Compositional Physics and Other Forms of Disorder
Wortham Fellow Symposium
Panel: Michael Abrahamson, Ph.D., Visiting Assistant Professor, University of Utah; Scott Colman, Ph.D., Assistant Professor and Thesis Coordinator, Rice Architecture (moderator); Jeff Halstead, Director, Jeff Halstead Design; Anna Neimark, Principal, First Office, and Faculty, Sci-Arc; and Hans Tursack, Pietro Bellusci Fellow, MIT
Friday, February 21, 9:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.
Admission is free and open to the public. Registration is encouraged.
To register for Day 1 of the event on Feb. 20, click here.
To register for Day 2 of the event on Feb. 21, click here.
Chance based operations, material entropy, and the use of physical forces were essential to American and European art movements of the 1960s and 70s such as Process Art, Conceptual Art, Performance Art, and Italian Arte Povera. Primarily giving form (or not giving form rather) to installation and sculptural works, chance-based operations provided artists of these decades a non-expressive route to abstraction. Although chance based operations as visual phenomena that belonged to the discipline of painting can be traced back to suprematism, constructivism and eventually the Bauhaus, it wasn’t until the 1970s that it fully erupted into spatial and formal compositions.
Anticipating the advent of the digital, transformation diagrams registered over a time sequence and volumes that seemed to surrender to acts of physical forces were some of the formal and compositional attributes of architecture projects of the early 1990s. More recently, following the first and second digital turns, the proliferation (and ease of access) of physics simulation engines has gained accelerated momentum in architecture and other peripheral disciplines (film, media studies, video game design, motion graphics, and internet art).
At present, during this moment of digital reprieve in architecture, some emergent practices have returned to more de-constructed, dis-assembled, form-less aesthetics. The seduction of the ruin, incomplete geometries, unhappy wholes, non-hierarchical assemblies, and other mandates for faulty aesthetics have resurfaced with renewed energy. This symposium invites critics, theorists, and designers to argue, articulate, and think through projects of compositional physics in architecture in relationship to current cultural, technological, and pedagogical conditions.
For information regarding visitor parking on the Rice campus, please visit parking.rice.edu
Compositional Physics and Other Forms of Disorder is organized by Wortham Fellow and Director of Miracles Architecture Viola Ago.