Prof. Thomas E. Mical from Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand will give another lecture for students and employees of the University of Silesia in Katowice, entitled “Architectural Intelligence and Multiple Ecologies”. The meeting, which will be held remotely, is organised as part of project entitled „Towards Innovative Education of the Future and Research Excellence: international cooperation project with Prof. Thomas Mical (Auckland University of Technology)”. The initiative has been co-funded by Metropolis GZM within the framework of Metropolitan Science and Assistance Support Fund for 2019–2022. The funding amount was PLN 21,007.
The broadcast will be available on the YouTube channel of the University of Silesia. The lecture will be given in English and followed by discussion involving Agnes Momirski and Takaharu Tezuki. The invited guests, from the perspective of their research and practice, will talk about the problems undertaken during Prof. Mical’s lecture together with the hosts.
Description of the lecture
This talk explores the intersections of ideas about intelligence using architectural examples in our contemporary age of automation and artificial intelligence. We will see how understanding the particulars of the organic nature of the historical architectural imagination is a form of disciplinary intelligence. Architectural intelligence is a synthesiser, pulling together codes, processes, and effects from a range of other arts, sciences, and professions. The push today for interdisciplinary is about the process of synthesising, assembling, and divergence. Architectural Intelligence compositionally combines elements other disciplines into new structures. Thus architectural intelligence, as detailed in the talk, includes physical structures but also structures of thought. Given new forms of automation and intelligence, desire and production are co-evolving in many cultural areas. Architectural intelligences, it should be noted, are but one set of our humanist multiple intelligences. Today there are also new and emergent forms of post-humanist intelligence. This turn from singular to multiple is the liberation available in the present time – the contemporary is an opening of diversity in knowing and expertise. Multiplicity is explained as the guidance mechanism of the processes driving the world, which is modelled on systems theory, ecology, and even chaos theory. This world of multiplicity (multiple selves, multiple worlds) will then consider the theories of multiple ecologies, including the three dominant ecologies of mental ecologies, social ecologies, and urban ecologies. The talk is intended to offer a panoramic understanding of these contemporary conditions. To illustrate this using multiple real examples of the artificial and the natural as the seem to converge in present situations.
Prof. Thomas E. Mical
Photo from the private archive
Thomas Mical is a Professor of the Auckland University of Technology, Academic Professor at the University of Southern Australia, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (USA) and Carleton University (Canada). He has a Master of Architecture degree from the Harvard University GSD and PhD degree in architectural theory from the Georgia Institute of Technology. He cooperates with the Faculty of Architecture La Cambre Horta at the Université libre de Bruxelles. He is currently the Dean in the School of Architecture at the Jindal Global University in Dehli. He has conducted research and classes in broadly understood design, as well as many courses in media and culture studies to support the advanced design education and the problems of artificial intelligence.
The international cooperation project implemented together with Prof. Thomas Mical concerns both innovative education and research excellence. The activities in this respect will be carried out by the Institute of Culture Studies at the University of Silesia and Faculty of Architecture at the Silesian University of Technology.
Researchers and doctoral students of both units can take part in consultations, whereas students and doctoral students will be able to participate in classes to discuss the problems of broadly understood design and architectural theory, architectural heritage and the impact of culture and new media studies on the processes of designing and creating architectural objects and urban spaces. Some of the meetings will also be available for the Silesian architects, urban planners, land use planners and representatives of cultural institutions.