Rachel Armstrong is a Co-Director of AVATAR (Advanced Virtual and Technological Architectural Research) in Architecture & Synthetic Biology at The School of Architecture & Construction, University of Greenwich, London. 2010 Senior TED Fellow, and Visiting Research Assistant at the Center for Fundamental Living Technology, Department of Physics and Chemistry, University of Southern Denmark. Rachel is a sustainability innovator who investigates a new approach to building materials called ‘living architecture.’ She is currently collaborating with international scientists and architects to explore cutting-edge, sustainable technologies by developing “metabolic materials” in an experimental setting to develop buildings materials that share some of the properties of living systems. On Twitter she is @livingarchitect. (“Soft Cities,” “A Short Story of a Short Story,” “Biolime: Mock Rock,” “Combined Advanced Technologies & Flexible Urban Infrastructures: Mapping the Landscape for Agile Design“).
Seth Denizen is a researcher and design practitioner trained in landscape architecture and evolutionary biology. He graduated in 2007 from McGill University with a B.Sc., where he studied the Pliocene evolutionary biology and neotropical ecology of the Panamanian Isthmus. Since receiving his MLA from the University of Virginia in 2012, his research in architecture has focused on the aesthetics of scientific representation, madness and public parks, digital fabrication and construction waste, and most recently the design of taxonomies for the mapping and historical analysis of urban soil in Hong Kong. (“Stratophysical Approximations: a Conversation with Seth Denizen on the Urban Soils of the Anthropocene.“)
Sara Hendren is an artist whose work engages cultural ideas about disability, the normative body, “universal” design, medical ethics, and the future of prosthetics and adaptive technologies. She has shown work at the CUNY Graduate Center, Outpost for Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), and the 18th Street Art Center (Santa Monica), among others. She’s a recent Awesome Foundation Fellow, and she’s currently in the Advanced Studies Program in Art, Design, and the Public Domain at Harvard Graduate School of Design. She runs the Abler web site. (“Towards an Ethics of Estrangement“)
Sukjong Hong is a designer and researcher with a masters’ degree in urban planning and a bachelors in architecture. She organizes with a number of community groups in New York City on militarism, displacement and housing rights. She can be found on Twitter @hongriver. (“Necessary Monsters in Cold War Asia and the Diaspora – An Illustrated Index of Political Outcasts and Outsiders“)
Mitchell Joachim, PhD, is the founding Co-President of Terreform ONE. He is an Associate Professor at NYU and EGS in Switzerland. Previously he was the Frank Gehry Chair at University of Toronto and faculty at Pratt, Columbia, Syracuse, Washington, and Parsons. He was formerly an architect at Gehry Partners, and Pei Cobb Freed. He is a 2011 TED Senior Fellow and has been awarded fellowships with Moshe Safdie and Martin Society for Sustainability, MIT. He won the Zumtobel Group Award for Sustainability and Humanity, History Channel and Infiniti Award for City of the Future, and Time Magazine Best Invention of 2007 with MIT Smart Cities Car. His project, Fab Tree Hab, has been exhibited at MoMA and widely published. He was chosen by Wired magazine for “The 2008 Smart List: 15 People the Next President Should Listen To”. Rolling Stone magazine honored Mitchell in “The 100 People Who Are Changing America”. Popular Science magazine has featured his work as a visionary for “The Future of the Environment” in 2010. Mitchell was the Winner of the Victor Papanek Social Design Award sponsored by the University of Applied Arts Vienna, the Austrian Cultural Forum, and the Museum of Arts and Design. Dwell magazine featured Mitchell as one of “The NOW 99” in 2012. He earned a Ph.D. at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MAUD Harvard University, M.Arch. Columbia University. (“In Vitro Meat Habitat“).
Tobias Klein works as an experimental designer, critic and educator in London. He has worked with Coop Himmelb(l)au, MarcosandMarjan and Nigel Coates as well as several other practices in London. At the Architectural Association, he is the Unit Master of Dip1 and is running the Mediastudies course – Ecclesial Anatomies. He is a visiting Professor at the University of Innsbruck in the studio 3 – experimental Architecture. Internationally exhibited, his work has been displayed at the Royal Academy Summer Show (2007, 2009, 2010), the 12th international Architectural biennale (2010), the Aram Gallery (2010) and the V&A (2010). He has been widely published in books such as AD Neoplasmatic Design (edited by Marcos Cruz), Digital Architecture Now (by Neil Spiller), Drawing (by Sir Peter Cook) as well as Architectural Review, Architectural Journal, BD and the AD issue ‘Exuberance’ edited by Marjan Colletti. (“Internal Prosthetics for Cloud Computing“)
Tim Maly runs Quiet Babylon. He’s into cyborgs and architects. He is @doingitwrong on Twitter. (“24 Hour Smarty People“)
Neil Spiller is Head of the School of Architecture and Construction at the University of Greenwich, London, and Founding Director of the Advanced Virtual and Technological Architecture Research Group (AVATAR). He is an internationally recognized editor and the author of numerous books including Visionary Architecture (2006), Future City (2006) and Digital Architecture Now (2008). He is a visionary architect whose work has been exhibited, published and lectured on around the world. (“The Geomorphology of Cyborgian Geography“)
Etienne Turpin is a writer, teacher, and curator who works with designers and architects to address issues of climate change and political economic inequality through design research, theoretical inquiry, and hybrid forms of tendentious practice. He is currently editing Architecture in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Design, Deep Time, Science, and Philosophy (MAP Office/MAP Books Publishers, forthcoming 2013). He is a founding editor of the independent not-for-profit journal Scapegoat: Architecture | Landscape | Political Economy, and his writing and research are aggregated online at www.ANEXACT.org. (“Stratophysical Approximations: a Conversation with Seth Denizen on the Urban Soils of the Anthropocene.”)
Ben Woodard is a PhD candidate at the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at the University of Western Ontario. His texts On an Ungrounded Earth: Towards a New Geophilosophy (Punctum Books) and Slime Dynamics: Generation, Mutation, and the Creep of Life (Zer0 books) are both forthcoming. He is founder and editor (along with Timothy Morton) of Thinking Nature and is an editor of Helvete: The Journal of Black Metal Theory. He blogs at Speculative Heresy and Naught Thought. (“I Want to Live Inside This Monster: Haunted Houses and Ecological Design“)
Liam Young currently lives and works in London as an independent urbanist, designer and futurist. Liam was named by Blueprint magazine as one of 25 people who will change architecture and design in 2010. He is a founder of the futures think tank Tomorrows Thoughts Today, a group whose projects explore the consequences of fantastic, perverse and speculative architectures and urbanisms. Probing the urban and ecological consequences of emerging technologies Liam also curates events and exhibitions including the annual Thrilling Wonder Stories program and runs the nomadic teaching studio the ‘Unknown Fields Division’ at various universities throughout Europe and Asia. Each year the division travels to extraordinary landscapes to explore the Unknown Fields between cultivation and nature and spin cautionary tales of a new kind of wilderness. (“Internal Prosthetics for Cloud Computing“)