Meteora : Mechanics of Architecture in an Intelligent World

Meteora Studio approaches architecture as a practice of architectonic thinking, where ideas grow through imaginary dialogues that weave together reflection and deliberate action. This mode of inquiry moves fluidly across scales, uncovering subtle conditions while outlining larger frameworks for what is yet to emerge. Writing becomes a tool for shaping principles and motifs without reducing them to personal authorship. In this embodied yet abstract practice, diverse forms of intelligence find a hospitable ground, enabling a shared and continuously evolving understanding of design. Meteora is the design studio of the Chair for Digital Architectonics, led by Prof. Dr. Ludger Hovestadt at ETH Zurich’s Department of Architecture, and conducted by Jorge Orozco, Adil Bokhari, and Miro Roman.

• Presentation of the works produced within Studio Meteora at ETH Zurich
• Multiperspectival investigation into contemporary digital design methodologies
• Kaleidoscopic articulation of conceptual frameworks and intellectual lineages

Ludger Hovestadt is Professor of Architecture and CAAD (Computer-Aided Architectural Design) at the Institute for Technology in Architecture, ETH Zurich. Between 1997 and 2000 Ludger Hovestadt was a visiting professor in the Department of CAAD at University of Kaiserslautern, Germany. In 2000, he was appointed Full Professor at the Department of Architecture at ETH. Since 2018 he is a Visiting Professor at Southeast University in Nanjing, China. He studied architecture at the RWTH Aachen, Germany and the HfG in Vienna, Austria. Upon completion of his diploma in 1987, he started his academic career with Prof. Fritz Haller at TU Karlsruhe for whom he worked as a scientific researcher for over ten years. Under his supervision Ludger Hovestadt completed his doctorate at TU Karlsruhe and Carnegie Mellon in 1994, expanding Haller’s school of thought of minimalist-functional mannerism into the digital domain, thereby laying the foundations for digital architectonics. 

Miro Roman is an architect and a scholar. His main focus is the overlap of information technologies and architectural articulations. Miro explores, designs, codes, and writes about architecture while playing with a lot; with all the buildings, books, movies, and images; with clouds, avatars, streams, lists, indexes, and pixels. What is this abundance of information about, how to handle it, and how does it shape the way we think about the world? To navigate and surf these vast flows, Miro codes and articulates synthetic alphabets. Miro is currently a lecturer and a postdoctoral researcher at the chair for CAAD at ETH Zurich. From 2004 to 2017 he was a part of the project romanvlahovic. From 2013 to 2015 he was a part of the Future Cities Laboratory, the interdisciplinary research program of the Singapore ETH Centre for Global Environmental Sustainability (SEC), where he coedited the publication “A Quantum City”.

Adil Bokhari is currently a ITA PhD fellow at the chair, interested in documentary vs. projective practices and tools in architecture and their implications on design and pedagogy. Previously he has been a guest professor at the Peter Behrens School of Arts in Düsseldorf, and has worked as a visual studies and studio tutor at the Dessau Institute of Architecture, Städelschule Architecture Class, and National College of Arts. Professionally he has also worked for Najmi Bilgrami Collaborative in Karachi, Zvi Hecker Architect in Berlin and Atelier Manferdini in Los Angeles.

Vera Bühlmann is professor for architecture theory, and director of the Department for Architecture Theory and Philosophy of Technics ATTP at Vienna University of Technology. Since 2021 she acts as a member of the Hochschulrat at the Universität der Künste UdK Berlin, and also since 2021 ATTP is, together with the Center fpr Philosophical Technologies at Arizona State University and the Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities, Skopje, a co-founding member of the School for Materialist Resarch (SMR), in further cooperation with the Critical Inquiry Lab at the Design Academy Eindhoven. SMR is an informal graduate and post-doc level program that offers seminars and workshops that address the materialisms running through contemporary science, philosophy, art, mathematics, design, architecture, and politics. Previously she co-founded and directs with Ludger Hovestadt the laboratory for applied virtuality at the Architecture Department at ETH Zurich since 2010, and co-edits the Applied Virtuality Book Series. From 2012-2013 she was a guest researcher at the Future Cities Laboratory at NUS Singapore. After studying philosophy and English language and literature in Zurich, Switzerland, she obtained a PhD in media theory/philosophy from Basel University (2009).

Jorge Orozco is an architect and academic working at the intersection of architecture and artificial intelligence from both technical and philosophical perspectives. He holds a Doctor of Science and a Master of Advanced Studies from ETH Zurich, a Master’s in Advanced Architecture from the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (IAAC–UPC) in Barcelona, and a Diploma in Architecture from the Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo (UMSNH) in Mexico. He worked as Guest Professor of Design and Computation at the Berlin University of the Arts and Technische Universität Berlin, lecturer at the University of Innsbruck’s Institute of Design, and lecturer with the Architectural Theory and Philosophy of Technics group at TU Wien. He was also a guest researcher at the Future Cities Laboratory in Singapore and has led summer workshops at universities across Europe.