Aaron Sprecher

Associate Professor, Head of the Landscape Architecture Track 

The Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning, Technion

 

Senses, Sensors, Sentiment – Few Notes on the Post-Pandemic Landscape of Architecture

 

Landscape architecture expresses the unstable and dynamic conditions inherent to our environment. The perception of the environment as an ensemble of natural and artificial forces stems from the impact of information technologies that now penetrate the depth of all matters constituting our reality. With the global pandemic, this intensity of data screening and streaming has been coupled to a technological extensity that has blurred even more the limits between living and inert organisms, local and territorial regions, individual and societal desires. Along these two notions of technological intensity and extensity, we will consider the idea of potentiality as a design strategy for reconsidering the relation between our human communities and our global ecologies, being natural, artificial, or virtual. Three unique sensible technologies developed at our laboratory MTRL in the past year will provide the critical foundations for redefining this perception of the environment: senses, sensors, and sentiment for a post-pandemic era. 

 

Bio

Aaron Sprecher is Associate Professor and Chair of the Landscape Architecture Department at the Technion Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning. He directs the Material Topology Research Laboratory at the Faculty of Architecture. In parallel, he is co-founder and partner of the award-winning practice Open Source Architecture. This collaborative research group brings together international researchers in design, architecture, engineering, and media research. His research and design work focuses on the synergy between information technologies, computational languages, and digital fabrication systems, examining the way in which technology informs and generates innovative approaches to design processes. Besides his publications and exhibitions, he has lectured at many institutions, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harvard University, Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), and Rice University. Aaron Sprecher is co-editor of "Architecture in Formation—On the Nature of Information in Digital Architecture" (2013, London: Routledge/Taylor and Francis) and "Instabilities and Potentialities" (2019, London: Routledge/Taylor and Francis).