Mette Ramsgard Thomsen

Open Lecture: Speaker
Country: Denmark

Mette Ramsgard Thomsen is an architect working with interactive technologies. Her research centres on the design of spaces that are defined by physical as well as digital dimensions. Through a focus on intelligent programming and ideas of emergence she explores how computational logics can lead to new spatial concepts. Mette’s work is practice lead and through projects such as Robotic Membranes, Lacer, Sea Unsea and The Changing Room she investigates the design and realisation of a behavioural space.

Mette Ramsgard Thomsen is Research Fellow at the Faculty of Arts, University of Brighton (School of Architecture and Design), and Associate Professor at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture, where she heads the Centre for Information Technology and Architecture [CITA]. She has researched and taught at the Bartlett School of Architecture, the Department of Computer Science, University College London and at University of Brighton, School of Architecture and Design. She has taught multiple workshops in Calcutta, Ahmedabad, Amsterdam, Sydney, Perth, Halifax, Barcelona, Seoul, Copenhagen, Aarhus, Bonn and Braunschweig.

She trained as an architect at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL after which she entered research through a position at the German Fraunhofer Research Institute for Computer Science. Here, she pursued her interest in questions of interactivity and space, developing new body centred interfaces for art and architecture. She furthered pursued these interests in her PhD studies returning to UCL so as to study with Prof. Peter Cook, Bartlett School of Architecture and Prof Mel Slater, Department of Computer Science, UCL.

Mette Ramsgard Thomsen’s research questions how a performative architecture could be thought and realised. How can our design practice engage a durational space that unfolds along the temporal axes of the event? What are the means by which we can imagine a space that retains an inherent indeterminacy and openness towards a sense of futurity? The performed differentiates itself from the animated by seeking a moment of communication with that which lies beyond it, its audience, context or containing environment. It is through this communication that the performed retains an innate instability which collapses the moment we think it as a well sequenced event. The tradition of conceiving architecture as that which unfolds along the linear path of the architectural promenade is a model for thinking time and presence into the edifice of architecture, but preconceives space as that which can belong to a common one-bodied experience.