Architecture as Catalyst is an annual week-long event, bringing new ideas, conversations, and expertise to the School of Architecture by inviting guests from around the world to run experimental workshops with graduate students and give public lectures on their work.
Each year, first and second-year graduate architecture students engage with the guests and host faculty in intensive five-day workshops, each focused around a unique set of ideas and techniques. The primary goal of Catalyst is to raise the level of discourse about design and to provoke leaps in perception of what design can be. The workshops serve as intense, rigorous, transformative, and creative sparks within the spring semester, and participants then re-engage their peer groups able to share new ways of thinking, communicating, and making.
Catalyst 2022
Materi(e)ality: Before, During, After
Monday, March 14 to Friday, March 18
Designers continue to draw ideas that rely on seemingly unlimited material inventories that are sourced, assembled, transported, and used as needed which are founded in growth-based economic systems, histories (and current practices) of resource extraction, colonialism, and violent transfers of human labor, energy, and materials. Catalyst 2022 explores non-extractive material practices with the potential to lead to ecocenic rather than anthropocenic systems. Its workshops and lectures will examine the "before, during, and after" of material journeys.
Previous Catalysts
Architecture as Catalyst 2020 | Architecture of Reassurance: Between Emergency and Play
Architecture as Catalyst 2020 | March 2-6
This year's Architecture as Catalyst takes on the topic Architecture of Reassurance: Between Emergency and Play through different workshops and lectures.
Architecture as Catalyst 2019 | Extended Communities of Practice
Architecture as Catalyst 2019 | March 11-15
This year's Architecture as Catalyst takes on the topic Extended Communities of Practice through four different workshops and lectures.
Architecture as Catalyst 2018 | A Cosmopolitan Design Workshop
Architecture as Catalyst 2018 | March 5-10
This year's Architecture as Catalyst takes on the topic Cosmopolitan Design through different workshops and lectures.
Architecture as Catalyst 2017 | Difference
Architecture as Catalyst 2017 | March 6-10
This year's Architecture as Catalyst takes on the topic Difference through six different workshops and lectures.
Architecture as Catalyst 2016 | Representing Systems
Architecture as Catalyst 2016 | March 7-11
This year’s Architecture as Catalyst investigates the topic of Representing Systems [as type and action], specifically leveraging the promises and pitfalls therein. With attention towards constructive logics latent within these systems, workshops and lectures will engage a range of strategies from the deranged, the subjective, the analogical, the material, the formal, and the speculative potentials of acceleration. Inherently non-neutral, these systems affect the formation of realities and our subsequent perceptions thereof.
Architecture as Catalyst 2015 | Façade
Architecture as Catalyst 2015
Façade, investigates the broad and nuanced concept of façade.
The workshops interrogate façade as an experiential, philosophical and technological construct, as situated in relation to its multitude of meanings: face, fascia, front, enclosure, envelope, skin, membrane, exterior, appearance, pretense, simulation, affectation, semblance, illusion, act masquerade, charade, mask, cloak, veil, veneer. Acknowledging at once the classical and contemporary issues of façade, questions within the workshops include themes such as relationships between interior and exterior, enclosure and environment, surface and structure, image and reading, ephemerality, and the body.
Architecture as Catalyst 2014 | Sensory Perceptions
Architecture as Catalyst 2014
Sensory Perceptions, considers architecture as a sensory endeavor.
This theme questions how we sense architecture, how we represent or model these perceptions, and how architects can leverage sensory investigations in the design process. As a conceptual link with the School of Architecture Centennial, workshops highlight how fundamental notions of sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch can offer a departure point for an intense and forward-thinking investigation that extends the disciplines of architecture and design into the next century of the school.
