Marjan Colletti Livres

This title of AD heralds a new era of exuberance in digital design. Having overcome the alienation and otherness of the cyber, having mastered the virtual qualities and protocols of the parametric, having achieved the intricacy and elegance of the digital, and having fully embraced the potential of 3d computer software and cad/cam manufacturing technologies, it is now time for architects to show off! Conjure up the extravagance of furniture design, the abundance of cgi in Hollywood, the profuseness of bio-techno ornamentation or the lavishness of Middle-Eastern and Asian super-urbanism. Exuberance not only celebrates new Baroque theatricality, formal sophistication and digital virtuosity; it also debates a plethora of joyful and intelligent ways in which experimental architecture manages to cope with the contemporary turmoil in global politics, economics and ecology.

The hefty weight of responsibility – both in terms of economy and in particular ecology – which was recently put upon the discipline’s shoulders drastically challenges the conventions of architectural design. Architecture can no longer ignore nature; on the contrary: it must act as a prosthetic device for it towards the creation of an architecture 2.0 – a new kind of synthetic ecosystem where the natural domain and the artificial domain coexist. For twoandahalf years, the Unit Hochbau at the Institute for Experimental Architecture of the University of Innsbruck has operated under the umbrella theme ‘Meeting Nature Halfway’. The resulting research gathers a multitude of designbased, technology-based and environment-based perspectives on how architecture interfaces between digital/building technology and digital/natural environment.