About HDA Hugh Dutton Associates is a specialist design company formed in 1995, based in Paris, France. HDA comprises a team of architects and engineers providing specialist design services. Our work strives to provide design that is a synthesis of poetic intent and physical reality. Each project, big or small, varying from long span structures down to small fixing details, begins with a clear architectural idea with its own specific story to tell. The successful realization of the idea is dependent on a thorough understanding of technical constraints. The studio is an experienced team of designers from diverse backgrounds who specialize in works of complex geometry, innovative structures, 3DCAD, graphic design, 3Dimaging, engineering and detail design. HDA believe in technology as a powerful medium to overtake standardization of modernism and develop a more human, nature-oriented, parametric architecture. HDA works as independent architects, design consultants, and in collaboration with other architects. About Hugh Dutton Hugh Dutton qualified as an architect at the Architectural Association in London, after preliminary training at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. In search of complementary technical expertise he began his professional career with Peter Rice, a renowned inventive engineer responsible for the Sydney Opera house and Pompidou Center. Rice’s newly formed Paris Company RFR, including Martin Francis and Ian Ritchie, sought consciously to muddle the traditional boundaries between the architectural and engineering cultures of building professions toward an objective of an integral and holistic approach to design. His early years included experience at Norman Foster (Carré d’art in Nimes and Stansted Airport). Hugh Dutton collaborated closely with Peter Rice for 13 years at RFR, and related their experiences of the development of bolted structural glass and cable structures at the La Villette Science museum in a joint publication entitled Structural Glass. Wishing to take the design approach beyond modern steel and glass, Hugh Dutton, worked with Rice in his later years on developments in stone for its structural potential and translucent qualities. Notable examples are work on the Seville Expo 92 stone structure Universal Pavilion as well as the translucent west front of the Cathedral de Notre Dame de la Treille in Lille. At HDA, given his background of technical expertise, Hugh Dutton continues his exploration of design and built reality, having collaborated with many well known architects and designers (Andreu, Architectonica, Bellini, Heatherwick, Nouvel, Ricciotti, Saee, SOM, Tschumi, Wong & Ouyang & others) assisting them on the realization of their concepts with a notable attention to detail. About Complexitys HDA also runs an open research platform named complexitys about architecture and complex geometry. The blog aims to build a space for open debate on contemporary architecture and new technology issues. Complexitys is also the central node of an extended, internationally connected network of sharing and debate tools such as flickr, twitter, youtube and several external blogs. It collaborates with the Spanish open platform ecosistemaurbano.org and architectural “avant-garde” collective #thinkark. HDA contents are widely shared on-line in architecture magazines like Archdaily, designboom and dezeen. In the field of architecture, where content is over-protected by the culture of copyright, HDA put forward the idea of sharing in Creative Commons as a way to get higher quality results. Photos, videos, texts, methods, research, calculation and drawing scripts which are traditionally used as the product, are shared for free and everyone is invited to use and improve them -http:/complexitys.com/tag/script/- This is based on a future vision of practice based on design services and not on the product itself, as it is explained in the text "Guggenheim side effects and the Architects’ originality obsession". The very idea of sharing photos or videos related to "starchitects" productions under a CC license is often delicate but HDA believes in openness as a way to diversify architecture business and to overcome the flattening of culture which has become typical of the globalization process. HDA | Hugh Dutton Associés web | www.hdaparis.com blog | complexitys.com twitter | @HDA_Paris