Archinect - Features

#ArchinectMeets @town.and.concrete

2018-11-13T09:00:00-05:00

#ArchinectMeets is a series of interviews with members of the architecture community that use Instagram as a creative medium. With the series, we ask some of Instagram’s architectural photographers, producers and curators about their relationship to the social media platform and how it has affected their practice.

Social media has undeniably affected the way we perceive, interpret and share opinions about architecture today. While we use our own account, @Archinect, as a site for image curation and news content, we wanted to ask fellow Instagram users how they navigated the platform.

We spoke to Cyril Lancelin, the artist behind @town.and.concrete. Though his work is designed to be experienced in person, it has far more than a full life on Instagram. In fact, Instagram was in part the inspiration for his career as an installation artist. The work and its imagery are equally dreamy; they reflect the demands of the current generation of Instagram models and all-around selfie enthusias...

Morphogenesis, an Odyssey Through the Digital and Physical World

2017-03-18T11:15:00-04:00

Morphogenesis, a virtual reality art installation, is touring the globe, bringing a primal, otherworldly experience to audiences without the need for a ticket to Burning Man.

Working out of the Box: Anne Dérian, Architect turned Mosaic Artist

2014-10-15T11:16:00-04:00

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

In this installment, we're talking with French-born Berlin-based mosaic artist and pattern designer Anne Dérian.

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.

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.

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.

SmartGeometry 2011, Copenhagen Denmark

2011-04-07T14:50:52-04:00

SmartGeometry was established in 2001 as an international group of academics and professional architects, engineers, computer scientists and designers interested in the potentials of parametric design and computational tools. Each year, a four-day workshop precedes a conference day with invited speakers, and each year explores a different theme.