P_Wall, an installation from MATSYS at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

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Exploring Form, Fabrication and Performance with Andrew Kudless
Uptown Stage & Screen
Thursday, February 18 - Thursday, February 18

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Uptown Stage & Screen

Architect Andrew Kudless is difficult to pin down. Visual art, architecture, urban design and even a little science blend in his practise as principle at San Francisco-based Matsys design studio.

“When I was growing up, in college, friends and family were like, ‘What kind of architect do you want to be, what do you want to design?’” says Kudless. “I’ve never had an answer for that and I still don’t really, as far as picking one of the traditional sub-disciplines of architecture.”

From buildings that exaggerate an aspect of their surrounding landscape — highlighting the curvilinear nature of a cove, for example — to conceptual designs shown as pieces of art in their own right, Kudless pushes his experimentation.

Those blurred lines and Kudless’s design principles and practise will be the focus of his Design Matters lecture series presented by the University of Calgary School of Environmental Design.

Although he has already had an installation at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), a coup any visual artist would be jealous of, Kudless hasn’t fully embraced his inner artist. He is uncomfortable with the distance between the viewer and a piece of art in a museum, as opposed to the tactile presence of a building, and when he works on an installation, he always has architecture in mind. “Say the plaster wall at SFMOMA. That started out as a research project exploring some of the techniques of a Spanish architect that worked in the 1950s and ’60s, who was working with pre-cast concrete facade panels,” he says.

“I started out looking at his work and looking at the legacy of his work to see how I could evolve that, or change that in relation to some of the ideas I was interested in with digital tools that I have been working with.”

Those digital tools are increasingly important in the realm of design and architecture. For Kudless, computers enable him to mimic natural processes and forms. “Our world is full of so many amazing, not just forms, but systems,” says Kudless. “How they process energy and reproduce and so forth. We have a very different system within architecture for that.”

Kudless believes that a lack of integration in man’s brick-and-mortar world has produced architecture that is less sustainable, something he seeks to challenge.

“A lot of the computation I try to use works on the same principles of using software that kind of simulates physical behaviour or, in some cases, software that even grows systems digitally over time in relation to certain forces. So it’s more of a virtual evolution within the computer,” he says.

“Instead of evolving an organism, the computer is helping to evolve a design.”