Home > Invited speaker

There will be ten invited or featured speakers, who will deliver special lectures on the various classified themes, such as 'Space Syntax: Progress and Prospects', 'The Spatial Culture of East Asian Cities' and 'The Science of Cities', throughout the symposium period. They are listed below in order of appearance.

Public Lecture

Bill Hillier is Professor of Architecture and Urban Morphology in the University of London, Chairman of the Bartlett School of Graduate Studies, Director of the Space Syntax Laboratory in University College London and a director of Space Syntax Limited. He was the pioneer of 'space syntax' in the nineteen seventies, and authored The Social Logic of Space with Julienne Hanson (Cambridge University Press, 1984, 1990), Space is the Machine' (CUP 1996), and over two hundred publications on space and other aspects of architectural and urban theory. Current research interests are in space syntax as a theory of the city, the relation between cities and urban societies, the syntax of generative buildings, the links between objective spatial laws and spatial cognition, and the space syntax paradigm as a philosophical position.

Dominique Perrault, a figure of French architecture, gained international recognition after having won the competition for the National French Library in 1989 at the age of 36. This project marked the starting point of many other public and private commissions abroad, such as the Velodrome and Olympic swimming pool of Berlin (1992), the extension of the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg (1996), the Olympic tennis centre in Madrid (2002), the campus of Ewha Womans University in Seoul (2004) and the Fukoku Tower in Osaka (2010). He received many prestigious prizes and awards, including the AFEX Award for the Ewha Womans University in Korea and the Grande Médaille d'or d'Architecture from the Académie d'Architecture in 2010, the Mies van der Rohe prize (1997) and the French National Grand Prize for Architecture (1993). The body of his work was assembled in a monographic exhibition: "Dominique Perrault Architecture" exhibited at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 2008 and later made and itinerant show that travelled to Madrid (ICO Foundation, 2009) and Tokyo (Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, 2010).

Opening Lecture

Alan Penn is Professor of Architectural and Urban Computing at The Bartlett School of Graduate Studies, University College London, and Director of the VR Centre for the Built Environment. He is Dean of the Bartlett. His research focuses on understanding the way that the design of the built environment affects the patterns of social and economic behaviour of organisations and communities. Current research includes the development of agent based simulations of human behaviour, the development of spatio-temporal representations of built environments, investigations of urban spatial networks and the application of these techniques in studies of urban sustainability in the broadest sense, covering social, economic, environmental and institutional dimensions.

Spatial Culture of East Asian Cities

Young Ook Kim is Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at Sejong University, Korea and the chair of this year symposium. He received a London University PhD from UCL with a thesis on the relationship between spatial configuration, spatial cognition and space use patterns. His overall focus lies on how spatial layouts impact social phenomena and user behavior and has published more than 150 papers on academic journals. His is currently working on integrating both spatial and social network in a way to alleviate social pathology, especially, for suicides and crimes. He is actively participating in the Korean urban planning committee and as a master planner to the government programs to establish a healthier community.

Renee Chow is Associate Dean of the College of Environmental Design and chair of the Urban Design Program at UC Berkeley. She is the founding principal of Studio URBIS. Both her practice and research focus on the intersection between architecture and its locale. To encode local conditions, Renee has developed analytic and generative tools for integrating urban and architectural systems across sites and indivisual buildings. She authored Suburban Space: the Fablic of Dwelling (2001) and is currently finishing a manuscript for Field Urbanism: Changing Forms of Chinese Cities. She has been honoured with the Eva Li Chair in Design Ethics from 2005 to 2010, "Ten Top Architectural Educators" in the United States by Architecture Magazine in 2009, as well as numerous research and project awards from the American Institute of Architects. Her work has been exhibited at the Hong Kong-Shenzhen (2008) and Chengdu (2011) Biennales.

Masao Furuyama is President of Kyoto Institute of Technology (KIT) in Japan. He was born in Kyoto and studied Architecture at Kyoto University. He obtained Doctor of Engineering from University of Tokyo in 1976. Since then, he carried on his research on the mathematical analysis of urban forms at KIT, and became a Professor in 1990. Besides being an urban researcher, he is also known as an architectural critic and wrote a book about Tadao Ando, "Tadao Ando: Taschen Basic Architecture".

The Science of Cities

Hawoong Jeong is currently KAIST-chair professor and head of physics department at KAIST, Korea. He got his Ph.D. in physics at Seoul National University, and his research area includes complex systems, statistical/computational physics and interdisciplinary science. He published over 90 research papers, including 5 in Nature, with more than 11,000 citations in diverse areas including physics, computer science, social science and biology. He got several awards including KAIST best lecturer award, KPS Hak-Sul prize, the Scientist of the month award. He has also been selected as Young Scientist at 2012 Summer Davos World Econo Forum. His recent research on street networks and traffic congestion has been published in Physical Review Letters and also featured in the Economist.

Marc Barthelemy is a former student of the Ecole Normale Superieure of Paris. In 1992, he graduated at the University of Paris VI with a thesis in theoretical physics. After his thesis, Marc Barthelemy focused on disordered systems and their properties. Since 1992, he has held a permanent position at the CEA and since 2009 is a senior researcher at the Institute of Theoretical Physics (IPHT) in Saclay. His interests moved towards applications of statistical physics to complex systems, and he worked on complex networks, theoretical epidemiology, and more recently on spatial networks. From data analysis to spatial economics and modelling, Marc Barthelemy is currently working on various aspects of the emerging science of cities.

Juval Portugali, currently a visiting Professor at the department of Urbanism Faculty of Architecture TU Delft, is Professor of Human Geography at the Department of Geography and the Human Environment Tel Aviv University. He is the Head of the Environmental Simulation Laboratory (ESLab) and of the Environment, Society and Planning Graduate Program of Tel Aviv University. Juval Portugali received a London University PhD from The London School of Economics and Political sciences. His research integrates complexity and self-organization theories, environmental-spatial cognition, urban dynamics and planning in modern and ancient periods. His publications include more than 70 research articles and 15 scientific books, among them the following: Implicate Relations: Society and space in the Israeli- Palestinian conflict, Kluwer 1993. The Construction of Cognitive Maps, Kluwer, 1996 (Ed.). Self-Organization and the city, Springer, 2000. Complex Artificial Environments. Springer Complexity Series, 2005 (Ed.). Complexity, Cognition and the City, Springer, Complexity Series 2011. Complexity Theories of Cities Have Come of Age, Springer, Complexity Series 2012 (Ed.).

Closing Lecture

John Peponis was born in Athens, Greece, 1955. Professor of Architecture and Associate Chair, School of Architecture Georgia Institute of Technology, USA. Collaborates with Kokkinou + Kourkoulas Architects. Research-journal publications address the geometric and computational foundations of space syntax; the cognitive and organizational performance of museums, work environments, healthcare environments and environments for learning; design formulation and design languages; urban layout and its functions. He wrote "Χωρογραφίες, ο Αρχιτεκτονικός Σχηματισμός του Νοήματος" (Alexandria Publishers, Athens, Greece) in 1997.