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T H E P O L I T I C S O F P A R A M E T R I C I S MD I G I T A L T E C H N O L O G I E S A N D T H E F U T U R E ( S ) O F S O C I A L I T Y

A ONE-DAY CONFERENCE CURATED & ORGANISED BY:M AT T H E W P O O L E & M A N U E L S H V A R T Z B E R G

Friday 15th & Saturday 16th November 2013REDCAT, 631 W 2nd St, Los Angeles, CA 90012

aestheticsandpolitics.calarts.edu/conferenceswww.redcat.org/event/politics-parametricism

PRESS DOSSIER

Image: Synthesis Design + Architecture, Xiamen Dream City Tower, 2011

Sponsored by:

“We pursue the parametric design paradigm all the way, penetrating into all corners of the discipline.

Systematic, adaptive variation, continuous differentiation (rather than mere variety), and dynamic, parametric figuration concerns all design tasks from urbanism to the level of tectonic detail, interior furnishings and the world of products.”

“Parametricism as Style - Parametricist Manifesto”By Patrik Schumacher, London 2008 www.patrikschumacher.com

Presented and discussed at the Dark Side Club1 , 11th Architecture Biennale, Venice

Image courtesy of Peter Vikar

CONTENTS

1. GENERAL INFORMATION 5 2. SHORT PRESS RELEASE 7 3. LONG PRESS RELEASE 8

4. KEYNOTE EVENT DETAILS 10

5. PANEL TITLES & DESCRIPTIONS 11

6. CONFERENCE TIMETABLE 14

7. GUEST SPEAKERS’ BIOGRAPHIES 17

8. SPONSORS 21

9. CONTACT DETAILS 22

“Displays of beyond-human formal complexity drop out of the computational design systems employed in the search for exoticism and difference - a difference that was demanded by the market pluralism of ultra capitalism.

Appropriately, these projects seemed to use the very same kind of tools that have maximised, magnified and deepened the current financial crisis.

If the modern movement had the abstraction of industry as its reference, millennial architecture had the systematised abstraction of late capitalism.”

“Zaha Hadid Architects and the Neoliberal Avant-Garde”By Owen Hatherley, 26 October 2010 http://www.metamute.org

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1. GENERAL INFORMATION:

T H E P O L I T I C S O F P A R A M E T R I C I S MDigital technologies and the future(s) of sociality

Friday 15th & Saturday 16th November 2013REDCAT, 631 W 2nd St, Los Angeles, CA 90012http://www.redcat.orghttp://aestheticsandpolitics.calarts.edu/conferences

A conference curated and organized by:Matthew Poole & Manuel Shvartzberg

Hosted by:The MA Aesthetics & Politics Program at CalArts and The Gallery at REDCAT

Lead sponsor:Autodesk (www.autodesk.com)

Media Sponsor:eVolo Magazine (www.evolo.us)

Guest Speakers:Phil Bernstein (Autodesk), Benjamin Bratton (UCSD), Christina Cogdell (UCD), Teddy Cruz (UCSD), Peggy Deamer (Yale), Andrés Jaque (Office for Political Innovation), Laura Kurgan (Columbia), Neil Leach (USC, Los Angeles), Reinhold Martin (Columbia) & Patrik Schumacher (Zaha Hadid Architects, London).

Above: Image courtesy of Synthesis Design + Architecture

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Tsinghua University Parametrics Workshop, 2010, Tutor Daniel Gillen

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2. SHORT PRESS STATEMEMENT:

PARAMETRICISM has been heralded as the new avant-garde in the fields of archi-tecture and design – the next ‘grand style’ in the history of architectural movements. Parametric models enable digital designers to create complex structures and environ-ments as well as new understandings of space, both real and virtual.

Whether as tools for democratic action or tyrannical spectacle; self- and community-building capabilities; a post-humanistic subject; or, the mediatized politics of our vari-ous futurisms – all these themes are figured within the Parametricist discourse.

This conference, which includes a range of high profile international speakers from architectural practice and theory, will explore urgent questions that concern the social and political ramifications at stake in the evolution of this new design paradigm.

Above: Port to Port, Advanced Data Visualization Project courtesy of SIDL (Spatial Information Design Lab, Columbia

University), in collaboration with Thomson Reuters Research Unit. Project Team: Laura Kurgan, Project Director, Jen Lowe, Research Associate and Data Visualization

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3. LONGER PRESS STATEMEMENT:

THE POLITICS OF PARAMETRICISM: DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES AND THE FUTURE(S) OF SO-CIALITY is an international conference to be held at REDCAT, in Downtown Los Angeles, CA, USA on Friday 15th and Saturday 16th of November 2013.

A range of international guest speakers from the industries and academic spheres of archi-tecture and urbanism will explore urgent questions that concern the social and political rami-fications of the spreading influence of parametric scripting software as the potential stand-ard industry tool for architecture, urban planning and many other aspects of design.

PARAMETRICISM has recently been heralded as the new avant-garde in the industries of architecture, urban design, industrial design, and digital information modeling: the natural heir to the passing out of favor of Postmodernist and Deconstructionist models.

An increasing number of architecture projects and industrially manufactured products are now designed and realized using digital software based on parametric or algorithmic scripting platforms. These platforms have the capability to process large quantities of data for the de-velopment of complex topological structures and environments, as well as new understand-ings of space, both real and virtual.

As the stream of new tools and products proliferates, in the apparently infinite expansion of the ‘repertoire’ of design functions Parametricism allegedly affords, critical questions regard-ing these cultural and technological phenomena are often overtaken by the popular seduc-tive aesthetic and alluring futurism such design tools and products represent. This confer-ence seeks to address this issue, where we see ‘innovation’ overtaking its own ‘interrogation’.

To date, critiques of the proliferation of parametric design processes have focused on the central issue of a technocratization of social relations intrinsic to the Parametricist design ethos. These critiques principally observe and raise alarm that Parametricist design process-es actively quantify bodies, subjects, and the coding of spaces in full acquiescence with the logic of Neoliberal socioeconomics, gesturing towards a collapse of political potential and the destruction of social bonds and forms of dissent by such means.

Such criticisms focus on Parametricism’s apparently seamless coextensive integration of social relations, technological automatization, and Neoliberal governmentality. Here, the politi-cal forces that affect social relations are seen as being reduced by Parametricism to purely techno-economic, instrumental imperatives, and hence to the imperatives of the structures of late-stage capitalism that appear to govern such technological innovations.

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This debate, taken up most explicitly in academia and latently by varied social movements, continues to interrogate these issues decrying the closure that Parametricist discourses are enforcing upon a conception of the ‘indeterminacy of the social’. However, the stakeholders in the industries of architecture, industrial manufacturing, software development, and urban design remain broadly aloof from these critical discourses. In practice and in pedagogy those developing the Parametricist ‘repertoire’ largely bypass the debates of critically evaluating the fast-paced development of complex informational systems to forge ahead with the ex-panding of the technical and formal tools available to the industry.

The approach that this conference will take is to try to explore the points of convergence of the critical discourses of Parametricism and its practical innovations within its industries. We propose to explore the foundational impulses and methods/mechanisms of such practices and discourses by rethinking sociality as a form of collective technology: i.e. social formations and transformations considered as tacit design processes rather than as natural evolution-ary processes.

Whether as tools for democratic action or tyrannical spectacle; self- and community-building capabilities; a post-humanistic subject; or the mediatized politics of our various futuristic imaginaries – all these themes are figured and being actively assembled within the Parame-tricist discourse.

Over the course of two days, a range of high profile international speakers from architectural practice and theory will explore these and other questions regarding Parametricism, asking what social, political, ethical, and philosophical issues are at stake in the evolution of this new design paradigm.

This conference is curated and organized by Matthew Poole and Manuel Shvartzberg, and is hosted by the MA Aesthetics & Politics Program at CalArts (www.calarts.edu) and The Gallery at REDCAT (www.redcat.org). The principal sponsor is Autodesk (www.autodesk.com). The media sponsor is eVolo Magazine (www.evolo.us).

Below: Model Sketches, 2013, by Peter Vikar

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3. KEYNOTE EVENT DESCRIPTION:

THE POLITICS OF PARAMETRICISM conference will open with individual presen-tations and a debate between Reinhold Martin (Associate Professor, Columbia University) and Patrik Schumacher (Partner, Zaha Hadid Architects) at 7pm on Friday November 15th, 2013, at the REDCAT theatre in Downtown Los Angeles.

Architecture and Politics: Parametricism within or beyond liberal democracy?

At the very core of the debates surrounding Parametricism is the question of what political agency can or should be ascribed to architecture. Two diffuse yet clearly distinguishable sides seem to have formed around this question: those who, like Patrik Schumacher, defend the notion that architecture and politics ought to be considered structurally excluded domains of thought and action; and those who, like Reinhold Martin, consider these fields integrally tied together, albeit indeterminately.

The schism echoes the ‘critical vs. post-critical’ debate in architectural practice and theory of the last decade, except that now a single architectural process or ‘style’ – Parametricism – is gaining grounds as the incarnate technological discourse wherein the debate is most ardently unfolding.

Parametricism may thus present itself as a case study of the contemporary relation be-tween technology and ideology, where the many tropes of contemporary politics and culture – from post-Fordism and mass-customization, to socially networked revolutions and experi-ments in social representation – come together through and within a specific architectural imaginary.

In this debate, Martin and Schumacher will address this cultural paradigm and tackle what is perhaps the most urgent question for this new social, political and architectural condition: Can or ought Parametricism develop strictly within the confines of liberal democracy, or could it be pursued through more radical political valences?

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4. PANEL TITLES & DESCRIPTIONS:

KEYNOTE EVENT:“Architecture and politics: Parametricism within or beyond liberal democracy?” – a discussion with Reinhold Martin and Patrik Schumacher

Reinhold Martin: “On Numbers, More or Less”

Patrik Schumacher: “Thesis on the Politics of Parametricism”

PANEL 1: Introduction to Parametricism: historical and technological context

Phillip G. Bernstein: “Finding Value in Parameters: How Scripting Beyond Form Changes the Potential of Design Practice”

Christina Cogdell: “Breeding Ideology: Parametricism and Biological Architecture”

Neil Leach: “There is no such thing as a political architecture; there is no such thing as digital architecture”

This first panel will include a brief introduction to the history and key developments in para-metric digital design in various contexts. This will be followed by papers from guest speakers, and a discussion that will explore the following questions:

1. Why, and under what criteria, is Parametricist architecture heralded as the new avant-garde of architecture? Is this claim justified? And, if so, what are the political ramifications of this?

2. Why and how is parametric digital design and manufacture software becoming an increas-ingly used tool in architecture, built environment design, product design, and information management?

3. In what ways can we productively mine the history of the parametric paradigm, as its his-tory is recognizable from as early as the rise of cybernetics in the mid-twentieth century and the post-industrialization of major global economies?

4. What are the ramifications for radical critique within a design paradigm currently largely aligned with dominant power structures?

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Panel 2: Parametricism, the commons and social representation

Teddy Cruz: “The New Political: Where the Top Down and the Bottom up Meet“

Peggy Deamer: “Parametric Schizophrenic”

Laura Kurgan: “The Method is the Message”

The coalescing of information management within parametric digital design/manufacture technologies enables it to undertake many more tasks than simply producing ultra-efficient building design processes. As parametric design technologies incorporate live dynamic data streaming at ever more complex scales they are employed by governments, city planning of-fices and large private corporations to project future modeling of social patterns and behav-iors. This expanding capability of the parametric repertoire to map and actively affect social relations requires that it be given urgent and rigorous critical analysis to explore if and how new formulations of genuinely democratic governance may emerge from the use of such technologies.

This panel will open with an extended introduction that outlines these issues, and will be fol-lowed by papers from guest speakers and a discussion that explores the following questions:

1. What is the significance of traditional definitions of political subjectivity - such as the pri-vate, the public, the social; work, leisure, and agency; art, media, and technology; citizenship, belonging, and exclusion – when these now appear either randomly diffused or structurally over-determined in our contemporary condition, especially within the scripting, labor prac-tices, and potential uses of parametric architecture?

2. How are we to understand the roles of the ‘designer’ and ‘user’ in this expanded field of architecture, wherein digital tools and social networks have the potential of both locking down and democratizing access to design and spatialized socialities?

3. How might parametric design processes enable counter-cartographies and counter-pub-lics to challenge and redirect the dominant neoliberal economic and political employments of such technologies?

4. How can we re-purpose information flows used by parametric design processes away from their conventional determination as private property towards a more democratic inter-active field?

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Panel 3: Designing subjectivities, curating new models of sociality

Benjamin H. Bratton: “The Always Partial System: For an Inhuman Parametricism”

Andrés Jaque: “Architecture as Rendered Society”

Parametricism involves a fundamental shift in how architects represent their projects and perform their labor; away from the physical drawing and towards the virtual model. With this shift, a host of new opportunities and problematics are set in motion. The idea of de-sign changes entirely from a process of formal objectification to a process of never-ending contingent optimization or ‘versioning’. As such, traditional ideas of authorship, materials and craft are fundamentally de-stabilized, perhaps opening the way to a different architectural pedagogy and practice, as well as other modes of imagining the social. New collaboration models that erode categorical distinctions of expertise emerge, together with the possibility of a radically democratized notion of agency. Political transparency, self-making capabilities, a post-humanistic subject, and a politics of absolute contingency are all, arguably, figured within the Parametricist discourse.

This panel will open with a brief outline of the philosophical dimensions of this parametric futurism, and will be followed by papers by guest speakers and a discussion that explores the following questions:

1. Might an indeterminate, non-essentialized parametric architecture be able to configure the spatial ontologies of a democratic politics for the 21st century? And how should we think pedagogy and practice in this direction?

2. How can studying the development of cybernetic data flow mechanisms help us under-stand the seductive qualities of today’s aesthetics of dynamic bureaucracy in all aspects of digital design manufacture processes and information management systems?

3. Can and should we conceive of parametric data mining and processing without the need for sociological models to imagine a genuinely democratic potential for Parametricism?

4. What forms of futuristic imagination, whether dangerous or desirable, is Parametricism as a form of media unfolding today?

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5. TIMETABLE:

Friday November 15th at the REDCAT Keynote event:“Architecture and politics: Parametricism within or beyond liberal democracy?”– a discussion with Reinhold Martin and Patrik Schumacher

6:30pm – Doors open7:00pm – Conference and debate intro by Manuel Shvartzberg and Matthew Poole7:15pm – Reinhold Martin presentation7:40pm – Patrik Schumacher presentation8:05pm – Martin-Schumacher debate (moderated by MS and MP)8:30pm – Audience Q&A9:00pm – Event ends. Drinks in the lobby.

Saturday November 16th at the REDCAT 9:30am – Doors open. Welcome, coffee and bagels

Panel 1: Introduction to Parametricism: historical and technological context10:00am – Panel intro by Matthew Poole10:15am – Phil Bernstein 10:40am – Neil Leach11:05am – Christina Cogdell11:30am – Debate and audience Q&A

12:00pm – Lunch Break

Above: Sketches from the Non-Linear Architecture Parametrics Workshop, 2010,Tsinghua University, led by Daniel Gillen.

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Panel 2: Parametricism, the commons and social representation

2:00pm – Panel intro by Manuel Shvartzberg2:15pm – Peggy Deamer2:40pm – Teddy Cruz3:05pm – Laura Kurgan3:30pm – Debate and audience Q&A

4:00pm – Coffee Break

Panel 3: Designing subjectivities, curating new models of sociality

4:45pm – Panel intro by Matthew Poole5:00pm – Benjamin Bratton5:25pm ¬– Andrés Jaque5:50pm – Debate and audience Q&A

6:20pm – Closing remarks Manuel Shvartzberg and Matthew Poole

6:30pm – Event ends. Drinks in the lobby.

Below: Tsinghua University Parametrics Workshop, 2010Tutor Daniel Gillen, student project

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6. BIOGRAPHIES:

CONFERENCE ORGANISERS:

Matthew Poole is a freelance curator and contemporary art theorist living in Los Angeles. His curatorial projects and writing explore the contradictions of neoliberal politics and how they are transforming contemporary art, curatorial practices, the built environment and the politi-cal currencies of culture more generally. Before moving to LA, Matthew was the Director of the Centre for Curatorial Studies, in the School of Philosophy & Art History at the University of Essex, UK. His recent projects can be viewed online at: www.kynastonmcshine.org.uk

Manuel Shvartzberg is an architect and writer. He has worked for, among others, OMA/Rem Koolhaas, and was project architect for David Chipperfield Architects in London, where he led a number of international arts/cultural projects between 2006 and 2012. In 2008 he co-founded the award-winning experimental practice Hunter & Gatherer, with which he has lec-tured and made various projects on questions of contemporary art, architecture, and critical theory. Since 2011 he has been teaching in Los Angeles, California, at CalArts and University of Southern California. Manuel is currently based in New York City where he is enrolled in the Ph.D in Architecture program and is a graduate fellow of the Institute for Comparative Litera-ture and Society at Columbia University.

GUEST SPEAKERS:

Benjamin H. Bratton is a theorist whose work spans Philosophy, Art and Design. At the Uni-versity of California, San Diego, he Associate Professor ofVisual Arts, Director of The UCSD Design Theory and Research Platform and D:GP, The Center for Design and Geopolitics.His research is situated at the intersections of contemporary social and political theory, com-putational media & infrastructure, architectural & urban design problems, and the politics of synthetic ecologies and biologies. Current work focuses on the political geography of cloud computing, massively-granular universal addressing systems, and alternate models of eco-logical governance. His next book, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, is forthcoming from MIT Press.

Phillip G. Bernstein is a Vice President at Autodesk, a leading provider of digital design, en-gineering and entertainment software, where he leads Strategic Industry Relations and is responsible for setting the company’s future vision and strategy for technology as well as cultivating and sustaining the firm’s relationships with strategic industry leaders and associa-tions. An experienced architect, Phil was formerly with Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects where he managed many of the firm’s most complex commissions. Phil teaches Professional Practice at the Yale School of Architecture where he received both his B.A. and his M.Arch. He is co-editor of Building (In) The Future: Recasting Labor in Architecture (2010) and BIM In Aca-demia (2011). He is a Senior Fellow of the Design Futures Council and former Chair of the AIA National Contract Documents Committee.

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Christina Cogdell is a cultural historian who is a Chancellor’s Fellow and Associate Professor in the Department of Design at the University of California at Davis. Her research investigates the intersection of popular scientific ideas and cultural production, in particular art, architec-ture and design. She received her Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Texas at Austin (2001), her M.A. in American Studies from the University of Notre Dame (1994), and her B.A. in American Studies from UT Austin (1991). She is the author of Eugenic Design: Streamlin-ing America in the 1930s (2004, 2010), winner of the 2006 Edelstein Prize for outstanding book on the history of technology, and co-editor with Susan Currell of the anthology Popu-lar Eugenics: National Efficiency and American Mass Culture in the 1930s (2006). Her work has been included in Visual Culture and Evolution (2011), Art, Sex, and Eugenics (2008), and published in Boom: A Journal of California, American Art, Design and Culture, Volume, Design Issues and American Quarterly. She has received fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Penn Humanities Forum at the University of Pennsylvania, the Wolfsonian Design Museum, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center for the Study of American Modernism, and the American Philosophical Society. She is currently writing her second monograph on today’s “generative architecture” in relation to recent scientific theories of self-organization, emer-gence and the evolution of complex adaptive systems.

Teddy Cruz was born in Guatemala City. He obtained a Master in Design Studies at Harvard University in 1997 and established his research-based architecture practice in San Diego, California in 2000. He has been recognized internationally for his urban research of the Ti-juana-San Diego border, and in collaboration with community-based nonprofit organizations, such as Casa Familiar for advancing border immigrant neighborhoods as sites of cultural production, from which to rethink urban policy and propose new models of inclusive housing and civic infrastructure. In 1991 he received the prestigious Rome Prize in Architecture and in 2005 he was the first recipient of the James Stirling Memorial Lecture On The City Prize, by the Canadian Center of Architecture and the London School of Economics. In 2008 he was selected to represent the US in the Venice Architecture Biennial and in 2011 he was a recipi-ent of the Ford Foundation Visionaries Award, the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture and was named one of the 50 Most Influential Designers in America by Fast Company Maga-zine. Teddy Cruz is currently a professor in public culture and urbanism in the Visual Arts De-partment at University of California, San Diego, and the co-founder of the Center for Urban Ecologies.

Peggy Deamer is Assistant Dean and Professor of Architecture at Yale University. She is a principal in the firm of Deamer Studio. She received a B.Arch. from The Cooper Union and a Ph.D. from Princeton University. Her dissertation on Adrian Stokes emphasized the relation-ship he explored between vision, the body, and craft. Articles by Ms. Deamer have appeared in Assemblage, Praxis, Perspecta, Architecture and Psychoanalysis, and Harvard Design Magazine, amongst others journals and anthologies. The work of her firm has appeared in Dwell, The New York Times; Architectural Record and House and Garden, amongst others. She is the editor of The Millennium House and Architecture and Capitalism: 1845 to the Pre-sent and co-editor of Re-Reading Perspecta; Building in the Future: Recasting Architectural Labor; and BIM in Academia. Recent articles include “The Changing Nature of Architectural Work,” in Design Practices Now Vol II, The Harvard Design Magazine no. 33; “Detail Delibera-tion,” in Building (in) the Future: Recasting Labor in Architecture; “Practicing Practice,” in Per-specta 44; “Work,” in Perspecta 47; “Design and Contemporary Practice” in Architecture from the Outside; and “Marx, BIM, and Contemporary Labor,” in BIM Futures, 2013.

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Andrés Jaque is an architect whose work explores the role that architecture plays in the making of societies. In 2003 he founded the Office for Political Innovation, a trandisciplinary agency engaged with the making of an ordinary urbanism out of the association of hetero-geneous architectural fragments. Jaque has lectured at a number of universities around the world, including Berlage Institue, Columbia University GSAPP, Princeton University, Bezalel Academy, Universidad Javeriana de Bogota, and the Instituto Politecnico di Milano, amongst others. His work has been exhibited at the Schweizerisches Architekturmuseum in Basel, the Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno (IVAM), the Biennale di Venezia, and at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. He is also the author of other works like Teddy House (Vigo, 2003, 2005), Mousse City, (Stavanger, 2003), Peace Foam City (Ceuta, 2005), Skin Gardens (Barcelona, 2006), the Museo Postal de Bogotá (Bogotá, 2007), Rolling House for the Rolling Society (Barcelona, 2009), the House in Never Never Land (Ibiza, 2009), the ES-CARAVOX, (Madrid, 2012), Hänsel and Gretel’s Arenas (Madrid, 2013). He is currently teaching at GSAPP, Columbia University.

Laura Kurgan is Associate Professor of Architecture at the Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation at Columbia University, where she directs the Visual Studies cur-riculum, the Spatial Information Design Lab and is Co-Director of the Advanced Data Visuali-zation Project. She is the author of Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics (Zone Books, 2013). Her work explores things ranging from digital mapping technologies to the ethics and politics of mapping, building intelligence, and the art, science and visualization of big and small data. Her work has appeared at the Cartier Foundation in Paris, the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Whitney Altria, MACBa Barcelona, the ZKM in Karlsruhe, and the Museum of Modern Art. She was the winner of the United States Artists Rockefeller Fellow-ship in 2009.

Neil Leach is a Professor at the University of Southern California. He has also taught at the AA, Columbia GSAPP, Cornell University, DIA, IaaC and SCI-Arc. He is the author, editor and translator of 24 books, including Rethinking Architecture, The Anaesthetics of Architecture, Designing for a Digital World, Digital Tectonics, Digital Cities, Machinic Processes, Swarm Intel-ligence, Scripting the Future, Fabricating the Future and Camouflage. He has been co-curator of a series of international exhibitions including the Architecture Biennial Beijing. He is current-ly a NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Fellow working on robotic fabrication technologies for the Moon and Mars.

Reinhold Martin is Associate Professor of Architecture in the Graduate School of Architec-ture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University, where he directs the PhD program in architecture and the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture. He is a member of Columbia’s Institute for Comparative Literature and Society as well as the Committee on Global Thought. Martin is a founding co-editor of the journal Grey Room and has published widely on the history and theory of modern and contemporary architecture. He is the author of The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space (MIT Press, 2003), and Utopia’s Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism, Again (Minnesota, 2010), as well as the co-author, with Kadambari Baxi, of Multi-National City: Architectural Itin-eraries (Actar, 2007). In 2012, Martin co-curated with Barry Bergdoll “Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream,” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, for which he and Bergdoll also co-edited the exhibition catalogue. Currently, Martin is working on two books: a history of the nineteenth century American university as a media complex, and a study of the contem-porary city at the intersection of aesthetics and politics.

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Patrik Schumacher is partner at Zaha Hadid Architects and founding director at the AA Design Research Lab. He joined Zaha Hadid in 1988 and has since been the co-author of many key projects, a.o. MAXXI – the National Italian Museum for Art and Architecture of the 21st century in Rome. In 2010 he won the Royal Institute of British Architects’ Stirling Prize for excellence in architecture. Patrik Schumacher studied philosophy, mathematics, and architec-ture in Bonn, London and Stuttgart, where he received his Diploma in architecture in 1990. In 1999 he completed his PHD at the Institute for Cultural Science, Klagenfurt University. In 1996 he founded the “Design Research Laboratory” with Brett Steele, at the Architectural Association in London, and continues to teach in the program. Since 2000 Patrik Schumacher is also guest professor at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. In 2010 and 2012 he pub-lished the two Volumes of his theoretical opus magnum ‘The Autopoiesis of Architecture’. His lectures and essays in architectural theory are available at www.patrikschumacher.com. In 2002 Patrik Schumacher curated ‘Latent Utopias - Experiments within Contemporary Ar-chitecture’ and he is currently planning the exhibition ‘Parametricism – The New International Style’.

Below: Port to Port, Advanced Data Visualization Project courtesy of SIDL (Spatial Information Design Lab, Columbia

University), in collaboration with Thomson Reuters Research Unit. Project Team: Laura Kurgan, Project Director, Jen Lowe, Research Associate and Data Visualization

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8. SPONSORS:

We are extremely grateful to Autodesk for sponsoring this event. Their generous support has made possible the promise of a very exciting and important public event that will bring to a wider audience hitherto unexamined issues related to the burgeoning of parametric and algorithmic scripting tools in design and architecture that have wide reaching consequqnces for all our futures.

Autodesk is a world leader in 3D design software for entertainment, natural resources, manufacturing, engineering, construction, and civil infrastructure.

Autodesk helps people imagine, design and create a better world. Everyone—from design professionals, engineers and architects to digital artists, students and hobbyists—uses Autodesk software to unlock their creativity and solve important challenges.

For more information visit autodesk.com or follow @autodesk.

Founded in 1982, Autodesk is headquartered in San Rafael, California.

www.autodesk.com

We are also very grateful for eVolo Architecture Magazine for their support in promoting this event as our media sponsor.

eVolo is an architecture and design journal focused on technological advances, sustainability, and innovative design for the 21st Century. Our objective is to promote and discuss the most avant-garde ideas generated in schools and professional studios around the world. It is a medium to explore the reality and future of design with up-to-date news, events, and projects.

www.evolo.us

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9. CONTACT DETAILS:

Matthew Poole

[email protected]

tel: +1-323-344-6033

Manuel Shvartzberg

[email protected]

Websites:

aestheticsandpolitics.calarts.edu/conferences

www.redcat.org/event/politics-parametricism

Below: Image courtesy of Peter Vikar

“And yet, what we need is the intelligence and imagination to work out systemic alternatives to the status quo. Architecture can help directly by demonstrating possibilities that operate on different premises than those operating a hegemonic system of systems in which life and death are variables in a great game.”

“In architecture, form is a precondition for politico-economic immanence; it is among architecture’s ways of being in the world. As a discourse, architecture mediates social and economic relations by translating ortranscoding them into formal equivalents. Analyze these forms and you are analyzing the world.”

Reinhold MartinInterviewed in Thresholds No. 40, 2012, MIT Journal of Architecture.

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Image courtesy of Synthesis Design + Architecture

Occupy Wall Street, 2011