[mscp] Philosophy and Architecture - tonight

[Esther Anatolitis]

MSCP and RMIT Architecture
Philosophy and Architecture series

- this evening
! new venue: RMIT theatre 8.11.68

SEPTEMBER: HOLDING TOGETHER 
Pia Ednie-Brown
7:30pm Thursday, 15 September
RMIT Theatre 8.11.68 

The invention of design systems and processes is a poignant and
contested area of architectural design discourse. As part of the fall
out of Beaux-Arts methodologies into modernism, gaining ground through
cybernetics and, more recently, digital computation, processes of design
have become as much of a design problem as any architectural product.
This is often discussed as ‘designing the design’. The inherent
inseparability of process and product is, I suggest, indicative of the
increasingly virtuosic, emergent and elusive products 
of culture.

This presentation will discuss some particular examples of generative
design processes in relation to the nature of their outcomes. In each
case, the conventionally assumed ‘top-down’ action of designers and
compositional systems cannot be accounted for: these examples are of an
emergent nature. However, I argue that top-down action does not
disappear (as emergence theory would insist) but transform into what I
will explain as embedded or embodied processual consistencies that
inhabit the continuity between the emergent product and its process.
This understanding of how things ‘hold together’ recasts composition as
an issue of embedded refrains of behavioural tendency that define the
always ‘in-process’ character of a thing.

Pia Ednie-Brown is a Senior Lecturer in the Architecture and Spatial
Information Architecture programs at RMIT University, teaching design
and theory at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. She has a research
practice under the name of Onomatopoeia and is currently completing a
PhD ('The Aesthetics of Emergence') drawing on the work of this
practice. She is instigator of The Liveness Manifold and directed the
collaborative exhibition Skins of Intimate Distance. Her performatively
oriented research involves art-architecture installations, animation,
sculpture, creative writing and theoretical analysis. 

COMING UP
Nikos Papastergiadis, October 13 
Jeff Malpas, November 10 

FOR UPDATES
http://www.mscp.org.au/architecture.htm

Held on the second Thursday of each month, the Philosophy and
Architecture series provides a unique opportunity for a space of
exchange to be created between the two disciplines. While what we
provide is a local space – Melbourne philosophers and Melbourne
architects on Melbourne issues – the Philosophy and Architecture series
welcomes speakers from any discipline who engage with questions of
contemporary urbanism, planning, technology, space, system, design,
distribution and other issues in the productive overlap between the two
disciplines. We are expecting a diverse range of presentations and
presenters, from research students and established academics to
architecture and planning practitioners, policy makers, public artists
and those working in the world between theory, buildings and the city.