Archinect - Features

Student Works: AI | AA Athens & AA Istanbul Visiting Schools 2013

2013-06-17T12:15:00-04:00

by Elif Erdine (AA Istanbul Visiting School Program Director) and Alexandros Kallegias (AA Athens Visiting School Program Director)

AA Athens | Istanbul Visiting School (AI) defines architecture as "an art of suppositioning ideas, architectural principles which are being performed repeatedly". Its foundations lie on combining theory and practice and shared knowledge, with the goal to go beyond individuality and address today’s challenges via dialogue.

Student Works: Singapore University of Technology and Design Library Pavilion

2013-06-13T20:30:00-04:00

The Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) library pavilion is located on a sloping lawn on the temporary Dover Campus.

Accommodating three mature trees and forming a noise barrier toward the Ayer Raja Expressway in the north, the gridshell structure of the pavilion harnesses the site constraints and activates an outdoor space behind the existing library building.

Student Works: Beyond Prototype

2013-03-21T13:27:00-04:00

Beyond Prototype is an advanced digital fabrication seminar developed at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation by Jason Ivaliotis and Nicholas Kothari. This course focuses on the development of hybridized, folded meshes that simultaneously serve as both structure and building envelope. Students develop parametrically controlled tessellations and transform them into building component systems that can be built using conventional sheet stock materials. These tessellated systems are extracted from the digital realm and built at full scale.

Student Works: New Horizons Iceland Expedition

2013-02-04T14:01:00-05:00

In late November 2012, London's The Bartlett School of Architecture Unit 3 embarked on an expedition to Iceland.

Warmed by the Gulf Stream, endless geysers and caught between two major tectonic plates, this land of endless volcanic activity is also home to Europe's largest glacier.

Twelve 2nd and 3rd year students designed, built and tested a series of shelter/surveying devices to research and charted varied aspects of Iceland.

Student Works: The Petropolis of Tomorrow: Drift & Drive

2012-12-10T01:11:00-05:00

Drift & Drive proposes a new model of water-based urbanism by readdressing the technological and logistical challenges of offshore oil extraction. Our project is a solution to the desire on the part of Petrobras, the Brazilian petrochemical company, to relocate workers offshore, as rigs are established ever further from the coast, increasing the transportation cost of both workers and oil.

Student Works: DRX 2012 – Minimal Surface Highrise Structures

2012-11-02T20:04:00-04:00

The Design Research Exchange (DRX) is a non-profit residency program for researchers hosted by HENN Architekten. The DRX, initiated by Moritz Fleischmann (HENN Research Director) and Martin Henn (HENN Design Director), provides an open platform to unite experts from various fields. By exploring architectural topics of shared interest, the DRX promotes a multi-disciplinary discussion between academics and professionals.

ARCHIPELAGOS: Ungers vs. Rowe

2012-10-09T16:58:00-04:00

This brief text attempts to discuss two interrelated concerns: an examination of the techniques and analyses of the city that underpinned the work of O.M. Ungers and Colin Rowe, and secondly, the way in which that examination served as the conceptual foundation for a graduate architecture studio I taught in Fall 2011 at Cornell University which took their legacies and positions as the basis for a urban design and architectural project. The four projects shown here each enacted a rigorous process of manipulation, transformation and distortion of precedents by Ungers or Rowe (two of each). In doing so, the distinction between architectural history and design was purposely collapsed, requiring a combination of analogical and analytical thinking. While the discourse surrounding these two significant figures is vast, the precise relationships between their distinct projects is less well-known. Nevertheless, a key point of overlap (among others) is the issue of contextualism (a term wit...

Student Works: Fallen Star

2012-09-05T10:00:00-04:00

“Fallen Star” is an installation set between biomimetics, interaction, and perception. It is the final working prototype of the Architectural Association (AA) DLAB Visiting School which took place in AA London and AA Hooke Park during July 23 – August 5, 2012.

Student Works: INSITU Medellin

2012-08-27T10:00:00-04:00

INSITU is an initiative founded by Blokcad Lab and uAbureau in 2011 to implement projects that investigate the informal development of cities, its non-consolidated urban spaces and auto- construction processes. Its central objective is to explore how the ecological and the social environments of the city can be merged to create new and unforeseen landscapes. Through a series of ongoing workshops, lectures and events, the program is directed to students, professionals and communities working in art, architecture, design and its related fields.

Student Works: PERFORMA_12

2012-08-21T13:56:00-04:00

The PERFORMA Studio at the University of Kentucky College of Design is an intensive research and fabrication studio run by professor Mike McKay.

Manhattanisms : RAM(s) vs. REM

2012-08-14T20:00:00-04:00

by Alexander Maymind & Matthew Persinger

(published in Pidgin Magazine: Issue 11, Princeton University School of Architecture, p. 208-219.)

“In other words, it’s Stern’s commonness as opposed to his rarity, that makes his work so significant.” - Mark Jarzombek[1]

“Pretending histories left and right, its contents are dynamic yet stagnant, recycled or multiplied as in cloning: forms search for function like hermit crabs looking for a vacant shell . . .” - Rem Koolhaas, Junkspace[2]

Still Ugly After All These Years: A Close Reading of Peter Eisenman’s Wexner Center

2012-05-22T17:46:00-04:00

(Published in One: Twelve Issue 4, April 2012.)

Peter Eisenman’s Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University has been typically understood through its relationship to and manipulation of then-current postmodern trends within architectural discourse. While the discussion about the building has been host to a plethora of theoretical issues (ranging from the historicity of quotation, to new forms of monumentality, to contemporary modes of estrangement, to architecture-as-collage, etc.) it seems that today certain shifts have caused the work to move to the fringe of current debates.

SmartGeometry 2012 in Troy, New York

2012-04-15T18:27:00-04:00

Text and photos by Terri Peters

SmartGeometry is an international community of academics and professionals who hold annual workshops and conference days at academic institutions around the world. Now in its ninth year, this year´s theme was Material Intensities and both the four-day workshop and conference day was held at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center in Troy, New York. Sponsored by software company Bentley, the next event will be held in London in 2013. Previous Archinect features reported on SmartGeometry 2009 in San Francisco and SmartGeometry 2011 in Copenhagen.

Building Between Dimensions: An Interview with Sophia Vyzoviti

2012-02-27T20:00:00-05:00

by Woody Evans

Architect Sophia Vyzoviti pushes, cuts, pleats, folds, and shreds the edges of architectural design – to startling effect. I was a librarian to architecture and engineering departments at a community college for some years, and found myself often promoting her work on folding matter to CAD-dazed sophomores; it opened eyes. Her emphasis on the techniques of handling physical models and materials is refreshing in a world when so many of the Prtizker class seem to work solely in software. I interview her here about augmented reality, touching stuff, and the aesthetics of smart textures.

Columbia University GSAPP Fast Forward

2012-01-25T13:19:00-05:00

The evolution of digital visualization over the last decade has enabled designers to articulate powerful visions of space, manipulate components, isolate significant moments and generate provocative renderings of a given space at a given time. Often, the generative process of digital modeling remains exclusively in the hands of the creator with the potential of these virtual environments frozen in the presentation of a static image or a scripted animation. In this way, there has been an inherent disconnect between the intelligence embedded within the dynamic process of generating 3D virtual environments and the presentation of static CGI images which are meant to represent them. However, what if the audience had a window into the designer’s world, where we could interactively reshape the environment as we choose and instantaneously see the cascading results updated in real time? How would this effect the manner in which designers can effectively communicate ideas to their audience...

CONTOURS: The Divisions that Bind Us

2012-01-16T20:28:00-05:00

As if the narratives and infographics of Occupy weren’t loud enough by now, Catherine Rampell, an economics reporter for The New York Times, decided to bang the drum a little louder by writing “Want a Job? Go to College, and Don’t Major in Architecture”.

Top 10 Design Milestones of 2011—for the public good

2011-12-22T12:16:00-05:00

By John Cary

‘Tis the season for gift guides, year-end donation appeals, and lots and lots of lists. Among others, we saw a few standout designers among Forbes’s “30 Under 30” list earlier this week, and it’s hard to disagree with most of Alissa Walker’s picks in her annual GOOD design year-in-review list, which is always worth a read.

The following list, by contrast, favors people, places, and projects that advance the notion of design for the public good. It profiles built projects, new sources of funding, powerful public voices, nonprofit start-ups, and web-based ventures. Lists like this are never comprehensive; this one, for its part, seeks to showcase how design can and is making the world a better place, if not directly transforming people’s experiences and lives.

Looking forward, stay tuned for a companion list of the “Top 10 Design Initiatives Worth Watching in 2012,” right here at Archinect.

Safavid Surfaces and Parametricism

2011-12-02T19:09:52-05:00

The development of specialized treatments of concrete and glass, customization through digital fabrication, and parametric design tools have brought about a contemporary resurgence of surface articulation, reopening the general issue of surface composition as a “legitimate” aspect of design, after almost a century of (near) omission by modernism. A wide variety of firms, among them Zaha Hadid (Patrik Schumacher), Herzog and de Meuron, Weil Arets, Aranda\Lasch and Foreign Office Architects, have been reintroducing this aspect of design -- most notably the last, which in addition to built work, Farshid Mousavi’s The Function of Ornament includes surface articulation as part of its theoretical explorations.

In Search of a Rwandese Regionalism; ‘Learnt in Translation’ lecture by Peter Rich, Kigali, Rwanda 2011, by Killian Doherty

2011-10-24T12:00:00-04:00

‘The reality I have known no longer exists’ laments the narrator at the loss of the Paris of his youth. This extract from Marcel Proust’s ‘A la recherché du temps perdu’ (In Search of Lost Time), is referred to in Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre’s seminal essay ‘Why Critical Regionalism today?’ in an attempt to poetically capture the concept of the loss of a place and its identity. A loss synonymous with modern architecture, particularly in relation to contemporary global development , in this essay they argue for a ‘Regionalist Architecture’ , an architecture of place making which preserves the fibres of ‘collective social structures and the collective representations’(i) that are etched within community and place ; things that cannot be recaptured if lost.

Op-Ed: The Neglected Public Bathroom

2011-06-09T18:55:00-04:00

According to the New York Post, the National 9/11 Memorial will open this year with no bathrooms. The $508 million project will draw legions of visitors and is characterized by gushing water, but anyone seeking a toilet will have to leave the site for a nearby department store.

This omission of public bathrooms resonates with a personal architectural experience. Over the past six months, I participated in a collaboration of art and architecture students to design a pavilion at Columbia University. It is located in a courtyard behind the architecture school and will be up for most of the summer. A temporary structure, a pavilion is often the architect’s opportunity to build without the inconvenience of plumbing or other practicalities.

Slipstream: An Exploration of Spatial Turbulence; Inspired by the drawings of Lebbeus Woods and Leonardo Da Vinci

2011-06-07T14:00:00-04:00

Slipstream is compelling pavilion whose form emerged from an exploration of both spatial phenomena and digital design methodologies. A Slipstream, in essence, is a type of turbulence generated by a body moving rapidly within a larger body. As stated by Lebbeus Woods, “The slipstream is a highly dynamic space active with forces that impel a direction and that itself moves, together with the moving body continuously creating it...” This became the design intention: to express such a phenomenon experientially, to explore the implications of slipstreaming as a spatial construct.

NEXT SERIES: ARCHITECTURE JURY, A Factual and Fictional Manual

2011-05-31T16:53:46-04:00

To spectators, the architecture jury critics might mean deities if they don't know they are not. In fact, some students know this but it is a best kept secret so they can stand back and watch the divine comedy folding out on the first rows of their presentation. Not all students take criticism personally although it is hard not to.

Most architecture schools are the continuation of the traditional model, design studios taught by people who are, if you say so, spatial experts. In general, architecture education is defined by how to draw and produce space. Most people in the world can say something about buildings. Naturally, architects use a unique vocabulary to control and develop their craft.

I was asked if I would write a piece on architectural juries. After thinking about it for a few hours I came up with this idea of subjectively stereotyping the people who sit in front of the presentations and say 'wise' things about student projects. I hope this will help the audience and...

MIT, Going FAST After 150 Years

2011-05-06T12:08:00-04:00

In 2011 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology celebrates the 150th anniversary of its founding, an occasion marked with 150 consecutive days of activities commemorating its long history of technology innovation. The most prominent of the exhibits, performances and symposia making up the celebration is the Festival of Art, Science and Technology (FAST), a series of events meant to highlight the institute’s often overlooked tradition in the arts. Organized as a six-part series of events spanning three months, FAST offers the public direct access to a body of work that transcends art as a means of representation to instead becomes an agent of social and technological exploration. On May 7th and 8th FAST culminates in the FAST Light festival, an open house showcasing a number of installation projects by both faculty and staff.

Working out of the Box: Logan Amont

2011-04-27T13:50:35-04:00

Working out of the Box is a series of features presenting architects who have applied their architecture backgrounds to alternative career paths.

Are you an architect working out of the box? Do you know of someone that has changed careers and has an interesting story to share? If you would like to suggest an (ex-)architect, please send us a message.

Architecture in the Givenness - Toward the Difficult Whole Again: Part 2

2011-04-26T22:06:00-04:00

Our education is based upon the Classical education. An architect is a mason who has learned Latin. Modern architects seem, however, more likely to have mastered Esperanto.

Adolf Loos, “Grundsätzliches von Adolf Loos,” Adolf Loos (Vienna: 1930), p. 17.

In our world of powerful stimuli and the often irresponsible, commercially motivated love of experimentation for its own sake, there is a great deal that does not establish real communication. For intoxication alone cannot insure lasting communication.

Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful (UK: 1970), p. 51.

The art of building has been transformed into a business of self-display and promotion through the design and construction of figurative motifs, making it an object of consumption.

David Leatherbarrow, The Roots of Architectural Invention, (UK: 1993), p.1.

5 Projects: Interview 5 - Alexander Maymind

2011-04-14T13:41:00-04:00

5 (student) Projects: is a group of projects completed at Yale University's School of Architecture by 5 young architects during their graduate education. Each of the 5 projects are sited in New Haven on or adjacent to Yale's campus. Each project focused on an institutional building, loosely defined by program, type and context. These commonalities became a framework for discussion that illuminated individual polemics and debate about experimentation in today's architectural landscape. Despite the initial appearance of diversity within the set, each architect sought to address a common set of ideas emerging at Yale and perhaps within the discourse of architecture at large. Primarily addressing the legacy of Postmodernism (in its various guises and forms), each sought an architecture that engaged historical memory, local context and an renewed concern for communication and legibility. Each was interested in an operable or speculative way to use history and its associated culturally ...

5 Projects: Interview 4 - Brian Spring

2011-04-14T12:57:00-04:00

5 Projects: Interview 3 - Matthew Persinger

2011-04-12T19:21:00-04:00

5 Projects: Interview 2 - Adam Tomski

2011-04-12T15:57:00-04:00

Architecture in the Givenness - Toward the Difficult Whole Again: Part 1

2011-04-08T12:46:07-04:00