Workshop – Hybrids and Hyperdimensional Objects: The Quest for New Media in Architecture

This workshop seeks to discuss novel approaches to architectural design, making and researching, that dissolve and expand analogue-digital divides. The topics discussed during this workshop might include subjects like notions of craft and digital craft; imagination beyond tools and tools for imagination; the pre-digital or proto-digital pedigree (focusing on retro CAD or emerging techniques of form-giving such as “trace and loft”); generative components, morphing, reprogrammable manipulators, aesthetic assemblages, topology deformations and AI diffusion models, as well as alternative “translations’” and digital evolutions (like “void modellers” and “shape grammars” software).

During the mid-1990s into the early 2000s, Zaha Hadid’s architecture design techniques evolved dynamically and transitioned from analogue paintings, drawings and models to the use of the digital, including complex three-dimensional volumes. The current exhibition Zaha Hadid: Paper Museums, reliefs models constructed of cut and folded white paper, card and foamcore, represent a hybrid technique that mutates objects from drawing to sculpture, and from sculpture to structure. The models frequently become instrumental prompts for the increasingly conceptual connections between floors and landscape, enhancing and complementing Hadid’s strategy to increase the ground permeability and surface continuity.

Speakers to be announced. Speakers will present on their work individually, followed by a roundtable discussion.