CAST | Center for Architecture and Situated Technologies

"The Center for Architecture and Situated Technologies [CAST] is located within the Department of Architecture at the University at Buffalo.

CAST is devoted to work on the evolving and growing implications of new technologies within the built environment: social, political, ecological, and material. Our various research efforts address the impact of mobile and embedded computing, wireless networks, responsive systems and cybernetics on architecture and the city today. We consider issues like context, embodied interaction and performance as important, rapidly evolving characteristics to contemporary architecture and the city.

We study issues of techné and of technology that are ever-present in architectural discourse, but which have taken on new meanings and questions with the advent of new forms of human-computer interaction. These forms often originate in computer science and in engineering, and include the development of ubiquitous computing, physical computing, as well as parametric modeling and digital fabrication techniques.

One result of these new technologies is an opportunity and a demand for architectural study and practice to reshape their disciplinary boundaries and methods. With this shift, the role of research in the design studio – historical and theoretical as well as material and technological research – grows vitally important and must be rethought. Our Center's research, pedagogy, design work and discourse are unique as a single group within a major research university, devoted to methodically addressing these emerging issues."

Link to CAST website