EDWARD MITCHELL ARCHITECTS

Previous Next

ACSA 101 “New Constellations/ New Ecologies”

Ila Berman and Ed Mitchell

The 101st ACSA national conference was held in San Francisco this year. As last year’ s conference marked the 100th anniversary of the first program in architecture at MIT, this year’ s theme “ New Constellations/ New Ecologies” hosted by the California College of the Arts in San Francisco and co-chaired by its Director Ila Berman with Edward Mitchell of Yale University, projected new directions for education in the next century.

The conference advanced a set of architectural concepts in relation to six realms—matter, energy/ecology, form/space, technology, territory, and networks/populations—that have been undergoing radical transformations in our current culture, and reformulated them as the ‘ New Constellations / New Ecologies’ around which the conference was organized:

Waste(lands) + Material Economies

Energy circuits + Artificial Ecologies

Genetic Systems + Non-standard Modes of (Re)Production

Exchange Terminals + Interactive Technologies

Populations / Networks / Datascapes: From Cloud Culture to Informal Communities

These six broad themes of the paper sessions were structured to shift the general terms of architectural discourse and to provoke projection on how these concepts might be affecting the future of architectural practice and pedagogy.