International Lecture Series: Philip Beesley

KADK is proud to welcome Philip Beesley, professor at Waterloo School of Architecture in Canada. The Lecture is part of the International Lecture Series. 

Embodied Systems for Machine Learning: Work in Progress from the Living Architecture Systems Group

Philip Beesley’s Living Architecture System Group at the University of Waterloo is exploring new kind of building systems that raise fundamental questions about how architecture might behave in the future. Might future buildings begin to know and care about us? Might they start, in very primitive ways, to become alive?

This experimental new work draws together multiple disciplines that include next-generation lightweight structures, interactive robotics, and synthetic biology in pursuit of a kind of architecture that comes close to being alive. Current research focuses on distributed interactive systems housed within resilient structural scaffolds.

The current work involves a significant evolution towards embodied artificial intelligence integrating proprioreception, distributed and centralized communication, and multi-rate processes housed in novel expanded-mesh structural scaffolds.

The work is being created by a group of architects, engineers, scientists, and artists from Canada, the U.S., and Europe. Their design methods are being used to train new generations of architects and engineers, providing them with skills to work with complex and interconnected sustainable environments. 

About Philip Beesley
Philip Beesley, MRAIC OAA RCA, is a practicing visual artist, architect, and Professor in Architecture at the University of Waterloo and Professor of Digital Design and Architecture & Urbanism at the European Graduate School.

Beesley’s work is focused on the rapidly expanding technology and culture of responsive and interactive systems. He serves as the Director for the Living Architecture Systems Group, and as Director for Riverside Architectural Press.

His Toronto-based practice Philip Beesley Architect Inc. operates in partnership with the Europe-based practice Pucher Seifert and the Waterloo-based Adaptive Systems Group, and in numerous other collaborations.