Adam Kampff (1979-2025)
He touched our architectural practice profoundly… intellectually and with his humility, enthusiasm, and humanity. We met him in October 2010 at the beautiful Champalimaud Centre of the Unknown in Lisbon (designed by Charles Correa), while we were researching / designing the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre (SWC) at UCL. In 2015, he was the first neuroscientist to be recruited from abroad to set up a lab at SWC.
Adam was a wonderful and very special person, an inspirational scientist who loved sharing his insights with extraordinary clarity – a rare gift.
Conversations were always a joy, challenging and probing frontiers to examine how to create a better world – one turning away from isolation and consumerism to one full of creativity and connexity.
From 2019 we collaborated and supported his embryonic Voight-Kampff project to develop a new technology for displaying digital information inspired by how our brains understand and interact with the world without the need for the pervasive 2D screen world; and developing new training paradigms to explain this technology to the brains that will use it.
The Jean-François de Clermont-Tonnerre Foundation became the major sponsor of this new approach and to demonstrate the first Voight-Kampff space fully optimised at room scale so that artists can use it to create new immersive experiences to demonstrate this ‘post-screen’ future. It would eliminate the need for 3D glasses, AR or VR.
We met with the director of the Haywood Gallery to try and convince him of the possibilities. This Voight-Kampff idea was too ahead of its time.
Adam explained his approach to education:
“My dream is to create a Voight-Kampff school offering PhD level students a curriculum that teaches them what happens in today’s world and exactly how it works. Over the last 30 years, the tech world has focused on teaching people how to use it, but not why it works. If we lose this ability to learn why tech works the way it does, we are facing an existential threat. Humanity needs to spend so much more time explaining the new stuff it creates, rather than using it to actually think less. Voight-Kampff can cross this barrier and open up a whole new world.”
(The Voight-Kampff project is named after the machine in the Philip K. Dick novella Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which became the Ridley Scott classic film Blade Runner.)
Adam, with Danbee Kim while at SWC contributed to the 2020 AD Neuro-Architecture that Ian Ritchie guest edited.
We recall Adam speaking about his hopes for SWC in the short film Neural Architects, made about the design of the building: “In many ways, I think the SWC is a place where coming up with the good questions for the science of neuroscience to ask is actually going to be our major output, and if the SWC produces the questions for the rest of the field to go and throw the resources at, that I think, is a huge success.”
His dream became a reality with No Black Boxes – a foundation co-founded with his wife Elena dedicated to education and demystifying modern technology.
We will continue to support No Black Boxes, to help ensure that Adam’s sparkling contribution will continue to enlighten the world of science and education.
If you wish to support his legacy, Elena has set up this fund in his memory.
