Situated Technologies
The Situated Technologies Graduate Research Group is engaged in design experimentation that repositions architecture in an expanded field.
Architecture today is expansive in its practices and in its composition. Complex assemblages of code, people, space, material, infrastructure, practices, processes: each are technologies unto themselves, as is their gathering in architecture. There’s no digital architecture anymore; there’s just architecture. In this context, “technology” refers to different things, to design and building technologies, but also to technology within the built environment, to methods of work, and more.
We depart from these observations to explore methods of study and to conduct experiments that probe the limits of architecture: prototypes, processes, techniques, modes of collaboration, and workflows. We adopt new methods to identify new sites of inquiry, at different scales and within different social and political settings, for an expanded field of practice. Design studios and seminars result, accordingly, in a wide range of outcomes–buildings, devices, events, infrastructures, tools, workflows, interfaces–and in skillsets that enable our students to articulate new agencies for architecture.
This prepares our students for a field that now supports increasingly diverse modes of practice. Graduates of our group join architectural design firms, but also engage in critical creative and scholarly work, design digitally interactive and responsive environments, and innovate novel methods of design and fabrication.
Faculty members working in the group are associated with the Center for Architecture and Situated Technologies (CAST).
