Archinect - News

Editor's Picks #391

2014-10-30T23:30:00-04:00

In Screen/Print #26: an interview with Jessica Walsh, currently half of design firm Sagmeister & Walsh , was excerpted, from the 2nd issue of Intern Magazine (devoted to "intern culture" in the creative industries).

Darkman was confused "Strange choice to interview the most hated designer in the world for Intern magazine...She almost brags about not paying interns...Reads like PR I've already read". Similarly Mr_Wiggin wrote "seems, to me, diametric to the message Intern Magazine should be publishing".

Malaysia-born Melbourne-based sculptor Daniel Dorall spoke with Archinect for the latest installment of Working out of the Box. He finished up his Bachelor of Architecture at the University of Melbourne in 2005, as he explains that now

"In a nutshell, I make miniature objects out of cardboard – it usually takes the form of the maze...creating walk through maze-installations". midlander felt the work was "Fantastic! Witty and meticulous".

News
Anthony Morey attended Acadia Conference of 20...

ACADIA Conference 2014: Architectural Auto Show

2014-10-29T14:32:00-04:00

Acadia 2014 was presented this year at the USC School of Architecture in Los Angles from October 23-25. The term "Design Agency" was the cornerstone term of discourse through out the conference. It would be considered from different angles, including but not limited to: materiality, fabrication, and programming. The conference also considered the impact of external influencers, such as games and art, that have shaped our industry through their usage and invention of tools – the same tools that made ACADIA possible. Keynote speakers such as Will Wright (Creator of The Sims, SimCity and Spore), Casey Reas (Co-Creator of Processing and Artist) and Zaha Hadid (Zaha Hadid Architects) provided touchstones throughout the conference's weekend.

[Zaha Hadid's keynote]

The cross-pollination of Architecture with other disciplines has allowed for ACADIA to broaden its scope since its inception in the early 1980s, making the conference more inclusive. The ability to call upon a wide array of spea...

Vying for Attention: Reporting from ACADIA Conference, Day 3

2014-10-28T20:42:00-04:00

Day one at Acadia 2014 found us in the 2D world. Day Two in reality. Day Three was to be somewhere in-between those. It found us dealing with Temporal and Data Agency. Temporal dealing with time and Data with evaluation. A mixing of the two worlds was at play. We weren’t here nor there. Somewhere in a digital version of Alice and Wonderland. Interaction, movement and perception were mixing seamlessly. Our understanding of reality has been expanded through the digital. Our viewing of the world and our society has been exploited. Subsequently, our social understanding of its impact and influence is coming to fruition, and an area of focus emerges.

Tools such as Google Earth, robotic arms, smart phones and countless others have forced us into a purgatory of realms all vying for our attention. We live in a three-dimensional world, we build three-dimensional objects, we think in three-dimensions, yet all our tools until recently have dealt in the 2D. How many times have we sat in front of...

Law breakers, prize winners, bird flippers: Weekly News Round-Up for October 20, 2014

2014-10-27T17:53:00-04:00

Friday, October 24:

Architecture in Flux: Reporting from ACADIA Conference, Day 1: The Association for Computer-Aided Design in Architecture has changed a lot since its inception in the early 1980s; the conference takes a look at the present moment of "digital design" practice, while that term still exists.

Thursday, October 23:

Frank Gehry gives the crowd a piece of his mind (and his middle finger): At a press conference in Oviedo, Spain, in response to a reporter's insinuation that his architecture was "showy". Frank Gehry is 85 years old.
Keep Portland Architecture Weird!: Episode 3 of Archinect Sessions out now: Feat. special guest Brian Libby, we discuss the trials and tribulations of Michael Graves' Portland Building, and The Guardian's speculations on Obama's presidential library.
Denver's Union Station is lacking diversity and local critic places the blame on the architecture: The Denver Post's fine arts critic sees a lack of diversity at Union Station's multi-use redesign, and...

Numbers don't cast shadows: Reporting from ACADIA Conference, Day 2

2014-10-27T13:18:00-04:00

Day two of ACADIA 2014, which took place last Friday at the California Science Center across from USC's campus, brought a radical shift of focus and direction from day one. Materiality and Fabrication were on the forefront of thought and discussion. Ranging from robots making robots, or large robots that then became buildings, to computation executing technical drawings; everything in the built world was up for grabs.

A jump into our real world gave us a challenge, a glimpse of these introverted ideas and what they could culminate in. The goal was to discover, if even only slightly, how these tools in architecture could push the methods of production, reinvent them or combine them to find failures, successes or any combination thereof. Testing the limits of the digital with the reality of the analog world we inhabit.

All projects at some point returned to analog, all projects ripped themselves from their infinite processes and were born into mass and matter. Points from day one becam...

Architecture in Flux: Reporting from ACADIA Conference, Day 1

2014-10-24T18:54:00-04:00

Proof of concept, experiments, process, a shot in the dark. The Acadia Conference of 2014 started off sounding more like a science conference than a forum for cutting edge architectural exploration. Topics such as walls, threshold, corner, access, and sketching were far from the main topics of exploration; instead something else had taken hold.

Reality, our movements, our ideas, they were formulated and described with symbols, numbers and variables more at home in a calculus class. It presents a new lens to see architecture through, a way to view it from a place where the designer did not feel the burden of immediate complete authorship; but inviting them into a system that already had its own qualities, ones to question and react to, a modern day mathematical rorschach. Architecture has been in flux, moving with extreme haste in multiple directions, from formal discovery, mathematical testing, materials exploration and so forth.

Acadia 2014 is our chance to engage into one of the bra...

Zaha Hadid joins keynote speaker lineup at ACADIA 2014: DESIGN AGENCY – Registration now open

2014-08-19T20:54:00-04:00

If you're in the Los Angeles area this fall, make sure not to miss this top notch event: the ACADIA 2014 Design Agency Conference, to be held at the USC School of Architecture October 23-25, just confirmed that Pritzker Prize winner Zaha Hadid will join the roster of high profile keynote speakers, including game designer Will Wright (creator of SimCity), programmer Casey Reas (creator of Processing), computational architect Marc Fornes (Principal of TheVeryMany) and structural engineer Greg Otto (Principal of Walter P. Moore).

Archinect and our sister site Bustler are proud to be media partners of ACADIA 2014, so be sure to learn more right here.

Read on for more details from the organizers.

"Co-chaired by Dr. David Jason Gerber (USC School of Architecture), Alvin Huang, AIA (Synthesis Design + Architecture/USC School of Architecture) and Jose Sanchez (Plethora Project/USC School of Architecture), this highly anticipated event will bring an international audience of innovative design e...

UPDATE: ACADIA 2014 Call for Papers deadline extended to April 22

2014-04-15T13:55:00-04:00

UPDATE: The Call For Papers deadline has been extended to April 22nd 12AM PDT.

Due to popular demand, the final deadline to submit papers for the ACADIA 2014 | Design Agency conference has been updated to April 22 at 12 a.m. PDT.

Submissions are welcome from specialized researchers, practitioners, students, and others interested in computational design of architecture. Submissions can include the disciplines of science and art, engineering, fabrication, computer science, construction and design.

This year's conference -- including workshops and tour -- will be held at the University of Southern California campus in Los Angeles this October.

Conference: October 23-25, 2014
Workshops and Tour: October 20-22 & 26, 2014.

Submission details
Submit a paper
ACADIA 2014 Consent to Publish form

You can find more details about the conference here.

Last reminder! ACADIA 2014 Call for Papers deadline is April 1 (UPDATE: April 22!)

2014-03-28T18:07:00-04:00

UPDATE: The Call For Papers deadline has been extended to April 22nd 12AM PDT.

Just a heads up that the deadline to submit papers for the ACADIA 2014 | Design Agency conference is April 22 (UPDATED!)!

This year's conference will be held at the University of Southern California campus in Los Angeles on Oct. 20-25, 2014.

More details below:

"The conference theme is intended to highlight experimental research and projects that exhibit and explore new paradigms of computing in architecture. The theme is a purposeful instigation of work that looks at re-defining the term "Agency" through the lens of computational design strategies such as simulation, fabrication, robotics, and novel integrations from science and the media arts...