Maverick Designers, Inventors, Media Artists, Futurists Gather for an International Conference at USC on Architecture and Design Technology
CONTACTS: Lee Schuyler Olvera (213) 740-2723 olvera@usc.edu
Allison Engel (213) 740-1927 allison.engel@usc.edu
More than 400 of the world’s most important architects, designers and researchers will gather at the USC School of Architecture from Oct. 20 through 26 for the ACADIA conference. ACADIA, the Association for Computer-Aided Design in Architecture, is an organization committed to design research, education and the importance of enhancing computers and technology for the profession of architecture and the built environment.
The conference, titled Design Agency, is the largest and most significant architecture event to be held in Southern California this year. USC Architecture will be represented by more than 10 faculty members and five students presenting and exhibiting their design research. For the first time in ACADIA’s history, all three conference co-chairs, David Gerber, Alvin Huang and Jose Sanchez, are professors from the same host institituion. All three are assistant professors at USC Architecture.
The week will include three notable evening talks open to the public, including one Oct. 24 by Pritzker Prize winning architect Zaha Hadid in USC’s Bovard Auditorium.
Hadid is internationally celebrated for her wildly imaginative work at the interface of architecture, landscape and geology, exemplified in bold projects such as the MAXXI Museum in Rome, the London Aquatics Centre for the 2012 Olympic Games and Heydar Aliyev Centre in Baku, Azerbaijan. Her work has been hailed as architecture that transforms our ideas of the future with new spatial concepts and dynamic, visionary forms.
Hadid’s talk is in collaboration with USC Visions and Voices, the university’s humanities initiative. The event is free of charge, but reservations are required.
Other evening events open to the public are a panel discussion on design and computational aesthetics to be held at the Southern California Institute of Architecture on Oct. 21 and a talk by Marc Fornes, an architect who creates sculptural work using computational design and digital fabrication, at USC Architecture on Oct. 22.
On Oct. 23, Will Wright, inventor of SimCity and other innovative games, will be a conference keynote speaker. MIT Media Lab professor Neil Gershenfeld will speak on Oct. 24. On Oct. 25, the keynote speaker will be Casey Reas, media artist and inventor of one of the top 20 downloaded open source software programs. Also on Oct. 25 will be a panel discussion to launch David Gerber’s new book, Paradigms in Computing. These talks are open to conference attendees and media representatives only.
During the week, the public is invited to view several exhibitions on display throughout USC’S Watt Hall and Harris Courtyard. These include cutting edge 3D printed works; 70 peer-reviewed project posters; two interactive installations; and the full-scale mockups of the finalists for the Tex-Fab digital fabrication competition, whose winners will be announced at the conference.
Conference participants will spend the week attending multi-day workshops on topics including Swarm Intelligence: Algorithmic Design Strategies; Enhanced Parametric Design; Solar Radiation and Daylight Analysis; Design for Robotic Fabrication; Interactive Form-Finding with Physics; and Data-Driven Stadium Design.
The conference will conclude Oct. 26 with a hackathon in the new innovation lab at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.The event will feature D.J. Charlie Roberts, who performs music by writing live code that will be displayed on a screen as the music plays. One hundred laptop-toting conference participants will break into teams and be given a design challenge. Their work will be shared on public screens for the audience to observe. This event open to conference participants only, but there is media availability.
A complete listing of conference events is here. A link to the conference registration site is here.
[ABOVE IMAGE: The Heydar Aliyev Centre in Baku, Azerbaijan, designed by Zaha Hadid, the Pritzker Prize winning Iraqi-British architect who is speaking at USC Oct. 24. Image courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects]
About the USC School of Architecture
The USC School of Architecture, which began as a university department in 1916, was the first accredited school of architecture in Southern California. Its 3,000 graduates include two Pritzker Prize winners, Frank Gehry ’54 and Thom Mayne ’69, and an array of other important figures who are advancing modernism, prefabrication, sustainability and innovative urban design.
The School is committed to studying and supporting the city of Los Angeles, recognized as a center of tremendous creativity and diversity that claims a double frontier in America and the Pacific Rim.
The School offers bachelor’s degrees in architecture, architectural studies and landscape architecture, and both master’s degrees and certificates in architecture, building science, heritage conservation and landscape architecture. A Ph.D. in architecture also is offered.