About this stream

Advanced Technologies is a cluster of related projects, research, interventions, courses and people within the RMIT Architecture community of learning.

Rather than understanding architectural activity as finding the solution to problems deriving from an analysis, or a nuanced set of moves stemming from a mastery of canonical knowledge, these architectural works are understood as proceeding from a notion of emergent relationships within an expanded design domain.

A design domain can be thought of as coherently related ecologies of knowledge, materials, techniques, actions and circumstances from which emergent architecture is instanced. Informatics, glocal relations, contemporary modes of production, sensibilities and activities become constituent of the incipient domain from which architecture emerges.

Technique is a key term in the structuring of a design domain, as it allows instances of a particular domain to become manifest. Techniques may be analogue processes or digital methods. An interest in digital methods recognises architecture itself as an operative complex of physical and informational relationships. RMIT Architecture academics aligned with the Advanced Technologies stream work closely with researchers in the RMIT Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory, who are investigating digital techniques of design development and networked collaboration practices.

Emerging from the design domain, architectural instantiations come to be in various ways. An expanded notion of composition is developed to account for the qualities of open forms rather than closed designs, emphasising the resonant intensities of processural forces over formal aesthetics.