Archinect - News

Make it rain as you sit on rocking chairs inside the Cloud House

2017-03-21T21:09:00-04:00

Not far from the hustle and bustle of Farmers Park in Springfield, Missouri, the Cloud House is a getaway spot where anyone can sit and enjoy a few moments of peace and relaxation as you listen to the (somewhat simulated) sound of a gentle rain, as if you were sitting on the porch of a rural farm away from it all.

Designer Matthew Mazzotta developed the idea for the Cloud House during a two-month artist residency at Farmers Park. Mazzotta and his project team built the house from reclaimed barnwood and tin obtained from a nearby abandoned Amish farm, and its gutter system is modeled after the natural water cycle. During rainy days, the house collects rainwater as it hits the tin roof and into the storage tank underneath.

Diagram via Matthew Mazzotta.

Sitting in the rocking chairs inside the house triggers a pump that brings the rainwater up into the cloud, which will then release the water onto the tin roof and produce that pleasant pitter-pattering sound of rain hitting the roof.

The...

diji-lab investigates the future of flood-damage control with BIM and digital design

2014-02-24T18:47:00-05:00

With strange weather patterns becoming the norm, who knows when or where the next natural disaster will strike and affect local neighborhoods. And architects are trying to work with nature to find effective and economic solutions in disaster rebuilding. Some of those architects include Ida D.K. Tam of the diji-lab — a Building Information Modeling (BIM) and digital design consultancy in New York City — in collaboration with Runsheng Lin and Julia Pascutto.

The team investigates the possibilities to integrate BIM, digital simulation technology, and natural systems in an effort to mediate floodwater damage in the context of New Orleans.

Keep reading for a more detailed summary of the project:

"Owing to the inseparable links between nature, performance and efficiency, it is time that digital simulation, building information modeling technologies and natural systems play larger roles in design and construction.

Reversed tributary housing system is an ecological flood water management orient...

Winners of the d3 Natural Systems 2013 competition

2013-10-07T17:57:00-04:00

The winners for the d3 Natural Systems 2013 competition have finally been announced! The international competition challenged architects, designers, engineers, and students everywhere to investigate the potential in nature-based, sustainable practices and solutions to apply in urbanism, architecture, and design.

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.