For the past year and a half, I have studied at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), and this experience has sparked and strengthened my interest in thinking about new media as tool for creating architecture. It has been a process that has led me to think about composition and systems in new ways. I’m interested in challenging the tradition in architecture of separating design and construction knowledge; and in exploring architectures that use energy in alternative ways, challenging our views on energy, design and sustainability.

Two years ago, when I applied to ITP, I was looking for a program that could provide me with different tools and methods to those offered by architectural schools. I was looking for new ways to express my creativity and to think about design programmatically. Surrounded by a fantastic group of creative technologists, I have witnessed the power of new media, and learned about the exciting possibilities that the emerging technologies have brought upon as. I believe that the separation between design and construction is anchored in the way architecture is taught today, and that we should break through the boundaries of such a belief, if we are to imagine the adaptive systems that the future demands.

There were instances in history, in which designer and fabricator meant one and the same. I believe that we are seeing the re-emergency of such tendencies in architecture: a new breed of master builders that feel as comfortable designing as using new media to fabricate; designers that can imagine and develop new ways of building matter. I want to become one of those master builders, investigating the potential of overlapping of digitally fabricated designs and objects, as a vehicle to thinking of full-scale design problems.

I am interested in exploring new methods for creating and developing industrial applications for building matter, relying for inspiration in nature and its systems. For example, self-assembly can become a process to developing new industrial tools: a process that can lead us to create new architectures and design methods. I like the idea of thinking about self-assembly as a system for building industrial processes, because it is ‘similar’ to how self-organization works in physical/biological systems. For my thesis at ITP, I am exploring the “shapes and rules” that allow the emergence of self-assembly in building systems, convinced that many industrial processes can result from its study. I believe that self-assembly can be one of many technologies that can help us bridge the gap between design and construction by radically transforming the ways we put things together and use energy.

[STILL WORKING]

I believe that self-assembly will be a process that as a process to develop a new generation of industrial tools. I believe that it is a process that can lead us to explore new design and construction methods for building matter, using energy in more creative ways. I will explore the “shapes and rules” that allow the emergence of self-assembly in building systems, convinced that many industrial methods can result from its study, and that it can help us to bridge the separation between design and construction by transforming the ways we put things together. [STILL WORKING]