ABOUT

formAxioms was established in 2018 by Eva Castro and Federico Ruberto as a research framework, agency and teaching cluster. The laboratory promotes research on space, selfhood, performance, art, planetary structures, and economy-ecology. It produces physical-digital dyads integrating platform-design, block-chain, VR/AR/XR in its pipeline. The group experiments with trans-media operations that welcome critical queering, utilising a mix of design strategies, philosophy, media-theory and world-building. With digital models and computational tools the lab prototypes spaces-interfaces-infrastructures for trans-subjective and collaborative-participatory operations, working to re-discover the emancipatory potential of art and design.

 

[formAxioms is a trans-disciplinary practice.]

[Our interest: questioning the relation real/ideal, post post-modern thought, through a framework carried forward by “fictioning” and by adhering to an ontology of “modelling”: two pathways for creating syntaxes that allow for both, the constitution of (a shared) structure and the divergence from it.]

form | axioms
agency_research lab

Axiom = a noun ἀξίωμα (axíōma) derived from the verb ἀξιόειν (axioein), meaning “to deem worthy”, but also “to require” (wiki). Axioms = “point-zero(s)” that cannot be derived by principles of deduction; un-demonstrable by mathematical proofs because they are the beginning of such proofs. Axioms = inferences/statements that define a new possibility, they are “starting point” without neither a “surface” nor a “volume”. Their presence defines one or more structures. An axiom is a self-evident entity so it requires a leap, it requires agency to be posited. At the bottom of each system there are axioms. Axioms are statements that are made or that make themselves evident; their instantiation, assumed to be “true” (to have a reality) without a necessary proof, utters thus the possibility of a new reality.

Form>axioms = The speculative environments we construct are neither emergent nor they are preemptively defined beforehand, they are “worlds” (see Nelson Goodman), new world-s relying for their construction on the processes of formation they relate to and on axioms (“of choice”) that are needed to define such relation. Axiomatic decisions are necessary for navigating, analyzing and re-presenting, “understanding” the process of formation of a selected territory whilst making it evident to other agents. Any process of formation requires axiomatic decisions. Together, forms and axioms constitute “worlds”, they are both necessary for any process of “world-building”, as any “world” is formed by series of decisions (axioms), inferences that need to be stated to determine how the emergent properties of a system are made evident (extracted, analyzed, selected), and how the manipulation of complex and vast layers of data are tamed or augmented. Axioms are the “ideo-logical” framework of any system. Axioms define processes of formation and processes of formation are intrinsically informative of axioms. A de-signer is a world-builder, a trans-media story teller that juggles in the interstitial space; it is an interface that plugs top-down events to bottom-up processes in order to constitute the relations of axioms and forms, tied to the (never-ending) end of the process, where the “vision” of a new reality must be stated.

formAxioms:

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TEAM

Core Research Team

Eva Castro

Architect

Federico Ruberto

Architect.Writer

Eva Castro is a professor of practice at AS+D – SUTD, Singapore, where she currently coordinates core studio 2 and co-leads advanced option studios. She has bee the director of the Landscape Urbanism Unit at Tsinghua University in Beijing and a visiting profesor at the Architectural Association in London, where she taught – as a diploma unit master and co-directing the Landscape Urbanism Master program since 2003. She has also held positions as visiting professor at HKU, Hong Kong and honorary profesor at X’ian Tech University. As a practitioner, Castro is cofounder of Plasma Studio and GroundLab. She has been recognized with several awards including the Next Generation Architects Award, the Young Architect of the Year Award and the Contract World Award. Her work is published and exhibited worldwide, including Archilab’s ‘Naturalising Architecture’ and various solo exhibitions and art installations -at the DAZ (Deutsches Architectural Museun) in Germany and the Architectural Association in London. Plasma studio and GroundLab were the lead designers for the International Horticultural Fair in Xi’an, China a 37ha landscape with a wide range of buildings opened in 2011.

[Federico Ruberto] I’m a writer, architect and educator working between philosophy and design. I hold a PhD [summa cum laude] in “Philosophy, Art and Critical Thought” from the European Graduate School, an inquiry on the concept of “contingency” in formal/natural languages; a research that connects metaphysical questions to the field of de-sign. My investigations, presented at symposiums, exhibitions and through publications, look at contemporaneity inquiring the potentials/problematics of the current computational paradigm, scrutinising the hyper, multi-scalar processes that exponentially virtualise the “self”, the “world(s), and language. 

I’m a teacher designer, co-founder/partner of formAxioms (formaxioms.com), a Singapore based laboratory of speculative narratives that investigates alternative processes of urbanisation and that focuses on how virtual-augmented modes of presence are impacting the architectural discipline. I’m also a co-founder/partner of reMIX Studio (remixstudio.org), an architectural office based in Beijing with built projects published worldwide. With formAxioms I practice through research, I design, teach and craft textual and material projects. I recently curated an art exhibition titled “Negentropic Fields”, a project part of “Novel Ways of Being” located at the National Gallery Singapore. In 2019 I curated “Mapping the Invisible: Para-Consistency, Design and Fiction”, part of “City of Streams” a sub-venue of the “Eyes of the City”, Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture Shenzhen. As a designer I won several prizes among which the First Prize and the Grand Prix of the International Competition at the XI Krakow Architecture Triennial (2009). As reMIX studio’s partner my architectural work has been included in several exhibitions, among which the 14th Venice Biennale – “Across Chinese Cities Pavillion”. My theoretical essays have been published among others by Routledge (UK), dpr-barcelona (Spain), Mimesi (Italy), Riverside Architectural Press (Canada), Monograph-List lab (Italy) and Tsinghua University Press (China). I presented my philosophical and architectural researches at international venues among which the 2019 Lisbon Architecture Triennale’s “Artificial Realities: Virtual as an Aesthetic Medium for Architectural Ideation”, the“Postcards from the Anthropocene” (Edinburgh 2107), R.E.D.S at La Sapienza (Rome 2013), and the “Future of Cities Forum” (Beijing 2016). 

I’m currently teaching design studios at the National University of Singapore, DoA. From 2018 I directed studios working with computational tools and speculative narrative at SUTD (Singapore), where in 2019 I served as a lead researcher for the SUTD-MIT IDC founded grant “Territorial Strategies and Urban Prototypes in South-East Asia”. Previously I taught at the Landscape Urbanism program at Tsinghua University (Beijing), I was instructor at “Processes of Abstraction” at IFC Central Academy of Fine Arts and lecturer at the Laboratory for Computational Design (Beijing). I tutored at workshops in China (Beijing, Dalian, Zhengzhou and Changsha) and in India (Surat), at the Architectural Association Visiting School in Beijing (2012) and co-directed a unit at the AAVS in São Paulo (2013).

Research Assistants

Ho Jin Teck (Daryl)

Architect / Planners

Peng Haonan

Architect / Planner

Augmented/Virtual Reality Team

Jacob Chen Shihang

VR-AR Programmer / Educator

Song Yong Bin

Programmer

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