Dezeen promotion: an exhibition of digital technology in architecture opened last week, as the inaugural event at The Turbulences extension to the FRAC Centre in Orléans, France.

Titled Naturalizing Architecture, the ninth in the series of Archilab exhibitions is being held in the new faceted aluminium extension to the museum by architects Jakob + MacFarlane.

ArchiLab was first started in 1999 to explore how digital technology is redefining the way architects and other creatives design.

This edition presents projects by over 40 architects, designers and artists who all use biotechnology, robotics, nanotechnology, and simulation in their work.

The "world's first 3D-printed room" by architects Michael Hansmeyer and Benjamin Dillenburger has been installed in the gallery.

Designs by Beijing architecture studio Mad and fashion designer Iris van Herpen are also on display.

The exhibition runs until 2 February 2014. For further details visit the Frac Centre website.

More information from the museum follows:

The Turbulences – Frac Centre

Inaugural Event: 9th ArchiLab, Naturalizing Architecture, 14 September 2013 - 2 February 2014.

In 1999, the first ArchiLab edition - an international laboratory of architecture - explored the revolution brought about by the emergence of digital technologies and focused on redefining the arena of architecture.

Going well beyond the boundaries of their discipline, architects are now developing a praxis at the crossroads of computer sciences, engineering, and biology.

Today digital simulation tools, borrowed from the sciences, are opening up unprecedented areas of investigation, allowing for the exploration of evolutionary principles peculiar to the living world.

Thanks to advanced mathematical mastery, architecture is now being enacted at the level of matter and tends towards a comprehensive re-creation of the organic, made possible by science.

Over and above a so-called "sustainable" approach, it is the change in the very concept of nature which is being questioned here, inseparable as it now is from technical and technological production.

It is these challenges, somewhere between architecture and science, that this new ArchiLab exhibition is keen to illustrate by way of an international show presenting the projects of some 40 architects, designers and artists, from a new generation of creative people at the forefront in terms of biotechnology, robotics, nanotechnology, and simulation.

Curators: Marie-Ange Brayer, Frédéric Migayrou
Assistant curator: Emmanuelle Chiappone-Piriou

Architects

[Ay]A Studio, B+U, Biothing, Bloom Games, Niccolo Casas, ecoLogicStudio, Eragatory, EZCT (Architecture & Design Research), Faulders Studio, Gage / Clemenceau Architects, Gramazio & Kohler / Raffaello d’Andrea, Michael Hansmeyer / Benjamin Dillenburger
, akihisa hirata architecture office, junya.ishigami+associates, Kokkugia, MAD Architects, MARC FORNES & THEVERYMANY™, marcosandmarjan, MaterialEcology, Matsys, Achim Menges, Minimaforms, 
Plasma Studio + Grounlab, Ruy Klein, Jenny Sabin, servo, soma, SJET; SPAN, Supermanoeuvre, Wendy Teo, Daniel Widrig Studio, X_TU Architects, Xuberance.

Designers and stylists

Cmmnwlth., Iris van Herpen, Joris Laarman Lab.

Artists

Federico Díaz, Perry Hall, Casey Reas, Marius Watz.

International Symposium

Architecture and Sciences: A New Naturalness - Scène Nationale, Orléans, Thursday 24 October 2013, 9.30am-6.30pm

In partnership with Réseau des maisons de l'architecture and Maison de l'Architecture du Centre. The problematics of ArchiLab 2013 will be broached at an international symposium which will bring together ten exhibited architects. Thanks to the new digital technologies, the same processes of "naturalization" are at work in architecture and design, as well as in the scientific disciplines.

Free entrance. Necessary registration here.

Interdisciplinary Symposium

The Nature(s) of the Artefact - Domaine national de Chambord (Chambord Castle), Friday 25 October 2013, 9.30am-5.30pm (fully booked).

Under the scientific supervision of Frédéric Migayrou. This interdisciplinary conference will encompass human sciences and fundamental sciences. Art and architectural historians and scientists (biologists, geneticists, specialists in living world simulation systems) will question the sources of the Renaissance and Mannerism by linking them with the present-day field of digital technologies, marked by the simulation of living world growth phenomena.

The Turbulences - Frac Centre, 88 rue du Colombier, 45000 Orléans, France. Tel. +33 (0)2 38 62 52 00

www.frac-centre.fr