Thoughts for Gen X - Speculating about the Rise of Continuous Measurement in Architecture

Opening Address by Tristan d'Estree Sterk at the reForm: Building A Better Tomorrow (ACADIA) conference at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2009

We are here, in Chicago, not to talk about what we know, but what we do not know. We are here to share ideas and to speculate about what the world might look like if it were challenged, rethought, and rebuilt. We are here to uncover, piece by piece, a sense of our own ambitions for an architecture influenced by today but motivated by tomorrow.

We are all speculators and dreamers. We find places for dreaming in our work, our models, our essays, our lectures, our research, and our teaching. Through these activities we speculate on the architecture of tomorrow. Sometimes these speculations hold great promise, while at other times they do not - certainly much of what we do can be improved, refined, qualified, quantified, and genuinely benefit from being computed. This could be horrifying; it could set the scene for an engineered architecture if we do not adapt.

But architecture is changing and responding to very fresh and different ways of thinking. As a movement, young architects are questioning their inheritance and establishing new values, new methods, and new forms of practice. We might best think of these young architects as the Generation X of architecture - a generation who shapes discourse through technological, social, and environmental lenses. From its smallest technical process to its highest level of thought, this conference represents the spirit of this movement.

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