Adaptation Lab: Architecture, Technology and the City + Q&A with Rick Robinson

Event information

Jeffrey Inaba, Founder of INABA and Director of C-Lab (Columbia Laboratory for Architectural Broadcasting), will present C-Lab's ongoing research into the relationship between technology and the built environment with a headline lecture that will celebrate the opening of Adaptation Lab followed by a conversation with Rick Robinson, Executive Architect for Smarter Cities at IBM an author of the blog The Urban Technologist.

Jeffrey Inaba is the founder of INABA, a New York-based architecture firm that specialises in an analytical approach to form making which aims to break down the constraints of a project and conceptualise creative alternative solutions. He is the founding director of C-Lab, a think tank at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation whose studies of urban and architecture issues of public consequence have been published and exhibited widely. He is the features editor of Volume magazine, and the author and editor of numerous other publications. Before starting INABA in 2006, he was a principal of AMO, the design and cultural consultancy founded by Rem Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture. He studied at Harvard University and University of California, Berkeley.

Rick Robinson is an Executive Architect at IBM responsible for the development and delivery of Smarter City solutions in the UK and Europe. He is a Fellow of the RSA, a member of the Academy of Urbanism, and a contributor to the World Cities Network, UBM's Future Cities community - who included him in their list of the "Top 20 leaders in urbanization" - Government in the Lab, and the Sustainable Cities Collective. Rick is involved in IBM's project in Sunderland to deliver a City Cloud; and in Birmingham he is a member of the Smart City Commission. In previous roles for IBM Rick has been responsible for strategy and first-of-a-kind project delivery in social media, service-oriented architecture and distributed computing. He holds a PhD in the physics of superconducting devices from the University of Birmingham, and is a visiting Research Fellow at WMG at the University of Warwick.