Archinect - News

Five tenets of a new kind of architecture

2012-12-16T20:56:00-05:00

So when people look at you know, at the ability to 3D print using a robotic arm, they're very, very curious about the possibility of in the future, printing full scale houses, so I think the media lab and specifically in the Media Matter Group, we don't focus only on efficiency translations. For that, I would open a practice in the commercial world, but that's not the function of this lab...

Neri Oxman founder of the Mediated Matter group at MIT’s Media Lab was recently profiled in a 30-minute segment and interviewed by Dr. Sanjay Gupta. CNN also published a short essay in which Ms. Oxman begins to define a design credo suitable for the contemporary context, wherein the World-as-Machine is replaced by the World-as- Organism. The five components include; Growth over Assembly, Integration over Segregation, Heterogeneity over Homogeneity, Difference over Repetition and Material is the New Software.

As Bruce Sterling noted elsewhere "Looks like Prof Neri’s working up a manifesto there."

SunRay Kelley’s Ungated Community

2012-11-30T15:51:00-05:00

It is an unusual soul, however, who proceeds to build 7 houses, 10 ponds, a hermit’s hut, a 17-foot-tall maple-wood Jesus and a yoga studio whose sculptured pink doorway resembles (with frank anatomical accuracy) the female genitalia. The lord of this manor is a 60-year-old barefoot maverick named SunRay Kelley. And his fantastical hand-hewn compound lies at the end of a dirt road that bears his grandfather’s name, in the foothills of the Cascade Range, north of Seattle.

I like this quote:

A recent Saturday morning found Mr. Kelley rambling in the garden while smoking an herbal palliative the size of a cigar. He self-medicates in this fashion at certain times of the day, like when he is awake and doesn’t have food in his mouth.

Winners of the d3 Natural Systems 2012 Competition

2012-08-20T18:26:00-04:00

d3 today announced the winners of its Natural Systems competition for 2012. The annual competition promotes investigation of natural systems from microscopic to universal toward determining new architectonic strategies. The competition invited architects, designers, engineers, and students to collectively explore the potential for analyzing, documenting, and deploying nature-based, sustainable influences in urbanism, architecture, interiors, and designed objects.