Metropolis

Scripting the Future Seminar

Neil Leach

 

This workshop will is devoted to a new design paradigm – based on recent computational developments - that is having an increasing impact on architectural production. Through a series of lectures/seminars with associated readings, students will be taken through the theoretical basis of this new paradigm and its various manifestations in terms of design.

New Materialism, Or the Death of Postmodernism
The first lecture provides a theoretical background to the emerging new paradigm of New Materialism. The development of this new paradigm will be charted against the backdrop of various intellectual traditions of the C20th – Modernism, Phenomenology, Structuralism, Poststructuralism and Postmodernism – from its origins in the work of French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, through to its dissemination in the writings and lectures of Mexican ‘street philosopher’, Manuel DeLanda.

Digital Tectonics
This lecture will consider the development of digital design from its early manifestation in science fictional representations in the 1990s to the emergence of new techniques of understanding process and material behaviour in the early 2000s. The lecture will show how - in contrast to its early opposition between the digital and the tectonic - the digital is being used increasingly to understand tectonic behaviour, so that a new era of ‘digital tectonics’ has been initiated.

Machinic Processes
This lecture will explore the two dominant emerging manifestations of computational techniques in the design process - the ‘immaterial’ use of scripting in generating a code generated architecture, and the ‘material’ use of digital fabrication technologies being used increasingly to model architectural form. The lecture will draw upon material from the 2010 Architecture Biennial Beijing.

Digital Cities
This lecture will look at the most recent computational design developments in terms of scale of operations – the use of algorithmic and parametric techniques to generate urbanism. Drawing upon material published in the Architectural Design issue on Digital Cities it will explore the potential applications of these techniques within the urban realm.