MRes Architecture & Digital Theory Programme Directors: Professor Mario Carpo, Professor Frédéric Migayrou
The Bartlett School of Architecture 2016 Image: MArch AD, Wonderlab, RC1, White Rabbit ‘Alien Resolution’ 306
Led by Professors Frédéric Migayrou and Mario Carpo, the Masters by Research (MRes) Architecture & Digital Theory is dedicated to the theory, history and criticism of digital design and digital fabrication. This intensive 12-month programme provides a grounding in research for students who have either trained in the design professions, or have a background in digital technology or the digital humanities, and wish to further their understanding of digital innovation. In its inaugural years, the programme will focus on the challenge of complexity in computational design, and on its aesthetic, technological, economic and epistemological implications. Research topics currently under consideration include: agent-based conception; the new sciences of simulation, optimisation and form-finding; the transdisciplinary scalability of computational models; robotics and the engineering and modelisation of new materials and of variable property materials; the history of digital notations and the demise of notational processes in the current data-driven computational environment. Digital design and digital conception will also be considered from epistemological and historical perspectives, from cybernetics through to the most innovative experiments in various disciplines. This critical dimension, emerging from an exhaustive archaeology of these discourses, will be related to socio-political contexts at an international level, in order to redefine the mutations, status and efficiency of design in the digital world.