Conclusion

The Practice of Design in the Age of Neurocomputing Neuralisms Shenzhen Studio

Conclusion Disciplines and tools evolve symbiotically, and each new technical innovation within design is met by corresponding cultural innovation. That evolution plays out in multiple contexts but becomes most tangible in the practice of individual designers. Today’s innovations, including data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, require designers to work collectively as never before. Gathering vast amounts of data, calculating the neural networks themselves, and understanding how multiple stakeholders could engage and consume such processes demand new commitments to collaboration and an open perspective on where disciplinary boundaries begin and end. A new collaboration among different parties, including governments, investors, the public, technical experts, and designers themselves can make the shifts toward a more integrated and adaptive city proposed by the studio possible. Designers have the opportunity to lead the way with a combination of innovative vision and social responsibility.

Taking place at the disruptive moment of the global COVID-19 outbreak, the studio could not directly travel to Shenzhen for the typical site visit. We instead turned necessity into virtue and developed an entire way of working based on the notion of remote sensing. Gathering satellite imagery, GIS data, city planning documents, and more, we created a data proxy for the city that became the basis for our research. We developed scanning tools and techniques that created insight even at a distance. This allowed new readings of types and territories enabled by the information codified in digital imagery.

303 The new disciplinary approach fused with an embrace of technical innovation formed the basis of our three critical interventions.

New Networks

The modern city is crisscrossed with dozens of multiscalar networks that define urban development and the urban experience. Shenzhen is no exception. From its high-speed rail, to its new and expanding airport, Shenzhen’s infrastructure is layered and constantly evolving and is indeed what solidifies Shenzhen’s position for “the city of the future.”

Due to its proximity with Hong Kong, Shenzhen serves as an interface between China and the world, and hence, highly engaged with global markets. However, due to the scale and speed of its growth, the local fabric, Shenzhen fails to engage with the dynamic and complex infrastructural systems of the city.

Speculating on the future of infrastructural networks of the modern city, New Networks proposes a strengthened dialogue between the urban experience and infrastructural systems of the city. With data infrastructure as the foundation to all projects, the interventions of New Networks attempt to reorganize infrastructural hierarchies by redefining historic, governmental, and financial centers while also proposing new ones. In the process, New Networks reimagines the role of public spaces, mobility, logistics, and consumer experiences

Neuralisms Shezhen

Conclusion while recognizing the potential of this new future in establishing new connections between Shenzhen and the world.

New Nature

The notion of nature, a culturally constructed term used to describe unchanged places outside the built environment, is entirely restructured in this studio. New Nature considers Shenzhen’s human and nonhuman requirements not as separate systems but as an interrelated and shared one. Production, cultivation, and conservation goals constitute a singular agenda, that utilizes the same land, resources, and labor. The spatial complexity in meeting both ecological and anthropogenic needs encouraged students to pursue unique generative and computational methods. Projects under this theme, designed for living, dynamic, and unpredictable systems, which forced students to ask: What does architecture and urban form look like when it must facilitate both human and nonhuman experiences? How might one work with nature to embrace its dynamism, both seasonally and in the future? Most important, how might a reintegration of our urban and natural environments shift values toward species, land, and resource conservation?

New Resources

Our evolving cities need new ways of understanding resources that are more resonant with our ecological responsibilities. Since the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century, humans have been relying on extractions of natural resources to improve

our living conditions—from the production of consumer goods to the construction of modern cities. Inefficient ways of extracting, processing, and using these materials brings hazardous consequences such as staggering waste, pollution, and intensifying climate change.

New Resources considers not only resources borrowed from nature, but also resources generated from the obsolete structures of the city itself, and how these two can be used to fuller effect with new technologies. The definition of “resource” has been greatly expanded and the model of resource utilization is portrayed as a cycle, rather than a linear trajectory. The project confronts critical questions about the city: How would a growing city metabolize itself? How would life look in a city with adaptive/responsive resource flows and programmable materials? How would designers adapt to this new material ecology?

New Cities

Through these three projects, across scales and across disciplines, the studio has woven disparate themes together with the tools of artificial intelligence. In doing so, it tries to create also a provisional idea of new directions for the discipline of design. Crossing borders and boundaries and exceeding the limits of the past, we will bring bright new opportunities for design and for our notion of the city itself.

Neuralisms Shezhen

307 Andrew Witt Andrew Witt is an associate professor in Practice of Architecture at the Harvard GSD, teaching and researching on the relationship of geometry and machines to perception, design, assembly, and culture. Trained as both an architect and mathematician, he has a particular interest in a technically synthetic and logically rigorous approach to form.

He is also cofounder, with Tobias Nolte, of Certain Measures, a Boston/Berlin-based design futures and technology incubator that combines imagination and evidence for scalable approaches to spatial problems. Their clients include Audi, BMW, Futurium (the German federal museum of the future), and the Dubai Futures Foundation. The work of Certain Measures is in the permanent collection of the Centre Pompidou and has been exhibited at the Pompidou, the Barbican Centre, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Le Laboratoire, and Ars Electronica, among others. Witt’s personal work has been featured at the Storefront for Art and Architecture. In 2017 Certain Measures were finalists for the Zumtobel Award in both the Young Professionals and Applied Innovation categories.

Witt is a fellow of the Canadian Centre for Architecture and the Macdowell Colony, a Graham Foundation grantee, a World Frontiers Forum Pioneer (2018), and Young Pioneer (2017), and a 2015 nominee for the Chernikov Prize. Witt has lectured widely, including at the Venice Biennale, Library of Congress, Yale, Princeton, MIT, The Bartlett, The Berlage, Stanford, UCLA, Berkeley, ETH, and EPFL, and his research has been published in venues such as Log, Project, AD, Detail, Harvard Design Magazine, FAZ Quarterly, Surface, Space, Linear Algebra and Its Applications, and Linear and Multilinear Algebra, and Issues in Science and Technology. Witt received an M.Arch (with distinction, AIA medal, John E. Thayer Scholarship, Frederick Shelden Travelling Fellowship) and an M.Des (History and Theory, with distinction) from the GSD.

Robert Pietrusko Robert Gerard Pietrusko is an associate professor in the department of Landscape Architecture, where his teaching and research focus on geographic representation, simulation, narrative cartography, and the history of spatial data sets. His design work is part of the permanent collection of the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris and has been exhibited in over 10 countries at venues such the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), ZKM Center for Art & Media, and the Venice Architecture Biennale, among others.

Prior to joining the junior faculty of the Harvard GSD, Pietrusko worked as a designer with Diller Scofidio + Renfro in New York and held research positions at Parsons Institute for Information Mapping at the New School and at Columbia University’s Spatial Information Design Lab.

Pietrusko holds a bachelor of music in music synthesis (with honors) from the Berklee College of Music; a master of science in electrical engineering from Villanova University; and a master of architecture (with distinction) from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University.

Mohsen Mostafavi Mohsen Mostafavi, architect and educator, is the Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design and Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor, and served as dean of the Harvard GSD from 2008–2019. His work focuses on modes and processes of

urbanization and on the interface between technology and aesthetics.

He was formerly the Gale and Ira Drukier Dean of the College of Architecture, Art and Planning at Cornell University, where he was also the Arthur L. and Isabel B. Wiesenberger Professor in Architecture. Previously, he was the chairman of the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. He studied architecture at the AA and undertook research on counter-reformation urban history at the Universities of Essex and Cambridge. He has been the director of the Master of Architecture I Program at the Harvard GSD and has also taught at the University of Pennsylvania, University of Cambridge, and the Frankfurt Academy of Fine Arts (Städelschule).

He is a consultant on a number of international architectural and urban projects. His research and design projects have been published in many journals, including The Architectural Review, AAFiles, Arquitectura, Bauwelt, Casabella, Centre, Daidalos, and El Croquis. His books include On Weathering: The Life of Buildings in Time (co-authored, 1993), which received the American Institute of Architects prize for writing on architectural theory; Delayed Space (co-authored, 1994); Approximations (2002); Surface Architecture (2002); Logique Visuelle (2003); Landscape Urbanism: A Manual for the Machinic Landscape (2004); Structure as Space (2006); Ecological Urbanism (co-edited, 2010 and recently translated into Chinese, Portuguese, and Spanish); Implicate & Explicate (2011); Louis Vuitton: Architecture and Interiors (2011); In the Life of Cities (2012); Instigations: Engaging Architecture, Landscape and the City (co-edited 2012); Architecture is Life (2013); Nicholas Hawksmoor: The London Churches (2015); Architecture and Plurality (2016); Portman’s America & Other Speculations (2017); and Ethics of the Urban: The City and the Spaces of the Political (2017).

Sean Chiao Sean Chiao is President, Asia Pacific, at AECOM (NYSE:ACM), the world’s premier infrastructure consulting firm delivering professional services across the project lifecycle—from planning, design and engineering to program and construction management. With over 30 years of experience in urban design and management, Mr. Chiao is responsible for leading operational performance and strategic growth in the Asia Pacific region; this includes 15,000 employees across Greater China, Southeast Asia, India, Australia, and New Zealand.

Throughout his career, Mr. Chiao has played a pivotal role in the creation of awardwinning master plans for high-density new towns and the revitalization of existing urban landscapes, including the Kuala Lumpur River of Life; Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor; Bonifacio Global City in Metro Manila; and Suzhou Industrial Park. In 2016, Mr. Chiao spearheaded the publication Jigsaw City, which showcases AECOM’s work and philosophies around forming new urban environments and experiences in Asian cities.

An advocate for inspiring future generations of talent, Mr. Chiao orchestrated AECOM’s collaboration with Harvard Graduate School of Design. The partnership enables students to explore topical issues related to Asia’s rapid urbanization and empowers them to envision tangible, holistic solutions.

Mr. Chiao is a fellow of the American Institute of Architects, a global trustee of the Urban Land Institute, and a member of Asia Society’s Executive Committee. He is also a member of Harvard University’s Master in Design Engineering (MDE) External Advisory Board.