'Real Virtuality': Gilles Retsin and Mario Carpo in conversation
Invisible Landscapes
Wednesday 27 March 2019 7 - 8pm
The Architecture Studio, The Dorfman Senate Rooms, Burlington Gardens, Royal Academy of Arts
Free, no booking required
Invisible Landscapes
Join Gilles Retsin and Mario Carpo as they discuss the political and social implications of the digital for how we build and design our cities.
After two decades of experimentation with the digital, the prevalent paradigm of formal continuity is being revised and questioned by an emerging generation of architects and theorists. While the world struggles with a global housing crisis and the impact of accelerated automation on labour, digital designers’ narrow focus on style and continuous differentiation seems increasingly out of touch.
On the occasion of the upcoming AD issue titled Discrete, guest-edited by Gilles Retsin, the architect will join academic Mario Carpo in conversation to discuss the current issues around digital and post-digital, automation and architecture, building upon the argument that today the digital can’t be understood anymore as separate from our everyday reality.
This conversation will be held in the Architecture Studio within the framework of Real Virtuality, a new spatial installation created by Gilles Retsin Architecture and commissioned by the Royal Academy of Arts as part of Invisible Landscapes: Imagination (Act III).
Speakers:
Mario Carpo is the Reyner Banham Professor of Architectural Theory and History at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. Carpo’s publications include The Second Digital Turn: Design Beyond Intelligence (2017), The Digital Turn in Architecture 1992-2012 (2012), The Alphabet and the Algorithm, a history of digital design theory (2011) and Architecture in the Age of Printing (2001).
Gilles Retsin is a London-based architect and designer. His work is part of the Centre Pompidou collection, and has been exhibited at the New York’s Museum of Art and Design, the Vitra Design Museum and currently at the Royal Academy of Arts. He is Programme Director of the B.Pro Architectural Design (AD) at the Bartlett School in London.