This book gathers 14 voices from a diverse group of architects, designers, performing artists, film makers, media theorists, philosophers, mathematicians and programmers. By transversally crossing disciplinary boundaries, new and profound insights into contemporary thinking and creating architecture emerge. The book is at the forefront of the current contemplation on matter and its significance for and within architecture. The premise is that matter in posthuman times has to be rethought in the rich and multifaceted context of contemporary computational architecture, and in the systemic and ec ... More

This book gathers 14 voices from a diverse group of architects, designers, performing artists, film makers, media theorists, philosophers, mathematicians and programmers. By transversally crossing disciplinary boundaries, new and profound insights into contemporary thinking and creating architecture emerge. The book is at the forefront of the current contemplation on matter and its significance for and within architecture. The premise is that matter in posthuman times has to be rethought in the rich and multifaceted context of contemporary computational architecture, and in the systemic and ecological context of pervasive computer simulations. Combining the dynamism of materiality and the capacities of nonhuman machines towards prototyping spatiotemporal designs and constructs, leads to alternative conceptions of the human, of ethics, aesthetics and politics in this world yet-to-come. The reader, through the various approaches presented by the authors’ perspectives, will appreciate that creativity can come from allowing matter to take the lead in the feedback loop of the creative process towards a relevant outcome evaluated as such by a matter of concern actualised within the ecological milieu of design. The focus is on the authors’ speculative dimension in their multifaceted role of discussing materiality by recognising that a transdisciplinary mode is first and foremost a speculative praxis in our effort to trace materiality and its affects in creativity. The book is not interested in discussing technicalities and unidirectional approaches to materiality, and retreats from a historical linear timeline of enquiry whilst establishing a sectional mapping of materiality’s importance in the emergent future of architecture.