Ludger Hovestadt is Professor for Computer Aided Architectural Design (CAAD) at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich since the year 2000.
His approach, broadly speaking, is to look for a new relationship between architecture and information technology. He aims at developing a global perspective that relates to and integrates with developments in different fields such as politics and demographics, as well as technology, in a post-industrial era.
He is the inventor of the digitalSTROM® chip and founder of several spin-off companies in the fields of Smart Building Technology and Digital Design and Fabrication. A showcase of his recent work can be found in Beyond the Grid – Architecture and Information Technology. Applications of a Digital Architectonic (Birkhäuser, Basel / Boston 2009).
Talk: Printed Physics
Information technology is printing technology. Once conceived, it is reproducible at leisure, like a newspaper. For this reason it grows omnipresent so quickly, unlike any mechanical system. And for this reason, we notice a rhizomic net that gets rapidly tighter across the world, in which information—whatever that may be—dashes as electromagnetical phenomena around our planet with near light-speed. A net that is the substrate not only for instabilities, but likewise for new stabilities that have increasingly begun to replace old order systems. Whereas our forbears cultivated the land under the rhythms of the sun, and along the sun’s reflections built cities, today we are relinquishing more and more our familiar and secure territories and must learn to articulate what we find valuable.
ALIVE 2013 