Architecture X Architecture: A Dialectic

Kum-Kum Bhavnani is a scholar/film-maker (Mirror and Hammer Films) who adopts a multilayered approach to analyzing inequalities and to building a more just, livable planet. Her film-making, interdisciplinary research, and teaching are shaped by the topographies of international development and equity. Through her work, she aspires to draw attention to the nodes within cultural and climate studies that resonate with critical development studies and social justice. Her feature length documentaries include Lutah: A Passion for Architecture a Life in Design, The Shape of Water, and Nothing Like Chocolate. At the University of California Santa Barbara she is a Research Professor (Distinguished Professor Emerita July 2024) and the campus Senior International Officer. She earned her doctorate at Kings College, Cambridge following her Honours degree from Bristol University (Psychology, with minors in Sociology, Politics and Philosophy), and her Masters from Nottingham University (Child and Educational Psychology). She joined the UCSB Department of Sociology in July 1991. She was Chair and Vice Chair of the University of California Systemwide Senate (2018-2020) and Chair of the Academic Senate at the UCSB (2012-2016). At present, she serves on the Chancellor’s Advisory Task Force on Childcare at UCSB and on the Systemwide Fossil Free Task Force that is developing plans for the electrification of all UC campuses. Her service includes collaborating with artists, scholars, policy makers, NGOs and other community activists. She is inspired by those who create the social justice urgently needed for present and future generations and for our planet.

Aaron Betsky is a critic and teacher living in Philadelphia. Previously, he was Professor and Director of the School of Architecture and Design at Virginia Tech and, prior to that, President of the School of Architecture at Taliesin. A critic of art, architecture, and design, Mr. Betsky is the author of over twenty books on those subjects. He writes a twice-weekly blog for architectmagazine.com, Beyond Buildings. Trained as an architect and in the humanities at Yale University, Mr. Betsky has served as the Director of the Cincinnati Art Museum (2006-2014) and the Netherlands Architecture Institute (2001-2006), as well as Curator of Architecture and Design at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1995-2001). In 2008, he also directed the 11th Venice International Biennale of Architecture. His latest books are Fifty Lessons from Frank Lloyd Wright (2021), Making It Modern (2019) and Architecture Matters (2019). In 2024, his Anarchitecture: The Monster Leviathan was published by The MIT Press and Beacon Press released his Don’t Build, Rebuild: The Case for Imaginative Reuse.

Bill Seaman is a media artist and a computational media researcher. Seaman is a Professor at Duke University working with the Computational Media, Arts and Cultures PhD program. He is the co-director of the Emergence Lab, Media Arts and Sciences, and is a member of the Departments of Art, Art History & Visual Studies, and Music. He earned a Master of Science in Visual Studies in 1985 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge. In 1999, he received a PhD from the Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts at the University of Wales for a thesis whose title accurately sums up the meaning of Seaman’s artistic practice: Recombinant Poetics: Emergent Meaning as Examined and Explored Within a Specific Generative Virtual Environment. His works may be found in numerous private and public collections, including those of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Mediamuseum, Karlsruhe. He is pioneer in the field of interactive media. In particular, his PhD (1999) explored emergent meaning production in a specific generative virtual environment. This research focused on new forms of highly complex interactive generative computation and related articulated visualization. He began collaborating from the mid 1980s with media computer scientists / programmers, articulating new experimental forms of interactive media production. He has collaborated on a number of Art/Science publications and projects. In 2021 Seaman was awarded a lifetime achievement award from ACM SIGGRAPH for his pioneering work in “Recombinant Poetics / Recombinant Informatics / Neosentience.”

Kyle Steinfeld is an architect who works with code and lives in Oakland, CA. He is Director of Master of Design; Associate Professor of Architecture, University of California-Berkeley. Through his unique hybrid practice of creative work, scholarly research, and software development, he seeks to reveal certain overlooked capacities of computational design; he finds no disharmony between the rational and whimsical, the analytical and uncanny, the lucid and bizarre. His work cuts across media, and is expressed through a combination of visual, formal, and spatial material. His creative work at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and Environmental Design has been exhibited at the NeurIPS workshop on Machine Learning for Creativity and design in 2017 and 2018, and has been published in Towards Data Science. In his academic and scholarly work, he seeks to illuminate the dynamic relationship between the creative practice of design and computational design methods, thereby enabling a more inventive, informed, responsive, and responsible practice of architecture. He is the author of a number of works of software design tools, and has published widely on the subject of design and computation. He is the author of “Geometric Computation: Foundations for Design”, a foundational text that demystifies computational geometry for an audience of architecture students and design professionals. He has been the recipient of a number of research grants and fellowships; he was an IDEA fellow at Autodesk in 2014, and a Hellman Fellow in 2012. In a previous life as a professional architect, Kyle worked with and consulted for a number of design firms, including Skidmore Owings and Merrill, Acconci Studio, Kohn Petersen Fox Associates, Howler/Yoon, Diller Scofidio Renfro, and TEN Arquitectos.

Amanda Wasielewski is an artist and researcher. She is Associate Senior Lecturer of Digital Humanities and Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of ALM (Archives, Libraries, Museums) at Uppsala University in Sweden. Her research and academic work focuses on the use of artificial intelligence tools to study and create art and images. Wasielewski is the author of three monographs including Computational Formalism: Art History and Machine Learning (MIT Press, 2023), she is co-editor of the recent volume Critical Digital Art History: Interface and Data Politics in the Post-Digital Era (Intellect, 2024). Her fourth monograph, Digital Photography After AI is forthcoming.