Karl Chu
Professor, Pratt Institute
Karl S. Chu is principal of the architectural studio METAXY.He is the Director of the Institute for Genetic Architecture at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University, New York, where he teaches advanced architectural studios.He is a co-director of the Biodigital Architecture Program at ESARQ, Universitat Internacional de Catalunya, Barcelona.He teaches at the School of Architecture, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn. He is involved in the research and development of genetic architecture as well as theoretical and philosophical inquiry into the ontology of genetic systems.He has taught, lectured, published and exhibited internationally.Currently, he is working on three books: Toward Genetic Architecture (student works from the GSAPP), Planetary Automata, and a theoretical inquiry titled Ontology of Genetic Architecture.
Evan Douglis
Dean, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Recently appointed Dean at RPI, Evan Douglis is the principal of Evan Douglis Studio; an internationally renowned architecture and interdisciplinary design firm committed to innovative and contemporary design. The firm's unique cutting edge research into computer aided digital design and fabrication technology, new materials and multi-media installations as applied to a range of diverse gallery installations, commercial projects and more recently a new generation of building components has elicited international acclaim.
Antoine Picon
Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology, Harvard Graduate School of Design
Co-Director of Doctoral Programs (PhD & DDes)
Antoine Picon is professor of the History of Architecture and Technology at Harvard Graduate School of Design. He has published extensively on the history of the relations between architecture, urbanism, science and technology. He is among other books the author of French Architects and Engineers in the Age of Enlightenment (1988), Les Saint-Simoniens: Raison, Imaginaire et Utopie (2002) that explore the changing nature of these relations during the transition from the Old Regime to the industrial era. He is in a similar way interested by the changes happening today in relation with the emergence of digital culture. He has published two essays on that theme: La Ville Territoire des Cyborgs (1998), Digital Culture in Architecture (2009).
George L. Legendre
Design Critic, Harvard Graduate School of Design and Architect
George L. Legendre is a partner at IJP, a London-based practice exploring the natural intersection between space, mathematics, and computation. IJP completed the 300-meter-long Henderson Waves, the highest pedestrian bridge in Southeast-Asia. The influential UK weekly Building Design recently elected IJP as one of the top 5 practices in Britain led by principals under the age of 40. Its work has been shown and published worldwide, most recently as the cover feature of AA Files 57, Icon Magazine, Perspective +, and Mondo Arc. Legendre graduated from the GSD in 1994 and joined its faculty from 1995 to 1999. Prior to founding IJP, he was also visiting Professor at the ETH Zurich, Princeton University (2003-5), and the AA School of Architecture, London, where he served as Unit Master of Diploma Unit 5 (2002-2008). A regularly published essayist, he has written IJP:The Book of Surfaces (2003), Bodyline: the End of our Meta-Mechanical Body (2006), and a critical essay in Mathematical Form: John Pickering and the Architecture of the Inversion Principle (2006). He is currently guest-editing a special issue of AD magazine on the Mathematics of Sensible Things (2011). His next book, The Pasta Book, will come out next year.
Georges Teyssot
Professor of Architectural History and Theory, Laval University, Quebec City, QC, CA
Born (1946) in Paris, Georges Teyssot is an architect and a scholar. He has taught history and theory at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura of Venice (I.U.A.V.) in Italy, at Princeton University's School of Architecture (NJ, USA), where he was Director of the Ph.D. program in architecture (1994-2000), and at the Department of Architecture of the ETH (Zurich, CH). Presently, he is Professor at Laval University's School of Architecture in Quebec (QC, Canada). He has published a volume on Interior Landscapes (New York, Rizzoli, 1988). He has directed a collective volume, with Monique Mosser, entitled The Architecture of Western Gardens (Milan, Electa, 1991; now, Thames and Hudson, 2000, and Flammarion, 2002). He has written the introduction to the volume of Diller + Scofidio, Flesh: Architectural Probes (New York, 1995). More recently, he was the curator with Diller + Scofidio of an exhibition on The American Lawn. Surface of Everyday Life, at the Canadian Center for Architecture (Montreal, 1998). Lately, his research and his teaching discuss the invention of spatial, architectural and technological devices that have allowed for the creation of habitations in Western industrial and post-industrial societies from 1830 to 2009, seeking to draw at a topo-analysis of micro-spaces.