With the summer season behind us and a new term just started, Archinect takes a moment to showcase the work of UCLA Architecture and Urban Design's IDEAS campus located near Culver City, Calif. The campus is an incubator for exploration of various examples of digital design software, fabrication techniques, and other tools to help students during their introduction to the post-professional Master of Science in Architecture and Urban Design program. 

At the IDEAS campus, students are able to work and collaborate with faculty while examining four areas of research within the architecture profession: Entertainment, Mobility, Technology, and Urban Strategy. 

For this year's exhibition, the studio explored and experimented with objects curated from contemporary sculptures from international artists. The focus was to understand different modeling techniques including aggregation, texturing, massing, surface, topology, and tessellation. 

"Students researched both the artwork and artist to learn about the intent of the object and engage with the artistic, intellectual and cultural ideas behind each piece," the studio shares. "These sculptures were then documented in digital space and further interrogated by extracting a kit of parts integral to the pieces. Students combined and reassembled selected parts, creating new assemblies through 'kitbashing.'"

After exploring these new assemblies, the new compositions were fabricated and animated using various forms of media to help showcase how the work could be experienced and understood by the viewer. 

"From image composites to augmented reality, viewers experience the new assemblies as animated sequences, immersive environments and user configured constructions."

The summer studio was coordinated by Benjamin Ennemoser and Marta Nowak and instructed by Julia Koerner, David Jimenez Iniesta, Leah Wulfman, and Jiahao (Kaiho) Yu.

IDEAS Program Director: Valerie Leblond

Student Work by: Aron Carcamo, Ruoyang Chen, Shuaijing Chen, Weonwoo Choi, Wenhan Dong, Revathi Ganesh, Luis Garcia, Xinran Ge, Anatoli Georgiadou, Ali Hussain Hakami, Yuxuan He, Jingyi Huang, Diptini Kapoor, Onur Koyun, Sangmee Lee, Lecan Li, Qingyang Li, Huilin Liu, Xuanhong Liu, Zhishan Liu, Qi Long, Alekya Malladi, Yeawon Min, Yueshi Min, Akshada Moham Muley, Negin Nayeri, Neha Oswal, Chunsu Ouyang, Gaurav Puri, Akash Ragde, Aishwarya Rajasekar,  Gesthimani Roumpani, Pranay Sharma, Ruchi Singhania, Tianyi Song, Nan-Tse Su, Chinmayi Suri, Irem Uygur, Jingyi Wang, Shilin Wang, Tong Wang, Xianrui Wang, Xiyan Wang, Jinfeng Wu, Yiyin Wu, Dingkai Xiang, Wei Xie, Siyuan Xu, Liang Yang, Ruohan Yang, Yanrong Yang, Sihang Zeng, Linyi Zhang, Wenzhao Zhang, Xiaoman Zhang, Yuexuan Zhang, Yusi Zhang, Xue Zhao, Zhi Zhou, Xiran Wang