Netlab director Kazys Varnelis recently spoke at the "Driving in the Smart City" session of the Smart City Expo in Barcelona to address issues of complexity and technology. You can watch a video of his talk at Vimeo.
With BP's appointment of Robert Dudley as chief executive office of BP, the Network Architecture Lab thought it appropriate to give him some advice for rebranding the company. Click here to see a project by Caren Faye, a student in "Evil," a studio that the Netlab ran in the fall of 2009. The syllabus and more information about the studio can be found here.
Director Kazys Varnelis will be speaking at the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius, Lithuania on Thursday 27 May at 6pm on three years of work at the Network Architecture Lab.
Netlab Director Kazys Varnelis will deliver a lecture on "Networked Ecologies" in the Future of Urbanism Conference on Saturday March 20, 2010 at the University of Michigan A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. Find out more and register here.
Netlab Director Kazys Varnelis's article, "The Meaning of Network Culture" appears in Eurozine, an edited aggregator of some 100 European cultural magazines (including the Lithuanian Kulturos Barai, which published the piece).
This introduction serves as a foundation for the larger Netlab project on Network Culture.
For 2010, we have rebuilt the Netlab Web site, readying the Netlab's online presence for an exciting year at Columbia and at Studio-X. We decided to launch the new site even though not everything is 100% ready since, even though there are still a few rough patches here and there, the new site is much more effective at conveying our mission. We welcome your comments.
Netlab Director Kazys Varnelis serves on the jury for the HB:BX competition.
HB:BX is an open international ideas competition to design an arts center that culturally reinforces the physical connection between the Manhattan and Bronx Highbridge communities of New York City. This competition is hosted by the Emerging New York Architects Committee (ENYA), AIA New York Chapter, in cooperation with Artists Unite and the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and it is meant to draw awareness to the current efforts to restore and reopen the bridge.
KV: In your book you argue that civilizational collapse, as it took place in ancient societies such as the Chou Dynasty in China, the Indus Valley, Mesopotamia, and Ancient Rome is “a rapid, significant loss of an established level of sociopolitical complexity.” Could you elaborate on what you mean by complexity and why it leads to collapse?
Arguably the entirety of architectural production in the last forty years has been dominated by the problem of complexity. Whether architecture that wears the difficulty of complex programs and requirements of contemporary society on its sleeve, that tries to reduce such complexity by providing a neutral background, or that aims toward resolution through a complex but smooth multiplicity (be it a folded or bloblike), complexity is the main problematic facing architecture since high modernism.
