Wednesday, September 4 2024, 4 - 7pm 112 Sanford Hall Guest speaker Myrsini Mamoli is an archaeologist and architectural historian with a specialization in the use of analytical and formal methods for the analysis and reconstruction of historical architecture. The key driver of her teaching and research lies on the exploration of the ways technology and computation, complementarity to traditional historical research, can shed new light in the analysis, interpretation, and reconstruction of architectural building remains. Her area of expertise is Greek and Roman architectural history with a special research focus on the architectural form of the ancient Greek and Roman libraries. Her research on the building type definition of ancient libraries using generative grammars has been published at the Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Engineering, Design, Analysis, and Manufacturing and several peer-reviewed conference proceedings. Most recently, she has expanded her work on the automated reconstruction of architectural plans and elevations using rule-based, generative grammars to achieve variability in reconstruction within the constrains by the archaeological evidence. Currently, in collaboration with the GT computer science department, she is working on a seed-grant to develop and evaluate AI methods that generate traceable, controlled iterations of architectural reconstructions of Greco-Roman architecture. She holds a Ph.D. in Architecture with majors in computation and architectural history (GATECH), an M.Sc. in Cultural Technology and Communication with specialization in museology (University of the Aegean, Greece), and a BA in Archaeology and Art History (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece). A native of Lesbos, Greece, she received a Fulbright fellowship, along with several awards from Greece, for her graduate studies in the USA. Before completing residency requirements in Greece and returning to Georgia Tech, she was an Assistant Professor of Art History at LSU, where she taught a series of courses on ancient Art History and a seminar on the formal specification and analysis of ornament across art history with the use of generative grammars and digital media. Abstract: In modern perception, the library and the museum are two separate institutions, with distinct contents each: books and artworks. In this context, modern scholarship has considered the ancient bibliotheca as a subordinate part of a larger complex, containing books. In my talk, I will draw evidence from literary sources and material evidence to propose that, at their conception, works of art and manuscripts were inseparable, presented in a cultural center, integrating the contemporary functions of a library, a museum, an art gallery, and sculptural garden. Further, I will present the design principles of libraries, I will debunk established theories of architectural identifiers of a Roman library, and I will propose the aedicular façade as a viable option for the interior of monumental imperial libraries in the Roman empire. Using shape grammars, a rule-based computational approach to analyze any given set of design principles by encoding them into rules and then applying them to generate designs within the same language, I will explore possible variation in the building typology of ancient libraries in plan and elevation, within the parameters of the archaeological evidence. Dr. Myrsini Mamoli Lecture Flyer Dr. Myrsini Mamoli College of Design School of Architecture Georgia Tech
