ENAC Seminar Series by Mr G. Retsin
Event details
| Date | 03.12.2020 |
| Hour | 15:45 › 16:30 |
| Speaker | Gilles Retsin |
| Location |
Zoom
Online
|
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
15:45 – 16:30 – Mr Gilles Retsin
Lecturer at The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, UK
Talk title:
Housing of Bits and Pieces: Automation and The Possibility of a Discrete Architecture
Abstract:
The past few decades, digital technologies have reconfigured our lives and world in the most far-reaching manner possible. However, in our build environment, little has changed. Despite years of digital research and experimentation, building remains a largely analog practice, characterised by a long, disconnected, unequal and wasteful production chain. While the world is facing a series of increasingly radical challenges, from climate change to the global housing crisis and rising inequality, the digital in architecture remained predominantly invested in an isolated project of complex form, curvilinearity and style. At the same time, following the emergence of the digital economy, new venture-capital backed tech-platforms are shaping up to fill in the gap left behind by the parametric avant-garde: the global supply of homes.
Operating in the post-2008 climate, the so-called Discrete proposes an alternative approach to the digital in architecture, based on an understanding of digital technologies as a form of Automation - with a social, political and economic premise. The discrete advances a computational understanding of architectural parts as versatile, generic and autonomous units, capable of fundamentally re-writing the way we procure, build, design and inhabit housing. This discrete approach to automation combines the efficiency and scalability of modular prefabrication with the complexity, open-endedness, and adaptability of the digital. From an architectural perspective, these automated processes result in a new architectural syntax defined only by part-part relations, stripped down to its raw and primitive state - its primordial core.
This lecture will explore the possibility and consequences of a discrete architecture, as a radical proposition for the digital in architecture. By resetting the entirety of housing through a fundamentally digital approach, architecture itself has the potential to contribute to a more just, equal, sustainable and inspiring way of inhabiting our planet.
Short bio:
Originally from Belgium, Gilles Retsin is a London based architect and designer whose work is interested in the impact of computation on the core principles of architecture – the bones rather than the skin. He studied architecture in Belgium, Chile and the UK, where he graduated from the Architectural Association. His design work, research and critical discourse has been internationally recognised through awards, lectures and exhibitions at major cultural institutions such as the Museum of Art and Design in New York, the Royal Academy of Arts in London, Tallinn Architecture Biennale and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Gilles Retsin works on a range of scales and has qualified with his proposals for the Budapest New National Gallery and a concert hall in Nuremberg. He recently edited an issue of Architectural Design (AD) on the Discrete and has co-edited Robotic Building: Architecture in the Age of Automation, with Detail Verlag. Gilles Retsin is Programme Director of the B-Pro M.Arch Architectural Design at UCL, the Bartlett School of Architecture. He is also co-founder of UCL Design Computation Lab, which does high profile research into new design and fabrication technologies, and its spin-off AUAR ltd ( Automated Architecture) a design-tech consultancy based in London. Before founding Gilles Retsin Architecture, Gilles worked as a project architect with Christian Kerez in Zurich.
Lecturer at The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, UK
Talk title:
Housing of Bits and Pieces: Automation and The Possibility of a Discrete Architecture
Abstract:
The past few decades, digital technologies have reconfigured our lives and world in the most far-reaching manner possible. However, in our build environment, little has changed. Despite years of digital research and experimentation, building remains a largely analog practice, characterised by a long, disconnected, unequal and wasteful production chain. While the world is facing a series of increasingly radical challenges, from climate change to the global housing crisis and rising inequality, the digital in architecture remained predominantly invested in an isolated project of complex form, curvilinearity and style. At the same time, following the emergence of the digital economy, new venture-capital backed tech-platforms are shaping up to fill in the gap left behind by the parametric avant-garde: the global supply of homes.
Operating in the post-2008 climate, the so-called Discrete proposes an alternative approach to the digital in architecture, based on an understanding of digital technologies as a form of Automation - with a social, political and economic premise. The discrete advances a computational understanding of architectural parts as versatile, generic and autonomous units, capable of fundamentally re-writing the way we procure, build, design and inhabit housing. This discrete approach to automation combines the efficiency and scalability of modular prefabrication with the complexity, open-endedness, and adaptability of the digital. From an architectural perspective, these automated processes result in a new architectural syntax defined only by part-part relations, stripped down to its raw and primitive state - its primordial core.
This lecture will explore the possibility and consequences of a discrete architecture, as a radical proposition for the digital in architecture. By resetting the entirety of housing through a fundamentally digital approach, architecture itself has the potential to contribute to a more just, equal, sustainable and inspiring way of inhabiting our planet.
Short bio:
Originally from Belgium, Gilles Retsin is a London based architect and designer whose work is interested in the impact of computation on the core principles of architecture – the bones rather than the skin. He studied architecture in Belgium, Chile and the UK, where he graduated from the Architectural Association. His design work, research and critical discourse has been internationally recognised through awards, lectures and exhibitions at major cultural institutions such as the Museum of Art and Design in New York, the Royal Academy of Arts in London, Tallinn Architecture Biennale and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Gilles Retsin works on a range of scales and has qualified with his proposals for the Budapest New National Gallery and a concert hall in Nuremberg. He recently edited an issue of Architectural Design (AD) on the Discrete and has co-edited Robotic Building: Architecture in the Age of Automation, with Detail Verlag. Gilles Retsin is Programme Director of the B-Pro M.Arch Architectural Design at UCL, the Bartlett School of Architecture. He is also co-founder of UCL Design Computation Lab, which does high profile research into new design and fabrication technologies, and its spin-off AUAR ltd ( Automated Architecture) a design-tech consultancy based in London. Before founding Gilles Retsin Architecture, Gilles worked as a project architect with Christian Kerez in Zurich.
Practical information
- General public
- Invitation required
- This event is internal
Organizer
- ENAC
Contact
- Joanna Jermini-Howard / Cristina Perez