The DSD provides a Platform for the exploration of interconnected frameworks of knowledge, detailed problem analysis, and technical methodologies, both within the Netherlands and in collaboration with other excellent institutions. As such, at its best moments, the DSD is a laboratory for emerging developments, free experiments, and generative approaches. Any attempt that is yet to be discovered is bound not always to succeed. Nevertheless, the most important goal is indeed the doing: how to develop new tools to disentangle the problem, how to come to grips with new methods, and how to do critical architectural theory in the advent of “global capitalism”. Yet what remains the common ground is, indeed, a commitment to advance scholarship, a practice that engages (whether tectonic or theoretical), and shared themes worthy of sustained research. This impulse was present in the original vision of the Delft School of Design, it remains present today.
The PhD Platform consist or a variety of venues functioning in various manners. The platform events are divided into colloquia, lectures, and workshops. Most of these events are open to the public. They are developed under the FUTURE CITIES Research Portfolio themes and open to all PhD candidates a the Faculty of Architecture as well as to DSD Master students.
DSD Platform programs currently conceived specifically for the DSD PhD program are:
Trans_Thinking the City: Practices and Perspectives
Colloquia Series
Organized by D. Hauptmann and guests
As the prefix "trans" indicates that which is at once between, across, and even beyond individual disciplines. Transdisciplinarity (a term introduced in 1970 by Jean Piaget) aims at an understanding of the present world. Transdisciplinary discourse attempts to bridge the sciences and humanities, it thinks within and between art, technology, science and philosophy. According to Basarab Nicolescu transdisciplinarity can be outlined with three postulates: the existence of levels of Reality, the logic of the included middle, and complexity.
Bruno Latour, in his now much cited paper ‘Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern’ (2004), puts forward a criticism of the sciences, leveled at two fronts: one, the dangers of sciences that seek certainties in the construction of facts - ‘disguised as bad ideological biases!’; and two the tendency within scientific thinking to exaggerate its retort to linguistically based arguments perceived as reveling in the ambiguities of ‘interpretation’. Latour calls for a shift from ‘matters of fact to matters of concern’, in this he refers to William James. Here citing James, ‘… the critical mind, if it is to renew itself and be relevant again, is to be found in the cultivation of a stubbornly realist attitude’. In Latour’s paper, ‘matters of fact’ have not been abandoned, they have simply shifted away from their presupposed relation to ‘reality’, in other words, away from the Kantian givens in experience. The argument here, put simply, rest on the assertion that the examination of details, no matter how numerous or complex, will never plausibly lead to ‘social explanations’. In short, the relation of study to object is in need of radical reassessment. This series will bring together specialist from many fields (economy, geography, sociology, neuroscience, philosophy, the arts, architecture and urbanism) to interrogate both the content and the methods of research within so called empirical and speculative sciences and philosophy.
The Trans_Thinking the City series will consist of two, 2-day colloquia, the series is planned to continue in 2009.
Spring & Autumn 2009
Trans_Thinking IV: Urban Polycentricity and Complexity: the Future of Urbanization
Spring 2009 (dates to be announced)
Organized by the DSD, Deborah Hauptmann; co-organized with Stephen Read, Department of Urbanism, Faculty of Architecture, TU Delft.
(information forthcoming)
Trans_Thinking III: Spatial Economy _ Urban Geography: Forecasting Future Cities
Autumn 2009 (dates to be announced)
Organized by the DSD, Deborah Hauptmann; co-organized with Ronald Wall, Applied Economics, Erasmus University, specializing in Spatial Economics
(information forthcoming)
Autumn 2008:
Trans_Thinking I: “Architecture & The Mind: the bio-politics of the mental”
October, 2008 (dates to be announced)
Organized by the Delft School of Design, Deborah Hauptmann; co-organized by Warren Neidich, Visiting Artist, Center for Cognition, Computation and Culture, Goldsmiths College, London
Trans_Thinking II: “Geo-Politics and the City:
Haeceity Roundtable: Architecture as a Spatial Critique of the Political
November 2008 (dates to be announced)
Organized by the Delft School of Design, Deborah Hauptmann; co-organized by Daniel Pavlovits of Haeccity Inc. www.haeceityinc.com
The Future of the Image
Lecture Series
Autumn 2009 – Spring 2010
Organized by D. Hauptmann, Patrick Healy
The ‘Future of the Image’ series invites renowned scholars and practitioners in various fields will addresses issues of drawing, media and image production within Architecture, Urbanism, Art and Film; and, most importantly, the impact images have on culture and the way in which they are utilized to economic and political ends. Forty years ago, image culture was vilified by renegade artists-activist Guy Debord as emblematic of ‘the society of the spectacle’; thirty years ago, the apocalyptical sociologist Jean Baudrillard described a situation in which reality had been superseded by the simulation of reality, the simulacra. In the years which have elapsed, image culture subsisted despite such reservations and dark warnings. It is currently embedded throughout culture, evolving in unexpected manners as a result of computing and the wide availability of digital imaging instruments such as diverse digital cameras, 3D modeling software, image treatment software and so on. The 'Future of the Image' would thus be a means of inspecting the current state of affairs of image culture as a means of forward looking.
In addition to Architects, Urbanist, Artist and Film makers, invited lecturers will also represent such disciplines as philosophy, literary and media studies and history. It is the view of this series that not only does advanced research in Architecture and Urbanism benefit from multi disciplinary research; but that we might also offer a platform for discourse whereby intellectuals form outside disciplines might find an in-road to ‘Architecture thinking’ as well.
Architecture_Thinking Workshops
Organized by Arie Graafland & Deborah Hauptmann
The Architecture_Thinking workshop series provides for internationally renowned scholars to hold intensive workshop/seminars at the TU Delft. The general aim of the series is to invite professors to discuss their current research, as well as to launch debates on topics found pressing within research in their respective fields. In previous years K. Michael Hays of Harvard University and Michael Speaks of Univ. of Kentucky have been invited to hold similarly formatted extended sessions.
K Michael Hays – Oblique Approaches to the Virtual: Buckminster Fuller’s Geo-Logic
2-day workshop
September 16 & 17, 2008
Though it became famous as the most stable structure available, Fuller’s geodesics must be understood first as a system based on distances and movements, his principal model for an “omnidirectional” process of growth and change. It can also be a dome, but it is more truly a cosmic machine, plugged into and traversed by the forces of the universe. A new generation of architects who rediscover Fuller will be inspired not by self-conscious reflexivity, spatial invention, or radical cultural critique, but by his modeling of a globalized system of contingency and structure, organization and change, temporary stability and constant renewal.
M. Christine Boyer - Talks on the City: filming, writing, mapping, networking, crossing, remembering
1 week workshop
October 20 – 24, 2008
Filming, Writing, Mapping, Networking, Crossing, Remembering the City utilize the present continuous tense. They are the subject to be explored using the words and theories of four architects: Le Corbusier, Alison and Peter Smithson, and Rem Koolhaas. Verbs represent both process and relationship, allowing for displacement and transmission across time. In this case, it concerns an encounter with the city, full of tensions and breaks, revisions and voids as images of thought are transmitted from one generation of architects to another.
Views on Mapping
Lecture Series
Autumn 2008 | Spring 2009
Organized by Arie Graafland & Heidi Sohn
The aim of these lectures is to look into contemporary mega-cities and the problematic that surround their ‘mapping’. More than mapping techniques alone, the different lectures focus on the impact of a series of architectural and urban design interventions and projects, as well as of specific theoretically driven inquiries on our present-day views and perspectives of complex urban environments. The leading motivation behind these lectures is to slowly begin unraveling some of the present-day discussions on whether the spatial disciplines are effectively ‘beyond mapping’, or if, on the contrary, the mapping practice is more necessary than ever to address and comprehend –at least partially- some of the poignant urban problems and phenomena that are emerging in mega-cities in ‘underdeveloped’ or ‘developing’ regions across the world.
Note: This lecture series links directly to the DSD_future cities_Research Portfolio ‘Mapping Urban Complexity: Explorations into the Agency of Mapping’ project.
Architectural Engineering: |The Designer as Tool Builder, Performance, Geometry and Materials
Autumn 2007 | Spring 2008
Organized by Bige Tunçer or the DSD in collaboration with Professor Ulrich Knaack and Associate Professor Andrew Bogart of the Faculty of Architecture, TU Delft.
