Formulations: Practices of Architectural Mathematics

Since the Renaissance, and particularly since the advent of computation, mathematics has served as a dynamic engine for striking new forms and ways of creating architecture. In this lecture Andrew Witt will consider the past and future of mathematized design as a creative and visual practice, through the work of his design office Certain Measures and through his new book „Formulations: Architecture, Mathematics, Culture.“ First, he will show how a contemporary design practice might embrace mathematical processes as a core dimension of creative process, through a series of projects ranging from extreme material reuse to morphological classification of the world’s buildings. Second, through case studies drawn from his book „Formulations: Architecture, Mathematics, Culture,“ he will reflect on the transdisciplinary past of design mathematics and uncover how mathematical techniques inflected the ways architecture was seen, drawn, modeled, and imagined in the predigital period. Witt argues that a fusion of design and scientific processes can open new possibilities for the nature of design itself.

Andrew Witt is an Associate Professor in Practice at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, teaching and researching on the relationship of geometry, data, AI, and machines to architecture, design, and culture. Trained in both architecture and mathematics, he has a particular interest in a technically synthetic and logically rigorous approach to form. He is also co-founder, with Tobias Nolte, of Certain Measures, a Boston/Berlin-based studio that combines design and data for systemic and scalable approaches to spatial problems. The work of Certain Measures is in the permanent collection of the Centre Pompidou, and has been exhibited at the Pompidou, the Barbican Centre, the Museum of the Future, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, among others.

Der Vortrag findet im Rahmen der Ringvorlesung Order | Disorder an der Technischen Universität Darmstadt statt. Vortragssprache ist Englisch.