Visiting Lecture | Andrew Witt: Formulating Form

Tuesday, October 24, 2023, 6:30 - 8:30pm

Add to Calendar

Image
Andrew Witt

This event will be conducted in-person in room 315F and through Zoom. 

For Zoom attendance, please register in advance here.

Since the Renaissance, and particularly since the advent of computation, mathematized form has served as a unique medium through which to see, measure, draw, and materialize architecture. Today, machine vision and artificial intelligence are reconfiguring the relationship between mathematical form and everything from ecology to history. Certain Measures is a studio that takes mathematics, machine learning, and AI as fundamental media to design a shared world in which humans, machines, and nature interact through data. Through a series of projects ranging from radical machine learning enabled material reuse to global planetary monitoring systems for the year 2070, Witt will share how intersecting practices of vision, computation, fiction, data, and architecture can multiply the possibilities of form and imagine a more verdant tomorrow.

Andrew Witt is an Associate Professor in Practice at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, teaching and researching on the relationship of geometry, data, AI, and machines to architecture, design, and culture. Trained in both architecture and mathematics, he has a particular interest in a technically synthetic and logically rigorous approach to form. He is also co-founder, with Tobias Nolte, of Certain Measures, a Boston/Berlin-based studio that combines design and data for systemic and scalable approaches to spatial problems. The work of Certain Measures is in the permanent collection of the Centre Pompidou, and has been exhibited at the Pompidou, the Barbican Centre, the Museum of the Future, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, among others.

The in-person event is open to current Cooper Union Students, Faculty, and Staff only. The Public may attend this event through Zoom.

Located at 7 East 7th Street, between Third and Fourth Avenues

  • Founded by inventor, industrialist and philanthropist Peter Cooper in 1859, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art offers education in art, architecture and engineering, as well as courses in the humanities and social sciences.

  • “My feelings, my desires, my hopes, embrace humanity throughout the world,” Peter Cooper proclaimed in a speech in 1853. He looked forward to a time when, “knowledge shall cover the earth as waters cover the great deep.”

  • From its beginnings, Cooper Union was a unique institution, dedicated to founder Peter Cooper's proposition that education is the key not only to personal prosperity but to civic virtue and harmony.

  • Peter Cooper wanted his graduates to acquire the technical mastery and entrepreneurial skills, enrich their intellects and spark their creativity, and develop a sense of social justice that would translate into action.