COMPOSITIONAL PHYSICS

AND OTHER FORMS OF DISORDER

Rice University
Spring 2020

Anticipating the advent of the digital, transformation diagrams registered over a time sequence and volumes that seemed to surrender to acts of physical forces were some of the formal and compositional attributes of architecture projects of the early 1990s. More recently, following the first and second digital turns, the proliferation (and ease of access) of physics simulation engines has gained accelerated momentum in architecture and other peripheral disciplines (film, media studies, video game design, motion graphics, and internet art). 

At present, during this moment of digital reprieve in architecture, some emergent practices have returned to more de-constructed, dis-assembled, form-less aesthetics. The seduction of the ruin, incomplete geometries, unhappy wholes, non-hierarchical assemblies, and other mandates for faulty aesthetics have resurfaced with renewed energy. This symposium invites critics, theorists, and designers to argue, articulate, and think through projects of compositional physics in architecture in relationship to current cultural, technological, and pedagogical conditions.   

Curated by: Viola Ago / Wortham Fellow

Photography: Takudzwa Tapfuma / Rice Architecture