Adaptation Lab: Adapting Digital Technologies to Cities

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• Adaptation Lab

A panel discussion bringing into dialogue leading voices from architecture, technology, urban development, computing and engineering to discuss the future of technology in our cities. 

How do the different lifecycles and temporal dimension of information technologies and buildings affect design processes?
Which innovations on the horizon will be most decisive for the development of cities in the next decades?
What role should architects and designers play in the translation of emerging technologies into urban space?

Panel

Simon Allford, Architect and Co-Director at AHMM
Liam Young, Founder of Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today
Lean Doody, ARUP Smart Cities Lead

Chaired by Jeffrey Inaba, Founder of INABA and Director of C-Lab (Columbia Laboratory for Architectural Broadcasting)

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Simon Allford. From AHMM’s base in London Simon leads a studio that works in England and internationally, engaging public and private clients in the exploration of a particular architecture’s potential to offer delight as well as utility. Simon works on a wide range of scales and typologies. Recent projects include Stratford residential master plan, The Angel, Tea and Yellow Buildings as well as Adelaide Wharf, the Saatchi Gallery and Chobham Academy. He is currently working on the new Google HQ at KX, The White Collar Factory at City Road, a new tower on Blackfriars, three mixed use projects on Regent Street for the Crown Estate, an academic building for the University of Amsterdam as well as large urban scale projects in London and America. Simon engages in the broader architectural discussion as a writer, critic, teacher, judge, advisor, trustee and commentator.

Liam Young is an architect who operates in the spaces between design, fiction and futures. He is founder of the urban futures think tank Tomorrows Thoughts Today, a group whose work explores the possibilities of fantastic, perverse and imaginary urbanisms. His projects include ‘Under Tomorrows Sky’ a science fiction movie set for a fictional future city developed through collaborations with scientists and technologists and ‘Electronic Countermeasures’, a swarm of quadcopter drones that drift through the city broadcasting a pirate internet and file sharing hub. He has also co founded the ‘Unknown Fields Division’, an award winning nomadic workshop that travels on annual expeditions to the ends of the earth to investigate unreal and forgotten landscapes, alien terrains and industrial ecologies. He currently teaches at the Architectural Association in London and is visiting professor at Princeton University. Liam also coordinates events and exhibitions and is a curator of the 2013 Lisbon Architecture Triennale. Liam’s projects develop fictional speculations as critical instruments to survey the consequences of emerging environmental and technological futures. 

Léan Doody leads the smart cities consulting team at Arup, an independent multi-disciplinary consultancy, advising cities, government, industry and developers on smart city strategy and organisation. She started her career working for a number of Dublin start-ups. After 8 years in software product management she completed an MSc in urban design and policy at the LSE Cities Programme. She then joined Arup in 2002 hoping to apply her software background to urban developments. Current work includes strategy and research for London, Bristol, Edinburgh and Christchurch, New Zealand. She is a member of the British Standards Institute advisory board on Smart Cities and a member of the advisory board for UrbanIxD.

Jeffrey Inaba is the founder of INABA, a New York-based architecture firm that specialises in an analytical approach to form making which aims to break down the constraints of a project and conceptualise creative alternative solutions. He is the founding director of C-Lab, a think tank at Columbia University‘s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation whose studies of urban and architecture issues of public consequence have been published and exhibited widely. He is the features editor of Volume magazine, and the author and editor of numerous other publications. Before starting INABA in 2006, he was a principal of AMO, the design and cultural consultancy founded by Rem Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture. He studied at Harvard University and University of California, Berkeley.