Hong Kong Ground and The South America Project: Infrastructure and Protected Areas in the Peruvian Amazon were presented Saturday at the 11th annual SmartGeometry Conference. "Smart Geometry" is a leading industry conference on digital design. Smart Geometry has in previous iterations dealt primarily with cutting-edge digital work at the architectural scale. This year is the first time topics in urban spatial analyses are figuring prominently in the mix of conference workshops and speakers, which include those from MIT's SENSEable City Lab and ETH's Future Cities Laboratory. A week-long workshop of 10 teams culminated in an exhibition at CUHK's AIT Building, with installations modeling urban data, networks, and dense building typologies.
Abstract for Ashley's talk:
A reliance on lines, curves and the calculus of turn of the century architectural exploration has stunted the design disciplines' potential to react critically to discontinuous and fragmented scenarios. This talk repositions Geographic Information Systems as a creative medium deep within the design process, enabling designers greater control over complex, highly articulate surfaces, data and territories. Two contextually divergent projects, one visualizing conservation sciences in the Amazon and the other modeling the highly discontinuous ground surfaces of urban Hong Kong, will field GIS beyond geographic analysis and organization towards a parametric and creative medium in which to operate where data is scarce. Both projects work at what is defined as "near-regional" resolutions, suggesting that the greatest difficulty, both technically and politically, in understanding these territories exists in the zone between local, perceptible human-scale interaction and the coarse grain of remotely sensed information and models. The talk will oscillate among conceptually compelling examples and the important yet highly technical means that proof them.
Posted by: Ashley Scott Kelly (ashleyscottkelly.com)