Friday 28th of February 2014
Massimo Banzi
Lecture: Open sourcing innovation.

@ 19.30, IAAC Auditorium
Open to the Public

The Dictionary of Received Ideas wishes to investigate both Practice and Ideas, or Theory and Design, that is ideas that have an effect on your design.

For this project Enrique was inspired by two writers in particular:

Georges Perec, relative to self imposed and volontary constraints, resulting in a different way of producing, in this case architecture;

And Gustave Flaubert, relative to looking at what we take for granted without critically processing it.

This of course applied to the architectural field, that is to examine clichés in the world of architecture, ideas that we take for granted, but with regards to design techniques.

The Dictionnaire des ideés recues by Flaubert, project from which Enrique’s research gets its name, was an inventory of ready made phrases that you had to use in 19^th Century France to be socially accepted. Flaubert wanted people to start thinking before talking. He provided instructions rather than giving definitions.

Enrique aims to chart clichés used in architecture in his Dictionary of Received Ideas…

But what is a Received Idea in Architecture? What is an architectural Cliché?

It is a technique that had intensity and was effective, that then gets used excessively, deleting it of its efficiency through its abuse. Or a solution to a problem that is no longer there.

Through his work Enrique hopes to give new use to these clichés…

Enrique Walker at the IaaC

Enrique Walker is an architect and Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University, where he also directs the Master of Science program in Advanced Architectural Design. His publications include, Tschumi on Architecture: Conversations with Enrique Walker (Monacelli, 2006) and Lo Ordinario (Gustavo Gili, 2010).

The Dictionary of Received Ideas is a decade-long project (2006—) whose aim is to examine received ideas—in other words, ideas which have been depleted of their original intensity due to recurrent use—in contemporary architecture culture. Based on Gustave Flaubert’s unfinished project, Le dictionnaire des idées reçues, this ongoing series of design studios and theory seminars proposes to disclose, define, and date—and in the long run archive—received ideas prevalent over the past decade, both in the professional and the academic realm, in order to ultimately open up otherwise precluded possibilities for architectural design and architectural theory.

“2.3/seg” is the first project Alejandro showed us, which studies the death and birth rates of the human race around the world. The question posed was how often are people born and how often do they die? Alejandro underlined that he was not so interested in the accuracy, but more in the concept of this.
The results showed that 4 people are born and 2 people die every second, resulting in 2 new people on the planet per second. The data used to generate this project was collected through the World Census Bureau, and conceptually inspired by the work of Jagadish Chandra Bos, and in particular his invention of the Creschograph, a technology that allows a person to see a plant grow in real time.
“The laboratory to explore the birth of ideas” was a complex technology inspired by his father, who taught him how to generate electricity.
Alejandro then went on to explain how another of his projects was inspired by a dream in which fruit communicated…”hello world”. Would it be possible to make a computer out of fruit? An organic computer?
He then started working with ph levels present in fruit to generate a binary system, starting with the use of lemon and tangerine. This makes us reflect on how we create technology, questioning its historical generator, that is for attack or defence mechanisms…this could be a poetic way to create technology!
The fourth and final project showed was inspired by an image of the northern lights, a sort of connection between magic and nature. But what are these northern lights, and how are they created?
These are a consequence of solar explosions, the earth is therefore a natural sensor of these explosions. Alejandro wanted to find a way to get connected with them, a poetic way of depicting these explosions. He created a system that would turn the energy of these explosions into data, and in return transformed this data first into fire (a natural phenomenon becomes data to then rebecome a natural phenomenon), and then in later versions of this projects into explosions using gun powder. This was called “8 minutes (when the sun explodes we explode)”.
Finally, sometime was spent discussing the workshop underway with the MAI students, “white box” that aims to break the concept of technology as a black box, rendering technology more open and accessible, that is white, allowing us to experience the poetic, nature and magic of technology in everyday life.

Alejandro Tamayo at the IaaC

Lecture “Technology: between magic and everyday life“

Alejandro Tamayo is an artist, researcher and teacher working in the intersections between artistic practice, science, technology and everyday life. He has been a tutor at Medialab Prado interactivos? workshops including Technologies of Laughter (Mexico) and Neighborhood Science (Madrid) and has teaching for over eight years at various art and design schools in Colombia including the Art Department from Los Andes University and the School of Fine Arts from the National University. He has been a guest speaker in various venues including Pixelache University-Reinventing the Teaching Situation (Helsinki), CIANT gallery (Prague), and the International Image Festival (Colombia).

In his lecture entitled ‘Ending Poverty in 10 Years’, Mr. Negroponte talked about how technology can help developing countries fight against poverty by teaching kids means to educate themselves.  ”If you can learn to read, you can read to learn”.

Nicholas Negroponte is the founder and Chairman Emeritus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, and also known as the founder of the One Laptop per Child Association (OLPC).

In 1967, Negroponte founded MIT’s Architecture Machine Group, a combination lab and think tank which studied new approaches to human-computer interaction. In 1985, he created the MIT Media Lab with Jerome B. Wiesner, a pre-eminent computer science laboratory for new media and a high-tech playground for investigating the human-computer interface. In 1992, Negroponte became involved in the creation of Wired Magazine as the first investor contributing, from 1993 to 1998, with a monthly column: “Move bits, not atoms.” Negroponte expanded many of the ideas from his Wired columns into a bestselling book Being Digital (1995), which made famous his forecasts on how the interactive world, the entertainment world and the information world would eventually merge. Negroponte is a digital optimist who believed that computers would make life better for everyone.

In 2006, Negroponte stepped down as lab chairman to focus more fully on his work with One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) although he retains his appointment as professor at MIT.

On Tuesday, February 26^th, Nicholas Negroponte will be lecturing at the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia – IAAC.

Nicholas Negroponte’s lecture at IAAC, will be streaming live in our youtube channel

]]> http://legacy.iaacblog.com/blog/2013/iaac-lecture-series-nicholas-negroponte/feed/ 0 http://legacy.iaacblog.com/blog/2013/bernard-tschumis-lecture-iaac-red-is-not-a-color/ http://legacy.iaacblog.com/blog/2013/bernard-tschumis-lecture-iaac-red-is-not-a-color/#comments Fri, 22 Feb 2013 12:49:33 +0000 admin http://legacy.iaacblog.com/?p=9483