuits focuses, not only on the exchanges and economies of energy, but also on its material flows and atmospheric effects, reconsidered as primary constituents of the built environment; Synthetic Ecologies examines architecture’s direct engagement with the organic, investigating the effects of new architectural bio-technologies and the conceptual, technological and aesthetic issues surrounding the proliferating living landscapes embedded within the surfaces and spaces of our emerging agropolis; Architecture’s Next Companion Species asks us to reconsider a truly post-humanist environment in the service of, or in concert with, species and ecologies other than our own; and Eco-logics reconstitutes architecture as an environment or eco-system to be created and assessed, not in terms of its objecthood, but rather in relation to the multiple valences of its performance.

Super Session | 101_3 Genetic Systems + Non-standard Modes of (Re)Production
Chris Hight, Rice University
Heather Roberge, University of California, Los Angeles
Branko Kolarevic, University of Calgary

Digital technologies have evolved from being simply representational tools invested in the depiction of existing models of architectural space to becoming significant performative machines that have transformed the ways in which we conceive and configure form, space and material. These technologies have enabled the emergence of a new parametric practices emulating genetic and iterative dynamic evolutionary processes that function at multiple scales and in different domains. These tools are radically changing the ways in which we integrate disparate types of material information into the design process, while altering methodologies directly influencing both design and manufacture. That our current models of space are far more continuous, variant and complex is specifically a result of the tools we are using to produce them, an inevitable byproduct of the ever-expanding capacities of digital computation and related fabrication technologies. These sessions focus on current negotiations and mediation strategies emerging within the digital realm between differing scales of operation that extend from building component to urban environment, between internal codes and external forces that reflect the nature/nurture dichotomy within design, between digital processes and physical behaviors, and between computational design strategies and the technologies governing fabrication and production.

Super Session | 101_4 Exchange Terminals + Interactive Technologies
Jason Johnson, California College of the Arts
Carlo Ratti, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Nashid Nabian, Massachusetts Institute of Technology 
John McMorrough, University of Michigan

These sessions will explore the intersection between interactive technologies and architectural space at a number of scales and interfaces. Sensing the City is geared primarily to one to one scale interactions that extend the sensible environment of the body through architectural interfaces, Media-scapes looks at the history and evolution of media and civic space and the recent impact of the social network on civic space, Living-Bits and Bricks investigates the technological interface between digital information and the scale and operation of the city, and Negotiated Territory solicits proposals which where resistance and negotiation are seen as constitutive rather than restrictive of the design process itself.

Super Session | 101_5 Enclaves / Territories+Expanding Megalopolises
Elijah Huge, Wesleyan University
Mona El Khafif, California College of the Arts
Felipe Correa, Harvard University
Julia Czerniak, Syracuse University

Urban environments and their surrounding territories are rapidly evolving in response to threats, pressures and opportunities that extend far beyond the boundaries of the traditional city. Environmental and social volatility, the migrations of populations, infrastructural demands and shifting economies operating at the regional and global mega-scale are accelerating the rate at which cities are transforming, rendering obsolete traditional planning techniques while demanding new methods of urban de-coding, new design strategies for prototyping growth, and a new toolbox of spatial and infrastructural concepts with which to re-imagine and re-define the 21st century city.

Super Session | 101_6 Populations / Networks / Datascapes: From Cloud Culture to Informal Communities
Ulrike Heine, Clemson University 
Dan Harding, Clemson University 
Aaron Bowman, Clemson University 
Bernhard Sill, Hochschule Trier, University of Applied Sciences
Ana Miljaki, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Amanda Reeser Lawrence, Northeastern University 
Armando Montilla, Clemson University
Laura Kurgan, Columbia University
Nicholas de Monchaux, University of California, Berkeley

Populations and audiences are evolving through digital interfaces, new discursive networks, ground-up community-based practices, new constituencies and communities previously under-represented or invisible to conventional notions of the public, identity groups, and organizations. These panels examine architecture’s emerging discourses and publics as well as the ways in which data proliferation, geospatial information and the cartographies of new media are shaping our understanding of these cultural communities.