Amber Bartosh, Keynoter

ON ARCHITECTURE 2021

FACING THE FUTURE – NEW CHALLENGES

9th International Conference and Exhibition
Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Gallery of Science and Technology
Belgrade, Serbia
3-4 December 2021

AMBER BARTOSH, KEYNOTER

Amber Bartosh is an Assistant Professor at Syracuse University School of Architecture. Bartosh is co-director of the Interactive Design and Visualization Lab (IDVL) and a Syracuse Center of Excellence Faculty Fellow.

EXPANSIVE REALITIES AND IMMERSIVE INFRASTRUCTURES

Abstract

The emergence of new digital design tools like photogrammetry, augmented reality, virtual reality, and mixed reality enables the contemplation, creation, and exploration of novel architectural processes and mediums. Coupled with big data sources, geographical information systems, and powerful computational applications that allow for generative and interactive sculpting, painting, and modeling, new possibilities open up for the augmentation of physical conditions in ways which have previously been unavailable to us as designers. Like the many technological innovations which have proceeded them, their capacity to inform the design process and product should be interrogated both optimistically and critically. In this presentation we will be examining the potential of “XR” tools and evaluating their capacity and limitations in creating compelling and innovative materials, forms, and spatial configurations.

Now more than ever, the physical, the digital, and the virtual are inseparably intertwined. The pandemic accelerated the mandatory embrace of online social gathering. Everyday activities are largely removed from specific edifices and increasingly managed through electronic gadgetry and websites. A meeting now has a web address and a trip to the store is routinely accomplished without leaving bed. As artificial intelligence, hybrid reality and responsive environments become more pervasive, they will transform the design process and expand the material palette of architecture. They will also increasingly challenge or prioritize the need for distinctive, identifiable and unyielding physical space.

This talk will particularly look at how the ability to design in, for and with expanded reality tools parallels the simultaneous creation of an immersive infrastructure intrinsically linked to our built environments.

Bio

Prof. Amber Bartosh in an architect and interior designer who constructs and examines the immersive infrastructures of the built environment using hybrid-reality and interactive design experiences. This research is supported by her professional practice and demonstrated through design-centric physical construction, exhibition, and installation. She has designed and managed award-winning projects for competition, bid & design build processes in the United States, China, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates and her work has been exhibited internationally in Australia, Italy, and Taiwan.

A Syracuse Center of Excellence Faculty Fellow since 2015, Bartosh is co-director of the Interactive Design and Visualization Lab (IDVL). The IDVL is a collaborative design cluster for interdisciplinary research, community outreach and professional partnership to create better living environments. Her visualizations communicate data related to phenomenology, building system performance, energy/fluid flows, and resource allocation. Custom-programmed environments couple digital simulation with video-game engines to provide interactive user interfaces via virtual reality, augmented reality and digital projection. Implementation ranges in scale from material investigations to urban geographies.