Archinect - MArch to the beat

Future Cities Lab Murmur Wall and Lightswarm Opening May 21st

2015-05-20T04:23:15-04:00

Join CCA architecture professors Jason Kelly Johnson and Nataly Gattegno this Thursday May 21, 6-8:00pm at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts San Francisco for the PUBLIC OPENING PARTY for two new installations by Future Cities Lab. Details can be found here: future-cities-lab.net/murmurwall. Murmur Wall is best viewed after dark, hope to see you all there! Project description follows:

WHAT WILL THE CITY AROUND US BE THINKING, SEEING AND READING IN THE NEAR FUTURE? HOW WILL ITS DESIRES AND FEARS MANIFEST? WHAT WILL BE MOST IMPORTANT?

Offering a glimpse into the immediate future, the Murmur Wall is an artificially intelligent, anticipatory architecture that reveals what the city is whispering, thinking and feeling. By proactively harvesting local online activity—via search engines and social media—the Murmur Wall anticipates what will soon matter most to the city. Constructed out of an intricate weave of steel and acrylic tubing, digital displays and electronics, the Murmur Wall allow...

Urbanism From Within Exhibition Opening at SPUR, San Francisco

2015-02-13T03:09:00-05:00

CCA's Urban Works Agency and OpenScope Studio have partnered with the San Francisco Planning Department and SPUR to launch the exhibition Urbanism From Within, opening with what should be a lively party on Friday, February 20th at 6:30 pm (Eventbrite info here). It's free and open to the public, featuring research work generated by architecture students at CCA that looks into the potential of secondary units (more commonly known as in-law units) as a strategy for adding tens of thousands of units to the city's housing stock without disturbing it's pristine, NIMBY-approved facade. By examining and breaking down the most typical housing/building types in San Francisco and illustrating their historical, current, and possible future uses, the exhibition hopes to re-frame public views of the potential of new architectures within old envelopes. The exhibition will feature intricate and beautiful drawings, maps, and models of the research work done by the students in a seminar last fall ta...

Creative Architecture Machines Final Review 2014

2014-12-02T22:15:36-05:00

The final review / discussion of the Creative Architecture Machines studio at CCA, run by Jason Kelly Johnson and Michael Shiloh, will be this Saturday, Dec 6 from 10:30-3:30. The review will be run as a hybrid science fair / architecture review. There are six unique research clusters, each focused on designing and prototyping novel fabrication machines, then using them to produce something extraordinary. The six clusters are:

3d Printing Swarm (mobile robots create domes out of salt, rice and saw dust)
Deltabot SkyPrint (regenerative robots crate animal habitats from mining industry detritus)
Omni Spiderbots (bio-remediation robots scan, drill and implant bio-matter)
Spaceweaver (robotic loom weaves fibrous vertical forms, columns and towers)
Robotic Casting Jig (re-programmable re-usable smart jig for casting)

I was fortunate to sit in on the mid-review a month ago and the projects were awe-inspiring, and in my opinion much more interesting and sophisticated than what we were able to p...

Creative Architecture Machines Colloquium at the California College of the Arts

2014-11-14T00:26:00-05:00

The Creative Architecture Machines Colloquium, held at CCA's Timken Hall on November 3rd and hosted by the Digital Craft Lab and arranged by Jason Kelly Johnson of CCA and Future Cities Lab, was a special chance to gather luminaries in the field of robotics and 3D printing in architecture from around the Bay Area in the same room to hear their varying research trajectories and thinkings about the future of manufacturing architecture. And if you're wondering what a "colloquium" is, don't worry, so did most of the audience. Explained Jason, it's a much less formal version of a symposium. The atmosphere was light and each of the five speakers gave short presentations about their current work, some rendered that very morning.

Jason Kelly Johnson set the tone for the discussion with an introduction to the work of the Creative Architecture Machines studio at CCA, a class I was a part of a year ago.

Joshua Zabel, Director of Digital Fabrication at Kreysler & Associates, recalled the company...

Faulders Studio's The Crystalline World: SUBHEDRAL

2014-07-01T18:45:00-04:00

Last summer a small group of CCA graduate students assisted professor Thom Faulders in assembling a project called The Crystalline World: SUBHEDRAL, a collaboration with CCA professor Lynn Marie Kirby, for theElectronic Pacific exhibition at SOMArts. This provided an opportunity to speculate about the unique (and prosaic) aspects of installation construction. Is a project influenced by it’s diffuse method of assembly? And what kinds of micro-utopian characteristics arise in the making of a piece of art as opposed to it’s consumption?

Micro-utopias, or relational aesthetics, can be described as a participatory artistic process. It is an art that expresses itself in creating relationships between viewers, not with the piece. For The Crystalline World, the organizational structure was rhizomatic: each worker had input in the construction methodology. The only top-down (possibly even fascist) element of the project was our utter subservience to the 3D model. The assembly process began wi...

CCA+AIR (Audi Innovation Research) Fellowship: Beyond Mobility

2014-06-11T03:52:00-04:00

Audi AG's innovation research office in San Francisco has teamed up with CCA for a two week intensive workshop, an interdisciplinary collaboration geared towards exploring the car as a key intersection in a broader network of interconnected devices. Spearheaded on the AIR side by Markus Auerbach and on the CCA side by Jason Kelly Johnson and Nataly Gattegno of Future Cities Lab from the architecture department and Haakon Faste from the Interactive Design department, the workshop is running from June 6th to the 20th and has brought together students from the industrial design, interior design, graduate design, design MBA, and undergraduate and graduate architecture departments.

We have begun to formulate a series of provocations about the future of the car and are exploring the potentials of data, customization, robotics, social networks, etc. to reinvent how we perceive the car among our many interconnected devices. After a couple days of field research out and about San Francisco ou...

Creative Architecture Machines Final Review

2013-12-04T22:35:57-05:00

Our advanced options studio this semester at CCA has been focused on engineering and constructing Grasshopper/Firefly/Arduino-controlled three-dimensional object producing machines, our own 3D printer prototypes, built from scratch. The final review will be this Saturday, December 7th, and it should be a fun, science-fair-like event, with invited jurors including luminaries from Bot n' Dolly, Otherlab, Samsung, Autodesk, The Exploratorium, Arduino, Future Cities Lab, Instructables and more. So please feel free to stop on by from about 2 to 4, it should be a fun and exciting time.

CCA Graduate Architecture Programs Info Night

2013-11-01T02:47:19-04:00

It's difficult to judge a visiting lecturer's enjoyability potential because they are an unknown quantity, which will NOT be the issue next Monday night, November 4th, as some of the most compelling professors teaching here at CCA will come together to present the graduate architecture offerings of the MArch (Masters of Architecture, 2 & 3 year) and MAAD (Masters of Advanced Architectural Design, 1 year, three concentrations) programs. Following the informational portion will be pecha-kucha style presentations from the faculty involved:

Neeraj Bhatia: new tenure track professor and principal of The Open Workshop, really excited to hear him speak
Irene Cheng: co-founder of Cheng+Sneyder, previously covered on this blog here and here
Thom Faulders: principal of Faulders Studio and my thesis advisor, always a riveting speaker
Nataly Gattegno: co-founder of Future Cities Lab, whose crazy and amazing installation Hydraspan for the Dissident Futures exhibition can be s...

An Olfactory Archive: 1738-1969 (Test Sites Symposium Exhibition)

2013-10-12T22:28:59-04:00

If you walked into CCA's nave this week you would have been greeted by what appears to be a primitive laboratory experiment, hard metal rods lightly supporting odd flasks and stoppers. But if you got too close to a particular few of them you would have gotten a face full of rank so heinous it stayed in your nostrils and thoughts for hours after. Which was the wonderfully participatory aspect of the Olfactory Archive, curated by David Gissen and Irene Cheng. It encouraged you to share your most shocking favorites with unsuspecting classmates and passersby.

Not all the ambrosias were so offensive, there was a mix of the mellifluous and the mephitic and the mundane. If you were interested in what Philip Johnson's Glass House smelled like, not at one point in time but indexed by decade, then you would have been treated to a noisome thirty year evolution from construction to period colognes to cigarette smoke. For sheer fetid ferocity the hands down (and up nose) winners were "...

The Future Of Architecture Is In Robotic Hands

2013-10-09T21:22:00-04:00

This semester I have the great fortune of being enrolled in Jason Kelly Johnson's (co-founder of Future Cities Lab) Creative Architecture Machines advanced options studio here at CCA. Co-taught with Michael Shiloh, a community manager with Arduino, this studio's focus is on operational architecture through robotics. The first three weeks was concentrated on engineering a machine that produces two-dimensional drawings. After a couple weeks of testing and Arduino workshops my partner Jia Wu and I had five days to design, prototype, wire, code, and build a working robot.

Our idea: Polydexter 1.0, a remote human sensing Arduino-controlled robotic translation arm. Utilizing three axes of control, the movement you put into the analog arm is augmented by the digital arm to produce a drawing by remote. We extrapolated a lot of possible uses: teaching people to write in different languages, translating/editing/censoring your written messages between countries, or, if scaled up, eve...

CCA 2013 Warm-Up Design Charette Competition

2013-10-07T12:01:00-04:00

Studio is put off for a few days in the first week of every fall for CCA Architecture and Interior Design Department's Warm-Up Design Charette Competition and this year saw all of the bachelors and masters and interior design students get thrown into teams of eight to ten members to essentially just blow stuff up. Led by new tenure track professor and lightweight structure savant Mauricio Soto, this year's theme, "Hot Air!", focused on inflatables. Each team received 800 square feet of plastic sheeting and an air compressor as materials to create inflatable structures you could be in, on, or under. The winning team of the three day event was voted for by students and faculty and awarded a $500 gift certificate for our favorite neighborhood art store, Arch. Here are a couple of the projects:

Pneu Twist
Team Members: Betty Nip, Mitchell Sweibell, Maryam Nassajian, Shawn Komlos, Chen Ni, and Aimin Wang
pneu twist is a super pneu take on an old family favorite. The difference is: ...

CCA Fall 2013 Lecture Series

2013-09-10T20:07:03-04:00

The California College of the Arts will host an amazing lecture series this semester, featuring a pretty great panel in mid-October under the topic Test Sites: Experiments in the History of Space, including a return to CCA by Keller Easterling who lectured here last fall. A highlight for me will be a lecture by one of my favorite professors here: Irene Cheng, of Cheng+Snyder, who helmed the spectacular Utopias seminar last semester, which achieved gallery form in the "What is Utopia?" exhibition we put on in the Spring.

Here's the poster for the lecture series designed by graphic design faculty Bob Aufuldish.

Radical Representation (All Tomorrow's Parties) Spring 2013

2013-08-14T14:33:00-04:00

Architecture is consumed through it’s representation. Some say it’s representation is the only true architecture. Radical Representation was an advanced course, taught by Greg Hurcomb with software tutorials by Flori Kryethi, that explored innovative methods of architectural expression through a wide range of digital tools. Focusing on the design triumvirate of Fiction~Cinema~Architecture we were encouraged to develop our ideas through writing to delineate a cohesive path of inquiry.

My project’s avenues of exploration were digital glitches, noise, and the entire background universe of signals that fill the voids of our daily lives. This unnoticed noise can be made corporeal to expose its unobtrusive and latent geographies. Starting from a short video of saran wrap moving in the wind the translucent and refractive material became a filter to contrast against the prosaic backdrop teeming with divisions, corruptions, and masked emotions. The following three images and two video...

Major Changes at the California College of the Arts Architecture Program

2013-07-26T18:16:41-04:00

There will be major changes for the architecture program at CCA this year as Ila Berman, Director of Architecture from 2008 to 2013, will be leaving to take the position of director of the School of Architecture at Waterloo University in Ontario, Canada. Her partner, Mona El Khafif, will also be leaving for a tenure-track position there. I had the privilege of taking her Scanning the City seminar in the fall of 2012. She is an incredible educator and will be a sorely missed resource. There will purportedly be a national search for a new director, while in the interlude the brilliant David Gissen will take over as interim director.

In other news Nataly Gattegno of Future Cities Lab will take over Chris Fallier’s position as chair of the graduate architecture program, both of whom, along with Thom Faulders, will be our thesis advisers for the next year. Should be very exciting!

Business Insider Ranks CCA #18 Design School in the World

2013-04-12T17:48:33-04:00

Business Insider conducted a survey of design professionals and compiled a ranking of the top design schools in the world, in which CCA came in at #18! RISD and MIT were numbers one and two respectively.

WHAT IS UTOPIA?

2013-04-09T19:51:00-04:00

Our graduate architecture seminar—led by our indefatigable professor Irene Cheng—recently put together an exhibition of our individual research projects, in-depth explorations of a particular historic or contemporary utopian venture, in an effort to bring a bit of architectural history and theory to the perpetually art-covered surfaces of our school's nave. Fellow classmate Anesta Iwan and I were in charge of the exhibition and board layouts.

I had fun snapping some photos of us enjoying our efforts after pinning them up. Also, here's the text from the exhibition introduction:

“We can leave it to the literary small fry to solemnly quibble over these phantasies, which today only make us smile, and to crow over the superiority of their own bald reasoning, as compared with such “insanity.” For ourselves, we delight in the stupendously grand thoughts and germs of thought that everywhere break out through their phantastic covering, and to which these Philistines are blind.”
-F...