ARCH_407B Seminar: ‘Dynamic Materialism and Urbanism’

This seminar was created for students interested in emerging technologies and digital production. In it, students developed and tested experimental design processes in architecture and digital media by enhancing 3D technologies, which allowed them to adopt abstract thinking and making processes.

Current developments in digital technology enable designers to use mathematical expressions to transform complex generative systems, shifting the formal discourse of architecture. These new, digitally based techniques are being invented to inform creative processes in architecture through the manipulation of complex geometric and topological forms. Students focused on inventing new methods for translating these mathematical developments into diagrammatic design strategies. For this investigation, students deployed the generative processes of design techniques. 

Complex sets of massing strategies were developed with a conceptual model for defining and inventing dynamic architectural proposals within an urban context. Through digital modeling and the mutation of architectural strategies, each student generated a transformational condition of a new emerging design. These new architectural forms were modeled through CAD/CAM (laser cutting) and rapid prototyping (3D printing) for physical outputs.