A short presentation at the Aga Khan University, in London (Bedford Square–across from the AA), as part of this afternoon’s roundtable discussion ‘Re-Considering Dubai’. Dubai is the Rorshach Test of contemporary architecture and urbanism: a place architects love or hate; promote or deny. In an era where strong opininions are rare, Dubai is, momentarily, a […]
Madrid
IEAA Design Workshop
21 November, 2009
Brett gives an introductory talk and welcome at the opening of a two-day design workshop by the AA School at the Instituto Empresa, one of the world’s leading business schools. The subject of the talk and workshop is the contemporary convergence of design and management theories, and the role of intelligent workplace design in the […]
Amsterdam
‘Adaptation’
A short lecture on the ways in which the AA School is adapting itself to the 21st century, given as part of a day-long conference titled ‘Re-inventing the Academy’, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture.
—Malmo
‘Architecture Schools Must Burn’
‘Architecture Schools Must Burn’ was the title of my talk yesterday at the end of a two-day international conference in Malmo, Sweden; a two-day event that brought together a half-dozen or so deans of architecture school around the world to address the theme of ‘positive’ schools of architecture. My focus: the need for architectural schools […]
—Seoul
‘From Design to Information: Archietcture v. 2.0′
Along with three of my tutors from the AA — Valentin Bostjes van Beek, Peter Ferreto, and Ricardo de Ostes — I presented a short overview of the AA School to the staff at the renown Seoul architectural office, Space Group. My topic: the convergence of distributed design sensibilities and networked design and creative platforms […]
—Pagu Book City
‘Prototyping the (Border) City’
A day after my arrival in Korea for a brief visit to the AA & SA’s current Visiting School Programme, I gave a modified version of my prototyping lecture; on the contemporary and modern problem of designing the city. The AA is 15 kilometers from the border with North Korea this week, with 60 visiting […]
—18 August, 2008
Seoul, Korea ‘Against Form’
This short lecture at the Seoul Headquarters of the Space Group, one of Korea’s foremost architectural and space planning offices, surveyed three key topics in architectural culture today: the rise of ‘ambient’ forms of urbanism; the proliferation of networked design systems and their effects on related architectural concepts of form, design and process; and the […]
—Polenza
‘Prototyping the City’
In the beautiful small town of Polenza, outside of Turin, at the world-famous Institute of Gastronomy (the world centre of the ’slow food’ movement), just long enough for Bernard Cache & me to give short talks at the conclusion of the World City of Design Festival workshops.
My ‘Prototyping the City’ presentation does what the title […]
—Auckland
‘Ambient Urbanism’
‘Ambient Urbanism: The Continuous Surfaces of the Contemporary City’. This talk examines the continuous informational city that has grown out of modernism’s reinvention of the city as a functional extension of architectural ideas; As Le Corbusier once wrote, ‘A town is only a tool’. This lecture, presented as a keynote session of the 2008 New […]
—Auckland
‘Design v. Research’
‘Design vs. Research: Collaboration, Conspiracies & Competition’. A presentation of contemporary architectural and design cultures that, during the past decade, have grown up around new design systems, technologies and multi-disciplinary work environments. Seeking to look past the euphoria of recent digital discourses, this talk will examine the ways in which the electrification and distribution of […]