Converation Series F2013
INVESTIGATING INDETERMINACY
TECHNICALLY SPEAKING
10/18 - Environments // 6:00PM School of Architecture North Gallery
Forrest Meggers:
Forrest Meggers came to the School in 2013 from the National University of Singapore and the Singapore-ETH Centre’s Future Cities Laboratory. His fields of knowledge include building systems design and integration; sustainable systems; renewable energy; optimization of energy systems; exergy analysis; geothermal; seasonal energy storage; low temp hybrid solar; building materials; thermodynamics and heat transfer; and heat pumps. He was previously Assistant Professor in the School of Design and Environment, Department of Architecture at the NUS. He went to Singapore as a Senior Researcher to develop new low exergy building systems for the tropics where as Module Coordinator he led the research of 5 PhD students and built and transported a novel building laboratory, BubbleZERO from Zurich to Singapore. Previously in Zurich, Switzerland he worked as a Researcher for the Building Systems Group at the ETH Zurich and directed research on sustainable systems for the president of the ETH Board. Originally a native of Iowa, Forrest worked on many sustainability projects at the University of Iowa, and worked with Jim Hansen, renowned climatologist at Colombia University and director of NASA GISS, as a Researcher on US Building Stock CO2 emissions. His recent publications include "Reduce CO2," and "EOL, COP, PVT, TABS, and LowEx," In Re-inventing Construction. (Ruby Press, Berlin 2010); “The Reference Environment: Utilizing Exergy and Anergy for Buildings,” International Journal of Exergy. 11(4) 2012; “An Innovative Use of Renewable Ground Heat for Insulation in Low Exergy Building Systems,” Energies 2012, 5(8); “Low exergy building system implementation,” Energy, 2012 41(1); and over 20 conference papers. Meggers presented the keynote address “The Hidden Potential: through green building to sustainable nation” at the launch of the Green Building Council Indonesia in Jakarta, and has served on several committees for the USGBC.
John May:
John May is Visiting Assistant Professor in the department of architecture at MIT. He holds a Master's degree in Architecture from Harvard, and a Ph.D in Geography and Environmental Studies from UCLA. May previously taught design studios and advanced seminars at UCLA, SCI-Arc, and the University of Toronto, and recently served as a National Endowment for the Humanities Visiting Professor in Architecture at Rice University.
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This lecture series critically examines how growing technological savvy interacts with emerging models of professional indiscipline. Conversations of digital technique will ground experimental forays, disciplinary fetishes, and revisited falsestarts within the economic forces of practice. This body of critical discussion will seek to reboot a theory of the digital. Patching the digital/ theoretical divide entails updating the technical jargon of computation with broader issues of cultural value and historical continuity; restoring the capacity of computation to run as a robust, forwardlooking framework for conceptual practice.
// Forging Fabrication
