MIT Department of Architecture
Fall 2018 Lecture Series / Organized by the Building Technology Group

Architectural Robotics-Embodied Computation 

When architecture becomes robotic, its autonomy means that the design process must extend beyond schematics, design development, and construction, and into the lifespan of the building, becoming a learning process in the context of its environment. Design is therefore not to be understood as an isolated process at the beginning of a sequence that entails fabrication and inhabitation, but rather treated as one continuous process, linking the design process with the process of use. The term “embodied computation” stands for the expansion of computation as an abstract, predominantly computational process into a hybrid physical-computational construct. Computation needs to break out of the limitations of simply describing the object and reach into the realm of lived-in architecture, thus enabling autonomous architectural robotics.