The Department of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design is pleased to announce that it will host the 2020 annual Association for Computer-Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA) conference. The conference will take place on October 29-31, 2020 following a three-day series of experimental workshops on October 26-28. The event will feature keynotes by recognized leaders in the field, talks by recipients of ACADIA’s annual awards program, exhibitions of both curated and peer-reviewed work, and peer-reviewed paper and project presentations of cutting-edge research showcasing the innovative application of computational practices in architecture and design.

The conference theme, “Hybrids & Haecceities,” asks how technology enables, reflects, and challenges established disciplinary boundaries and design practices. Haecceities describes the discrete qualities or properties of objects that define them as unique, while Hybrids are entities with characteristics enhanced by the process of combining two or more elements with different properties. The conference invites contributions on how hybrids & haecceities pose new ideas and approaches to design--be they computational, material, aesthetic, robotic, genetic, biological, environmental, or theoretical.

The conference leadership includes a team of dynamic Penn faculty from the Department of Architecture under the leadership of Miller Professor and Chair Winka Dubbeldam. Serving as co-chairs are: Masoud Akbarzadeh, assistant professor of architecture and director of the Polyhedral Structures Lab; Dorit Aviv, assistant professor of architecture; Hina Jamelle, senior lecturer and director of urban housing in the Department of Architecture; Robert Stuart-Smith, assistant professor of architecture, director of the new MSD-RAS program, and director of the Autonomous Manufacturing Lab.

The call for papers will be announced in January 2020, with paper and project submissions due in May. For more info, see the ACADIA 2020 conference website: http://2020.acadia.org/