Pressing Matters II

It is an exciting time to be an architect: challenges in the economy have impacted our profession greatly, environmental and natural disasters have put us on edge, and digital technologies continue to transform the means and ends of our field. A number of Pressing Matters have changed what it means to be an architect, and it is high time we rethink who we are as a profession and a discourse, and how we can best position ourselves in the world. This book looks at the past two years of work at the PennDesign Department of Architecture with these issues in mind.

Having just completed a very busy first semester as Chair, I would like to update you on a few new initiatives we started. The first is called “Inside Out;” it will involve a number of initiatives and dialogues to help turn the school inside out and bring more of our activities to the global and local architectural discussion. The first foray here is the new (holistic) concept for this publication; the second is to extend our post-professional program [PPD] to include a semester in New York. Inside Out will also entail a series of lectures and exhibitions.

The second initiative is to create a think tank focused on the links between innovative manufacturing processes and the process of architectural education. This will expand the realm for students’ engagement in innovation, while also enhancing the modeling ethos that has informed PennDesign for decades. The third initiative is to look closely at the curriculum and to better integrate design studios with cutting-edge knowledge in with specialized courses. We have started by updating the Visual Studies and Professional Practice courses, rethinking the History and Theory sequence, and introducing 3-d Modeling to the first year studio.

A number of these issues will be touched on in a two-day conference “The New Normal, Experiments in Contemporary Generative Design,” planned for November  14 & 15, 2013, with keynote lectures by Neil Denari and Ben van Berkel.  Since its emergence roughly twenty years ago, generative digital design has fundamentally altered the way in which we conceptualize, design, and fabricate architecture. Virtually every aspect of our profession, including education, has been radically transformed. These innovations have not been restricted to questions of technology alone, as they have fueled a lively debate among leading educators, theoreticians, and practitioners in their respective efforts to understand the larger cultural ramifications triggered by this phenomenon. Starting from this solid new platform, the symposium will bring together some of the brightest minds in architecture to explore the numerous means by which digital experimentation can continue to speculate and contribute to architecture education, design research and practice, theory, and fabrication. My hope is that the symposium will instigate an ongoing discussion about how to keep innovating in education and also – and perhaps more importantly – about how to continually reconsider the means by which architecture engages broader material, social, and cultural conditions through design.

Rather than providing an overview of student work, for Pressing Matters II, we have asked the NYC-based graphic design office WSDIA to “scramble” all recent, present, and ongoing developments at the school to offer what is at once a more complex and more comprehensive view of the research and design work of both faculty and students, and to highlight the many dialogues on architecture and its impact that are continuously taking place at the school.

This is only a glimpse of what is going on in the Department of Architecture. We hope you can join us to explore these and other issues at greater depth.

Winka Dubbeldam

Professor and Chair

Department of Architecture

PennDesign

Pressing Matters II on ISSUU.com