I am attending the ACADIA conference in Chicago this week and am impressed by the both the city and the innovative projects presented there. ACADIA, the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture has held a conference in a different city and with a different theme each year for the past 29 years. This year’s theme was appropriately “Building a Better Tomorrow” and the projects demonstrate how hardware, software and middleware technologies can transform the way buildings perform, act and operate.

One thing that really stood out to me about the work was a nearly ubiquitous bottom-up approach where the designer started with the material, technology or unity, developed a mock-up to explore its potential, subjected it to various experiments and then made adjustments or second and third versions based on their findings in an iterative design process. This approach seems like a natural one for scientists, but also signifies a return to craft that has profound implications on both the way architecture is taught in schools and the relationship between architects and fabricators in practice. Ultimately, the prospect of architects actually making things is exciting. Well at it’s least more exciting than drawing lines on an Autocad screen. But this bottom up approach also seems like a much more fluid way to achieve innovation and makes me wonder if architects haven’t been swimming against the current for the past couple of decades.

I will showcase some of the innovative projects from ACADIA 09 in the next few posts so stay tuned…