Design Matters with Dana Cupkova

Wednesday, February 21, 2018
St. Louis Hotel (430 8 Ave S.E.)

Doors open at 5:00 pm
Reception from 5:00 pm - 6:00 pm
Lecture from 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm

Seating is limited, please RSVP. 
Admission is $10 for non-students; free for students.
CASH AT THE DOOR.

Dana CUPKOVA is a founding director and design principal of EPIPHYTE Lab, an interdisciplinary design and research practice that engages the built environment at the intersection of ecology, thermodynamics, computationally driven processes, and material logic. She currently holds Assistant Professorship at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Architecture and serves as a Track Chair for the school's Master of Science in Sustaina

Dana's lecture is titled: Toward Sentient Matter
Historically, architecture focused on adaptation of built environment to serve human needs. Recently embedded  computation, simulation and digital fabrication have advanced means to actuate physical infrastructure in real-time. This  talk will explore design for reactive architecture and a desire to shift spatial form and materiality toward more holistic  understanding of sentience. Epiphyte Lab’s focus is to design and speculate about spaces, environments and architectures  that operate like airplants, tightly coupled with flow of resources, thermodynamic behaviors and perceptual experiences:  explicit or sentient. Driven by the believe that architecture is part of larger planetary ecosystem and this lecture will introduce recent design work and research that is interested in intuiting and designing new forms of hybrid ecologies, their agencies and authenticities.

REGISTER for the Taylor X Symposium 
February 20-23, 2018
St. Louis Hotel