studies in architectural narratives and digital design / secuencia de talleres de arquitecturas y narrativas digitales

Mark Burry is Professor of Urban Futures at the University of Melbourne in the Faculty of Architecture Building and Planning. As consultant architect to the Temple Sagrada Família since 1979, Mark Burry has been a key member within the local design team based on site in Barcelona, untangling the mysteries of Gaudí’s compositional strategies for his greatest work, the implications of which are only now becoming fully apparent as they are resolved for building purposes. He has published internationally on broader issues of design, construction and the use of computers in design theory and practice.

The Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory at RMIT University opened in 2002 under then Director Prof Mark Burry. The laboratory focuses on design research and undergraduate and postgraduate teaching with associated advanced computer applications and the rapid prototyping of ideas.  The laboratory has a design-practice emphasis and acts as a creative think-tank accessible to both local and international practices, including ARUP in Melbourne and London, dECOi in Paris and Gehry Partners in Los Angeles.


Brian McGrath is Dean of the School of Constructed Environments, Parsons The New School for Design and the founder and principal of Urban-Interface, LLC, an urban design consultancy fusing expertise in architecture, ecology and social media. The firm combines new research in urban ecosystems and digital technologies to provide urban design models that engage a broad range of local participants in flexible, innovative approaches to urban densification and revitalization.

Cinemetrics: Architecture Drawing Today (2007) co-authored with Jean Gardner, brings architectural projection into the 21st century, the age of computer-generated modelling and animation. This illustrated guide introduces a new drawing system not at the outset of computer-generated drawing, but well within its course of development. Now we are ready to discover the essence and strength of drawing digitally. Computer-generated drawing has only recently become more than just an efficient two-dimensional drafting or rendered picture-making tool. It is being recognised as a new way of conceiving architecture multi-dimensionally in space, movement and time. Cinemetrics proposes that today’s digital architectural drawing is a way of working, thinking and being in the world, not merely a servo-mechanistic process of simulating objects and illusionary scenes in service of what has become standard building production.

Manhattan Timeformations, a digital project by architect Brian McGrath with designer Mark Watkins, maps Manhattan's skyscraper districts through time. The project uses computer models and interactive animations to depict the dynamic relationship between Manhattan's skyscrapers and other layers of urban information such as geologic formation, settlement patterns, landfill, transportation and communications infrastructure, zoning laws and real estate cycles.


Architectural Topologies: Visual Languages and Digital Applications.

Dr. Athanassios Economou is Associate Professor in the College of Architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. Economou teaching and research is in the areas of shape grammars, parametric design, computer aided design and discrete mathematics and design (combinatorics, symmetry, proportion). Dr. Economou teaches core and elective courses in the field of Design and Computation and a series of graduate and undergraduate architectural design studios on formal composition and rule-based architectural design.


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Manuel De Landa, based in New York since 1975, is a philosopher, media artist, programmer and software designer. After studying art in the 1970s, he became an independent filmmaker. In the 1980s, he focused on programing, writing computer software, and computer art. De Landa is currently Adjunct Professor at PennDesign and the Gilles Deleuze Chair of Contemporary Philosophy and Science at the European Graduate School (EGS). His publications include War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (1991), A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (1997), Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (2002), and A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (2006).

His book Philosophy and Simulation: The Emergence of Synthetic Reason (Continuum, 2011) is a philosophical overview of the rapidly growing field of computer simulations. His essay, 'Deleuze and the Use of the Genetic Algorithm in Architecture' (1992) presents a theoretical groundwork related to the use of the genetic model in digital design.


Evan Douglis is the principal of Evan Douglis Studio LLC; an internationally renowned interdisciplinary design firm. Recognized for his innovative approach to design Douglis’ awards include: a NYFA fellowship, a Design Vanguard profile by Architectural Record, an I.D. Magazine Honorable Mention, a FEIDAD Design Merit Award, two finalist nominations for the North American James Beard Foundation Restaurant Design Awards, a selected fellow in the EKWC European Ceramic Work Centre’s Brick Project Residency Program, an ACADIA Award for Emerging Digital Practice, a Presidential Citation from The Cooper Union AIA / LA Restaurant Design Award and more recently he was awarded the 2015 John Q. Hedjuk Award and selected by Design Intelligence as one of 30 Most Admired Educators in architectural education in 2015.

Douglis’ work has been included in various international publications including: Architecture Now 5, Sign as Surface, 10 x10_2, INDEX Architecture, The State of Architecture at the Beginning of the 21st Century, the ARCHILAB Exhibition Catalog: Naked City, Distinguishing Digital Architecture, the SAM catalog Re-Sampling Ornament, the AD issues; Protoarchitecture: Analogue and Digital Hybrids and Programming Cultures: Design, Science and Software, FURNISH: Furniture and Interior Design for the 21st Century and Digital Architecture Now: a Global Survey of Emerging Talent. His book Autogenic Structures was published by Taylor & Francis. He is currently the Dean of the School of Architecture at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY.