Creative Architecture Machines Fall 2014 Colloquium
Hosted by the CCA Digital Craft Lab / CCA Architecture
Organized by Jason Kelly Johnson (CCA & Future Cities Lab)

Monday Nov 3, 6:00-9pm Timken Lecture Hall
CCA San Francisco, 1111 8th Street

Keynote Lecturers:

Fedor Novikov & Petr Novikov, Labori Construction Robotics
Website: http://www.labori.co

Joshua Zabel, Kreysler & Associates
Website: http://www.kreysler.com/

Virginia San Fratello & Ron Rael, Emerging Objects & UC Berkeley
Website: http://www.emergingobjects.com/

Andrew Atwood, Atwood-a & UC Berkeley
Website: http://atwood-a.com/

Brandon Kruysman & Jonathan Proto, CCA & Bot n’Dolly (formerly Sci-Arc Robot House)
Website: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-03-20/bot-and-dolly-and-the-rise-of-creative-robots

Jason Kelly Johnson, CCA & Future Cities Lab
Website: http://www.future-cities-lab.net/

Colloquium Synopsis:

Since the late 1990’s architects have typically used commercial CAD software to feed CAM programs to feed CNC machines. These “computer-aided” processes and “numerically-controlled” machines are most often used to increase efficiency and make the design, prototyping and fabrication processes more routine, faster and cheaper. In architecture and design schools around the world students are increasingly being taught to use standard suites of software and industrial hardware technologies such as laser cutters, robotic mills and 3d printers as ways to precisely model the formal and geometric aspects of their designs. Yet these fabrication technologies are rarely interrogated or explored in a critical or creative fashion. Why is it that architects are generally taught to be mere users of technology rather than hackers and innovators? Why are the core creative tools of our profession designed by systems engineers? What creative potential exists at the heart of these machines, where bits intermix with atoms, where digital code meets material logic?

The Creative Architecture Machines Colloquium will bring together a small group of radical innovators, each making unique contributions to the field of architecture and design. Through presentations and a round-table discussion focused on experimental and speculative fabrication machines and processes, we will endeavor to contribute to a wider debate within architecture about the role architects might play in a coming world where the unity of code and machine processes are increasingly becoming fundamental to the discipline. The colloquium will explore the efficacy of these processes and what motivates them, with a broader aspiration of contributing to a wider conversation about architecture, technology and culture.