Lars Spuybroek Lecture: The Digital Nature of Gothic

Architect and theorist, Lars Spuybroek, a Rotterdam native, speaks at Baltimore's Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA)

When

Wednesday, September 24, 2014
6:00 pm

Where

Maryland Institute College of Art
Fred Lazarus IV Center lecture hall
131 West North Ave.
Baltimore, MD 21202

There is street parking in the area.

Description

In this lecture Lars Spuybroek argues that digital architecture is far removed from infinitely malleable forms as we find in the stucco world of the Baroque, and in fact deeply related to the woven, interlaced networks of the Gothic. By using the famous argumentation of nineteenth-century architectural theoretician John Ruskin, Spuybroek shows that in the Gothic mind craft does not succeed the fully worked out designs of all-powerful architect, but in fact precedes it. This notion of craft is one that nestles itself in design; a form of design that is material, flexible and always leading to pattern where we can’t exactly distinguish between ornament and structure.

About Lars Spuybroek

• Currently Professor of Architecture at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, previously Professor at the University of Kassel Germany.
• In 1997, he designed the first fully interactive building with digitally generated geometry, the HtwoOexpo water pavilion in the Netherlands. He contributed a design for a new WTC in NYC in 2001.
• Books include: The Sympathy of Things: Ruskin and the Ecology of Design; The Architecture of Variation; Textile Tectonics
• Principal of NOX architecture and design firm. See his design work on NOX site.
• More info at Wikipedia