The third event in the series will discuss the future of the built environment in the relation to the term Anthropocene – a proposed age where human activity ‘impacts on Earth’s ecosystem’. Are binary notions of city/nature, urban/rural still relevant to think and act in the built environment at this age of planetary environmental crises or should they be surpassed by more innovative and instrumental practices? Taking the notion of Anthropocene as a provocative proposal, the event will bring together an interdisciplinary panel of architects, anthropologists, scientist and agent provocateurs. Individual presentations will be followed by a panel discussion.
Scavengers and Other Creatures is an on-going lecture series hosted by Intermediate 3, which explores the realm of fictional buildings, technological natures and cybernetics. An eponymous book of the unit’s student work, interviews and articles will be published in 2015.
Nannette Jackowski and Ricardo de Ostos are principals of NaJa & deOstos. They are the authors of The Hanging Cemetery of Baghdad and Pamphlet Architecture 29: Ambiguous Spaces. They have been nominated for the 2012 Iakov Chernikhov prize for young architects around the world. Nannette has worked for Wilkinson Eyre and Zaha Hadid. Ricardo has worked for Peter Cook, Future Systems and Foster + Partners. He has taught at Lund University in Sweden and is currently an Associate Professor at École Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris. He was appointed curator of the Brazilian Pavilion for the London Festival of Architecture in 2008 and 2010.
Rachel Armstrong is Professor of Experimental Architecture at the Department of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, Newcastle University. She is also a 2010 Senior TED Fellow who is establishing an alternative approach to sustainability that couples with the computational properties of the natural world to develop a 21st century production platform for the built environment, which she calls 'living' architecture. Rachel has been frequently recognized as being a pioneer. She has recently been featured in interview for PORTER magazine, added to the 2014 Citizens of the Next Century List, by Future-ish, listed on the Wired 2014 Smart List.
Mark Jarzombek, Professor of the History and Theory of Architecture at MIT, has published books and articles on a wide range of historical topics from the 12th century to the modern era with a particular focus on nineteenth and twentieth century philosophy and architecture. He is a leading advocate for global history and has published several books and articles on that topic, including the ground-breaking textbook entitled A Global History of Architecture with co-author Vikram Prakash and with the noted illustrator Francis D.K. Ching. His current book project is entitled Thinking About Architecture.
Marco Poletto is an architect, author and educator. He is co-founder and director of ecoLogicStudio in London and now holds an Adapt-r research fellowship in bio-digital design at the Aarhus School of Architecture in Denmark and is Distinguished Visiting Critic at Carnegie Mellon University. Marco has lectured and taught internationally and has been Unit Master at the AA in London, at the UCL Bartlett School of Architecture and Visiting Faculty at the IAAC, Barcelona, and Cornell University, Ithaca. He is co-author of “Systemic Architecture: operating manual for the self-organising city” by Routledge. His experimental work and completed projects have been published and exhibited throughout the world.
Michael Weinstock is the founder and Director of the Emergent Technologies and Design programme in the Graduate School of the Architectural Association. Over the last decade his published work has arisen from research into the dynamics, forms and energy transactions of natural systems, and the application of the mathematics and processes of emergence to cities, to groups of buildings within cities and to individual buildings. Whilst his principal research and teaching has been conducted at the Architectural Association, he has published and lectured widely, and taught seminar courses, studios and workshops on these topics at many other schools of Architecture in the UK and Europe, United States and Japan.