Andrew Witt (Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Associate Professor in Practice in Architecture, Co-Founder of Certain Measures)
Computation has long been understood not only as labor automation but as an intensified form of communication, binding together human and nonhuman agents in an ecology of signals. These signals define and translate otherwise incommensurate representations of worlds - the microcosms of architecture and the macrocosms in which architecture is embedded. Today, data plays a central role not only in the registration and recording of these worlds, but their liquid reformatting through AI. Yet as many of these systems are opaque, encrypted, or blackboxed, the concepts of legibility and reading take on new relevance. Covering a range of themes from mathematics to data, game engines and posthuman sensoria, generative design to multi species communication, Witt explores the many roles of language, mathematics, and data for the technically literate architect. Drawing on historical and projective work, he aims to show how these media become active and catalyzing in the practice of progressive design.
Andrew Witt is an Associate Professor in Practice of Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, teaching and researching on the relationship of geometry and machines to perception, design, assembly, and culture. He is also co-founder, with Tobias Nolte, of Certain Measures, a design and technology studio that prototypes the future. Trained in both architecture and mathematics, Witt has a particular interest in a technically synthetic and logically rigorous approach to form.
At Harvard, Witt teaches in the Architecture and Design Engineering programs. He has taught classes on neural urbanism, complex geometry, machine vision, domestic futures, and the relationship of science and design.
At Certain Measures, Witt designs spaces, experiences, products, and software for forward-thinking clients across industries. Their clients include Audi, BMW, SBB (Swiss Federal Rail), and the Dubai Futures Foundation. The work of Certain Measures is in the permanent collection of the Centre Pompidou, and has been exhibited at the Pompidou, the Barbican Centre, Futurium (the German federal museum of the future), Haus der Kulturen der Welt, and Le Laboratoire, among others.