HEXAGRAM Distinguished Speaker Series presents: Philip Beesley
“Condensing and Diffusing Architecture”
May 7th, 6:00pm, Concordia Hexagram Black Box.
This event will be open to the public.
Hexagram and The Topological Media Lab is thrilled to announce Philip Beesley as our distinguished speaker for the P.A.R.E. residency. Mr. Beesley is a world-renowned installation artist and architect whose practice and research blurs the lines between nature, architecture, technology, and sculpture. Mr. Beesley is a professor at the University of Waterloo, School of Architecture, the founder of the Philip Beesley Architect Inc. and Living Architecture Systems Group.
Buildings can move from classical ideas of a static world of closed boundaries toward the expanded physiology and dynamic form of a metabolism. Instead of valuing resistance and closure, design for thermal exchange could result in new form-languages based on maximum interaction. Architecture could be founded on adaptation and uncertainty where acquiring and shedding heat play in uneven cycles. The densely layered forms of a jungle are often made of diffusive, deeply interwoven materials that expand and interact with their surroundings. The kind of diffusive forms seen in reticulated snowflakes and the microscopic manifolds of mitochondria have a common form-language of radical exfoliation. Writ large, these forms speak of involvement with the world.These kinds of forms offer delicacy, resonance and resilience.
Exploring these themes, Philip Beesley will present recent work by the Living Architecture Systems group from Waterloo. The collective combines the crafts of lightweight textile structures, dense arrays of distributed computer controls with machine learning, and early systems of artificial-life chemistry. New architectural installations within the collaboration feature dense reticulated grottos with breathing, reactive, near-living qualities. Thin layers of voided hovering filters are tuned for delicate kinetic and chemical responses taking the form of expanded physiologies, sharing space with viewers.
http://www.philipbeesleyarchitect.com/
Mr. Beesley’s participation in the P.A.R.E event has been supported by Concordia Hexagram’s distinguished speakers series
photo credit: PBAI
