VizTech: Converging Pedagogies + Practices

VizTech: Converging Pedagogies + Practices

Faculty, students, and alumni discuss new opportunities for merging curriculum across visual studies and technology at GSAPP.

Organizers

Laura Kurgan ‘88 M.Arch, Associate Professor and Director of Visual Studies
Craig Schwitter, Associate Professor and Director of Building Science & Technology

Participants

Sarah Almukhtar '14 MSUP, Graphics Editor, The New York Times
Carlo Bailey '15 M.Arch, Design Researcher, WeWork
David Benjamin '05 M.Arch, Assistant Professor and Principal, The Living
Clara Chung '13 MSUP, Adjunct Assistant Professor and Strategist, Intersection
Mark Collins '06 M.Arch, Adjunct Assistant Professor and Co-Founder, Morpholio
Lise Anne Couture, Associate Professor and Co-Founder, Asymptote Architecture
Laurie Hawkinson, Professor and Partner, Smith-Miller + Hawkinson Architects
Sarrah Khan '03 M.Arch, Adjunct Assistant Professor and Founder, Agencie Architecture & Engineering PC
Farzin Lotfi-Jam '12 MSAAD, Adjunct Assistant Professor and Principal, farzinfarzin
Danil Nagy '10 M.Arch / '11 MSUP, Adjunct Assistant Professor and Senior Research Scientist and Design Associate, The Living
Leah Meisterlin '06 MSUP / '09 M.Arch, Assistant Professor
Eric Pietraszkiewicz '18 MSUP student
Ingeborg Rocker '96 MSAAD, Vice President, Dassault Systèmes
Juan Francisco Saldarriaga '09 MSUP / '12 M.Arch, Adjunct Assistant Professor and Researcher, Center for Spatial Research
Miranda Shugars '18 M.Arch student
Dan Taeyoung '13 M.Arch, Adjunct Assistant Professor and Co-Founder, Prime Produce
Josh Uhl '02 M.Arch, Adjunct Assistant Professor and Design Director, Toshiko Mori Architect
Zachary White '18 M.Arch student
Violet Whitney '17 M.Arch, Adjunct Assistant Professor and Associate Director, Design, Sidewalk Labs
Lindsey Wikstrom '16 M.Arch, Designer, Studio Gang Architects
Luc Wilson '11 M.Arch, Adjunct Assistant Professor and Associate Principal, Kohn Pedersen Fox

In recent decades, GSAPP’s Visual Studies and Technology sequences have been running in parallel. This conference will address the ways in which these two fields appear to have merged in pedagogy and in practice. This convergence is visible at GSAPP through the practices and projects of students, researchers, and faculty, who have been pushing the boundaries of spatial technologies in architecture, planning and design. Catalyzed by accelerations, constantly updated versions of digital technology—software, hardware and data—this expanded terrain has become an opportunity for us to reimagine not only our relationship to the built environment, but our larger role as designers.

The intersection and blurring of the digital and the physical have provided our discipline with opportunities to re-assess our tools and craft. Our curriculum has been committed to responding in real-time to these changes. Whether quantitative or qualitative, analytic or expressive, digital or analogue, our tools and methods attempt to instrumentally and discerningly intervene in the process of design, adding new inputs, outputs and workflows.

Over the last fifteen years, with this expanded approach to modes of design, the Visual Studies and Tech GSAPP community have addressed a number of emerging technologies sometimes enthusiastically and optimistically; but more often with caution. We have: interrogated the building as data; built iPhone appitecture, parametrically optimized structures/wall systems; analyzed and simulated thermal/light performances; questioned how recommendation engines segregate cities; studied how machine learning could facilitate design; scanned 3D objects and printed them anew; created stories out of urban data to renew our image of the city; and mapped geo-spatial data to help us better understand our urban environment and its opportunities for intervention.

As we reflect on these years and think about the future of this work at the GSAPP, we invite students, faculty, and alumni in a conversation on the evolution of GSAPP’s VS and Tech program in this exciting moment in its evolution.

Free and open to the public. GSAPP students are encouraged to participate in the conversation!
Organized by Columbia GSAPP.