Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference of the Association of Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA)

Volume II of the ACADIA 2020 Conference Proceedings contains the collection of Peer-Reviewed and Curated Projects presented during this year’s conference exhibition as well as essays from the winners of this year’s ACADIA Awards of Excellence. This volume also includes submissions from two new formats for this year’s conference—Videos and Field Notes—output from the conference’s fifteen Workshops, and documentation of the “Architects and PPE (Personal Protective Equipment)” panel held during the ACADIA 2020 conference. The circumstances of 2020 provided an opportunity to reflect upon practices and priorities. This work highlights diverse, ad hoc adaptations—academia fragmented, distributed research, bottom-up fabrication—that demonstrate the resilience and ingenuity of the computational design community in the face of crisis. The work published here foregrounds these themes while interweaving them with the presentation of the computational design expertise of the ACADIA community, with topics including architectures of care, augmented construction, robotics, programmable matter, biological interactions, machine learning, and disrupted practices, among many others, and panoramas spanning from the nano to the urban. At a time of profound disruption brought about by the global pandemic and coinciding with important sociopolitical events, Distributed Proximities seeks to provide a platform for the continuity of technical discourse while amplifying the space for a dialogue that also recognizes the impacts of the social in all aspects of the research.