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Architecture: Patterns, Databases and the Giant Global Graph

A Seminar with Philippe Morel
Organized by the AA PhD Programme
Wednesday, February 19, 6.30 PM
Architectural Association London, 33 Bedford Square, First Floor

In 2007, Tim Berners-Lee coined the expression “Giant Global Graph” as a definition of web 3.0 based on the semantic linkages of human and machine-created data objects. 13 years later, architects must ask themselves what makes architecture different – or as we’ll show, entirely similar – from being mere subparts of such a Giant Global Graph. As current AI (basically pattern matching techniques) and massive computational power are able to produce in a second all the human-generated architecture that could ever be imagined, one needs to address the generation of architecture as machine-made knowledge graphs whose main parameters are patterns and data structures.

Philippe Morel is an architect and theorist, co-founder of EZCT Architecture & Design Research (2000) and initiator and founding CEO of the large-scale 3D-printing corporation XtreeE (2015). He is currently a visiting teaching fellow at UCL Bartlett and an Associate Professor at the École nationale supérieure d’architecture Paris-Malaquais, where he headed the Digital Knowledge department (co-founded with Pr. Girard). He was previously an invited Research Cluster and MArch Diploma Unit Master at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. Prior to this he taught at the Berlage Institute in the Netherlands (seminar and studio) and at the AA (HTS Seminar and AADRL Studio). His long-lasting interest in the elaboration of a theory of computational architecture is well expressed in his numerous essays, projects and lectures.

Image: Detail from Philippe Morel, Subpart of an Architecture