Acadia 2014 was presented this year at the USC School of Architecture in Los Angles from October 23-25. The term "Design Agency" was the cornerstone term of discourse through out the conference. It would be considered from different angles, including but not limited to: materiality, fabrication, and programming. The conference also considered the impact of external influencers, such as games and art, that have shaped our industry through their usage and invention of tools – the same tools that made ACADIA  possible. Keynote speakers such as Will Wright (Creator of The Sims, SimCity and Spore), Casey Reas (Co-Creator of Processing and Artist) and Zaha Hadid (Zaha Hadid Architects) provided touchstones throughout the conference's weekend. 

[Zaha Hadid's keynote]

The cross-pollination of Architecture with other disciplines has allowed for ACADIA to broaden its scope since its inception in the early 1980s, making the conference more inclusive. The ability to call upon a wide array of speakers, topics and paradigms only strengthens the power of such a conference. Individual presentations throughout each day culminated in group panels that would discuss the previous common threads of development. This allowed the show to both explore individual voices and force certain outliers to situate themselves in the larger scope of Architecture. Individual presentation were focused on recent works, literature or projects in process that would raise topics of discussion. Authorship and its role in agency was also brought up during all three days of panel discussions. 

Day One focused on Design Agency and Parametric Agency, with the conference focusing on computation exploration and invention. The world of the computer simulation was the medium of presentation and investigation; discovering the tools at hand, their possibilities and limits. Constant derailments and discoveries led to wild, tangential diversions – presenting multi-agent systems, executing endlessly diverse topics. From Claudia Otten's presentation (Everyone is an Architect) tackled user-empowerment in a world that had, until recently, not understood how to reach out to the user. Joshua Taron and Matthew Parker (Bounded Agency:Integrating Informed Multi-Agent Systems with Architectural Subtractions) played with limits, where self-imposed guides and restrictions allow for a discrete framework of evaluation in an otherwise boundless world. 

By allowing users direct access and or restrictions, the tools the presenters showed were able to see their tendencies, and inclinations exposed and thus apply control. Endlessness, iterations, and optimization were constant key terms being delivered. Every mystery of design seemed one line of code away from discovery.

[Casey Reas' keynote]

Day Two dealt with fabrication and materials, and culminated in a keynote lecture by Fab Lab creator and MIT professor Neil Gershenfeld. The Fab Lab program was started to explore how the exposure and access of information and its method of production and representation could benefit an under-served community at the ground level. Started as an experiment at MIT in a class rightfully titled “How to build almost anything”, the Lab has turned into a global academic outreach effort, to expose all levels of society to technological advances and reinvest in public education.

The static nature of architecture was constantly being challenged from presentation to presentation through out the day. Architecture could change, learn and adapt depending on its needs. A presentation by Skylar Tibbits and his "4D printing" showed how materials, not computers, are programmed, such that a surface can turn into a box by itself when told. No mechanical parts anywhere to be found yet objects move, they fold, they walk and they assemble themselves. Kory Bieg (Caret 6 and the Digital Revival of Gothic Vaults) elaborated on Tibbits' concepts, enabling a seemingly flat material to become a deep three-dimensional pattern, creating both new spatial qualities and enhanced structural stability. 

Friday night was topped off by a lecture by Zaha Hadid. Her presentation, curated as a timeline of the last decades of her work was a clear pleasure to view. From the early Malevich drawings of her thesis to current day large scale projects such as The Azerbaijan Cultural Centre and the Galaxy Soho shopping centre, everything was on display and worked through as a connection to the last. Zaha was also presented with the first Lifetime achievement award by the Acadia 2014 president, Michael Fox.

[Zaha Hadid and Patrik Schumacher at Hadid's keynote]

Day Three brought thoughts on mixture and coherence in the world of Architecture. The two previous days' work were being pulled together for a test fitting. Projects focused on the ephemeral and senses were discussed. Conversations around "the singularity", as noted by Ray Kurzweil, were constantly brought up and argued in relation to their current application in the digital’s evolution. There was a constant provocation that architecture must understand its role in the upcoming revolution of interaction and connection between the digital and analogue world or be left to the wayside, obsolete. These two realities (Virtual and Real) are being blurred into a world where the flow between the two has become unnoticeable and irreversible.

Teng Teng showed us Inspire, a project based on real world manipulation and modeling through hand gestures. Erasing the need of additional input devices such as mice, keyboards, etc., allowing the user to directly interact with the objects and control the work as they would in the analogue world. Guvenc Ozel showed us the duality in what the digital can see and interpret, and what our eyes cannot, explaining how the two are no longer dependent nor independent of each other. Virtual reality, robotic adoption, and robotic training were topics being pulled through the day as the next level of work in the field.

[Guvenc Ozel's presentation]

This clarity in user-interaction allowed for a sense of play to become apparent. The user feels in control of the outcome. With goals in minds it became easier to see where work was needed. This immediate change in the player's role allowed for discovery to happen in small intervals, measurable and quantifiable against the previous.

Acadia 2014 ended with a spectacular closing keynote by Casey Reas, an artist able to explore the realm of art through software. As co-creator of Processing, an open-source programming language for the arts,  Casey directly contributes to the ideas that brought Acadia to being. The programming or instructions to his processes are expressed in different media including his lectures, animations and printed installations or artworks. In a world where computation is about speed and iterations, Casey explores the slowness, ephemeral quality of the method. Some works lasting months on end, each step presenting a new and equally provocative visual.

[Casey Reas' presentation]

We tend to see architecture in parts, in pieces as it sprouted out throughout the world. Acadia allows us to sneak peeks into these up and coming provocations that will soon be in the mainstream. It allowed us to start to think about consequences, steps and reactions. Acadia 2014 was a fantastic showcase of Architecture’s cutting edge computational expertise and explorations.

“We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.” – Marshall McLuhan