Lecture

Tom Wiscombe

"Extreme Integration"

Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Wyly Auditorium

Tom Wiscombe is the founder of the Los Angeles based firm EMERGENT, an internationally recognized design office operating at the forefront of digital design since 1999.

Mr. Wiscombe was Senior Designer and Project Partner for the Vienna- and Los Angeles-based firm Coop Himmelb(l)au for over 10 years. He was in charge of various internationally renowned projects, including the Dresden UFA Cinema Palace, the Lyon Musée des Confluences, and the Akron Art Museum. Most notably, Mr. Wiscombe was Senior Designer for BMW World, Munich, which has been hailed as one of the most important buildings of the 21st century.

EMERGENT is “a platform for architectural experimentation, dedicated to the transfer of techniques, logics, and sensibilities from science, technology, and computation into architecture.” EMERGENT is currently working on the realization of a 110 meter office tower as part of the Huaxi Urban Centre project in Guiyang, China, and a water desalinization prototype for application in the United Arab Emirates. EMERGENT was a finalist in the Czech National Library Competition in 2007 and won second place in the competitions for the Novosibirsk A&D Pavilion in 2007 and the Seoul Performing Arts Center in 2005.

According to the firm’s website, “Our interest is not in promoting either bottom-up or top-down design techniques per se, but rather in dealing with the inherent messiness of design problems which may be ill-served by allegiance to either. We prefer to focus on rich, exotic, synergistic effects in the field rather than auto-justifying processes in the lab. We are, so to say, moving out of the lab and into the jungle.”

http://www.emergentarchitecture.com

This lecture is also available for CEUs.