This lecture by Ludger Hovestadt explores how  the abstract concept of a point releases different potentials to be realized in different technological paradigms. It gives an introduction to what it can allow for first in a pre-analytical, geometrical paradigm, then in an analytical, mechanical paradigm, and closes with an outlook and a first attempt to characterize the story of the point within the more recent paradigm of electronic technologies and its networks.

Listen to the lecture here:

MAS10_1M4_hovestadt_01 part1

MAS10_1M4_hovestadt_02 part2

MAS10_1M4_hovestadt_03part3

slides:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Rhizome pdf

Deleuze and Guattari – A Thousand Plateaus pdf

Do we have enough energy for everyone? Of course not: we have more than enough.

More than enough to cover all our current needs, more than enough to cater for expanding populations, growing economies and rising standards of living, across the globe. We have so much energy that, once weʼve sorted out the logistics of distributing it, we wonʼt know what to do with it all. And we wonʼt need to, either: it will just be there. As a matter of course.

We have, on planet earth, an abundance of energy. True, our resources here are finite and some of them are now getting scarce. And there is a limit, it seems, to what the planet and its atmosphere can take in terms of factors that alter their finely tuned balance. But in actual fact, resources are not the issue. And if it is the case that our carbon dioxide emissions, for example, are causing climate change, then an end to this is also on the cards. We can, with technology that is available today, solve all our energy problems for generations to come, and take care of the CO2 situation, quite in passing.

There is a world in which the power is always on. Where energy, instead of being owned and controlled by a few, is owned by nobody, harvested by many and controlled by everybody, because everybody has an active say in it. Energy that doesnʼt pollute the planet, that doesnʼt heat up the atmosphere and thatʼs not going to run out if we add a few billion of us people to the planet. And itʼs not a world that exists in our wildest dreams, itʼs a world we have right at our fingertips: there is room, there is water, there is food and there is power for everybody. We can now, at the beginning of the 21st Century, take a conceptual leap forward and put ourselves onto a different footing altogether: we can embrace abundance.

The Abundance Story pdf a radical new perspective on our energy ‘situation’

slides: M zero energy pdf

Listen to the lecture here:

part1

part2

MAS10_0M9_energy3_M8k16b part3

part4

MAS10_0M9_energy5_M8k16b part5

Introductory lecture by Ludger Hovestadt on advanced CAAD, its potentials for application and its challenges for theory. (3h)

Listen to the lecture here:

MAS10_0M8_grid3_M8k16b part 1

part2

MAS10_0M8_grid3_M8k16b part3

slides: Mzero JDR pdf

A retrospective of the CAAD Chairs experimental and prototypical projects from 2000 to 2009, which clearly shows that we have only scratched the surface of digital technology’s potential for concrete applications in architecture. The related new way of thinking about architectural elements transcends the paradigms of grid-thinking, precision, and efficacy. It is the practical demonstration of a self-conception, which renders digital computation seminal as a basis for a new and productive way to negotiate the idea of architecture. The digitally mediated visibility of the becoming of architecture leads to the possibility of a non-predetermined yet still controllable diversity – one that integrates criteria and plans, processes and built architecture in a superordinate architectonic of continuous specification. Space for individual creativity emerges beyond the structure of the grid elicited by a generative force that tames the power of digital archives, instead of submitting to it.