Architecture, Technology and Process

BIOGRAPHY 2004. Chris Abel is an English born architectural theorist, critic and educator, based in Sydney. After graduating from the Architectural Association in 1968 he worked with the Greater London Council. He joined the teaching staff at Portsmouth Polytechnic School of Architecture three years later. His research and writing career began during the same period and in 1969 Architectural Design began publishing a series of his articles on the future impact of information technology and cybernetics on architectural production. In 1973-74, during a period as Visiting Scholar at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he devised and wrote ARCHITRAINER, an interactive computer game simulating architect-client dialogues. In spring 1978 he went on a British Council sponsored lecture tour to South America, encouraging him to further broaden his knowledge and critical range. In the following decade he taught at major universities in Canada (1978), the USA (1979-81), Malaysia (1981-82), Saudi Arabia (1982-85), Singapore (1985-86) and Turkey (1988-89). The outcome was a series of new teaching programmes and articles in The Architectural Review and other journals propagating a modern regionalism based upon both local and global sources. In 1989 he returned to the UK to consolidate his experiences and after a short period at the University of Dundee joined the University of Nottingham School of Architecture in 1991. There he established a series of interdisciplinary theory courses and design studios aimed at developing a new model of design education in keeping with advanced collaborative practice. In 1996 these were embodied into a radically new, computer based design studio called the Bio-Tech Architecture Workshop. In 1997 he left Nottingham to live and write in Malta, where he has maintained a home since 1983. He has continued to travel widely and has been sponsored on conferences and lecture tours in the Far East by both the Commonwealth Association of Ar

'No one in my many years of work has ever written anything even remotely so erudite and penetratingly rational as Chris Abel's text. It is brilliant!' Harry Seidler The (various) themes come together in what Abel calls Biotech Architecture, a shining vision of an integrated, collaborative, computerized building design method, more like an organic process than a production line'. Architectural Review, May 2005

• Foreword by Ken Yeang; Preface; Architecture in the Pacific Century; Cyberspace in mind; Technology and process; Foster and Gehry: one technology, two cultures; Harry Seidler and the Great Australian Dream; Mediterranean mix and match;Appendix I. Biotech Architecutre: A Manifesto. Appendix II. Birth of a Cybernetic Factory. References; Index.