Dr Daniel Cardoso Lloch (assistant Professor at the Carnegie Mellon University, School of Architecture, a Martin Centre Visiting Scholar for 2016)
The lecture will focus on the author’s recent book “Builders of the Vision: Software and the Imagination of Design” a new look at the history of Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and Numerical Control tracing links between postwar research and contemporary architectural discourses, practices and shapes. Drawing from primary archival and ethnographic sources, it will identify the crucial ideas shaping "digital design" since the first numerical control and CAD systems were developed under military contracts at MIT between 1949 and 1970: the cybernetic theorization of design as a human-machine endeavor; the vision of computers as "perfect slaves" taking care of the drudgery of physical labor; the techno-social utopias of computers as vehicles of democracy and social change; the entrepreneurial urge towards design and construction integration; and the managerial ideologies enabling today’s transnational geographies of practice.
Our speaker will be Dr. Daniel Cardoso Llach, who is an assistant Professor at the Carnegie Mellon University, School of Architecture, a Martin Centre Visiting Scholar for 2016. Daniel is also an architect, design scholar and researcher interested in issues of computing in design and architecture, interdisciplinary creativity, human-machine interaction and technological culture. He teaches architecture in the School of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University, where he chairs the Master of Science in Computational Design. His work explores problems ranging from social and cultural aspects of computing in design, the politics of representation and participation in software, and new methods for using data to visualize design as a socio-technical phenomenon. His recent research includes a book on the cultural history of Computer-Aided Design and numerically controlled machinery that examines how postwar technological projects shaped conceptions of design informing current architectural practices: Builders of the Vision: Software and the Imagination of Design [1] (Routledge, 2015). Daniel has lectured extensively and conducted numerous workshops on computational design in universities in the US, Latin America and Asia including Harvard, Cornell and MIT. He has published articles and essays in AD, Design Issues, Thresholds, and IJAC among others. He has co-chaired the editorial board of SIGRADI, and regularly serves in the scientific committee of conferences and journals including IJAC, CAADRIA and SIGGRAPH. Daniel holds a Masters of Science and a Ph.D. in Architecture: Design and Computation from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and a B. Arch from Universidad de los Andes. He has consulted as a computational design specialist for Gehry Technologies and Kohn Pedersen Fox, among others, and practiced as an independent licensed architect and media designer in his native Bogotá.