Hyojin Kwon
Assistant Professor in Architecture, Georgia Tech School of Architecture
Founding partner, Pre- and Post-
Public Lecture: Immanence & Composition
This lecture explores architectural practice as a compositional act grounded in immanence, where form and material emerge through internal relations rather than external prescriptions. Through projects engaging images, color, walls, and digital processes, the lecture reflects on how architecture is composed through operations, mediations, and material intensities in the post-digital condition. Drawing from research, teaching, and built work, the lecture situates these investigations within broader questions of material agency, authorship, and architectural production today.
Graduate workshop review: Images as instruments
Images as Instruments is a computational design workshop that explores how digital images can serve as both generative and representational tools in architecture. The plurality of design approaches enabled by the post-digital era has blurred the conventional role of images within experimental architectural practice. This workshop reframes the digital image as a computational, color-based, and pixel-driven dataset, foregrounding image-processing techniques—such as filtering, moshing, warping, and displacement mapping—as spatial and tectonic operations. Adapting displacement mapping from computer graphics into architectural workflows, students will translate pixel intensity values into volumetric deformations and material articulations. Through a series of assignments, participants will construct image-driven wall systems and voxelized building chunks, using chromatic algorithms and digital color data as design parameters. These workflows allow students to move fluidly between image curation, composition, spatial translation, and material construction, culminating in outcomes that challenge traditional form-making paradigms. The workshop introduces software such as Cinema4D alongside various image-processing tools. Students will hybridize digital and physical workflows to produce dynamic visual representations and material artifacts expressive of proto-architectural ideas. Ultimately, the image becomes a hybrid construct: a dataset, a conceptual scaffold, a material interface, and a multi-scalar design agent. Its capacity to animate, morph, and iterate enables new modes of communication and design reasoning. More broadly, the workshop is a critical inquiry into the shifting ontology of the image in the post-digital context—questioning how image-making, image-reading, and image-building intersect across design disciplines today.
