18 posts tagged “advanced architecture”

Following an invitation by Margerita Flores, the director of the architecture department of the ©CEDIM, Monterrey, Mexico, I joined into their "Summer-stars" workshop weeks. I prepared a workshop for the students dealing with geological phenomena as source of inspiration for the understanding of emergent conditions as design technique.

 It was interesting to discuss with the students possible consequences for the design of architectural entities dealing with issues such as erosion, tectonics and foldings.  Especially dealing with terms that are already well introduced design techniques in architecture, such as folding and tectonics, but trying to find a new flavor within the opportunities, proved to be an exiting issue within the workshop. Like with other courses we have done so far, the students had to create first an abstract machine. In this case the abstract machine consisted of chicken-wire and plaster in order to observe emergent behavior within the reaction of the materials to various intensities, such as varying gravity, viscosity, friction and more. In subsequent steps, the  students informed a digital model with insights from the abstract machine to generate their project. The project consisted of a simple pavilion that included one specific architectonic task: a stair. This is important in order to understand how form and geometry can generate specific architectonic conditions in a continuous fashion. The entire workshop took 6 days, and included lunch talks every day about specific issues such as A Glimpse of Contemporary Architecture Discourse, The Problem of Rigorosity, Advanced Fabrication Techniques, Advanced Materials, and so on.  I really enjoyed Monterrey, and its breathtaking Panorama. Thank you Margerita Flores, and thank you to Michel Garcia Novak, the very young dean of the School for this invitation.

Following an invitation by the Institute of Architecture at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna (die Angewandte) we joined into a two days design happening, followed by the Architecture Live party. Architecture Live has established itself as a yearly happening at the Angewandte as a platform of presentation of the various studios at the Angewandte. This years idea was to invite several young architecture practices to hold workshops at the studios. The invited practices included Propeller Z, Querkraft, Wendy & Jim, Delugan Meissl, Heri&Salli, Innocad, LOVE, Liquifier and many more.  Here is the brief of our workshop:

Back again in the Bauhaus we started this Semesters Advanced Design Techniques course. The course deals with two specific issues: Component driven Architectures and advanced fabrication techniques. As a role model for the idea of components we rely on the field of botany and here especially  on flowers. The course started with a presentation of this idea and some key terms the students have to use to develop their ideas: inflorescence, plication, venation and ornament. I´m pretty eager to see what the students are going to conceive based on this design environment and the line of thought emerging out of it. Especially the issue of ornament as spatial phenomenon can generate some polemic ideas, bearing loads of opportunities for architectural arguments, such as enclosure, structure,  spatial differentiation and so on. To develop a project the students were asked to pick up the site of the Gropius House at the Meisterhäuser, close to the Bauhaus, and replace the present postwar reconstruction with a new structure. 

This is a recent competition entry for a retail chain in Japan

The Blossom Store

The store concept Blossom explores the opportunities present in the morphologies of floral entities as point of departure for the design of architectural conditions. The sensorial and spatial experiences co-notated with the manifold qualities of blooming flowers, from their topological qualities and the distribution of sepals and petals to form the body of the flower, are scrutinized for their architectural qualities and incorporated in the design of Blossom. Even the olfactory qualities could be implied as substantial part of the design. To include the programmatic elements of a store the concept of delamination is applied. In delaminating layers from the surrounding envelope of the store, pockets of varying sizes are generated. These pockets include, according to their size elements like office, storage, changing booths and elements that could be used as presentation tablets.

 System:

Although the designs visual appearance is of heterogeneous nature, the underlying logic of the design is informed by a repetitive system related to the allover theme of floration. Nodes represent the core components of the system, connecting a specific variety of petals. This system of node and petal form the innermost layer of the delamination effect described above. The second layer provides the store with the necessary depth to include programmatic points, tagging along the node and petal system in its morphology. The third layer is comprised by a simple box, which represents in the renderings a possible space provided for the store in an existing building. This outermost layer bears a vivid coloration in order to bleed the color into the glossy white interior.

The described system is highly pliable, providing a wide range of opportunities for various setups. It can be applied to different envelopes, independent from their shape. Additionally the various layers can be used in multiple combinations to populate different environments. The store can occupy an empty space, it can be setup to perform as a pavilion by combining the two inner layers, or it can accommodate itself in a shop-in-shop scenario by using the innermost layer only. Appearance

Fabrication:

The fabrication process relies on computational fabrication methods extensively. The nodes, the most complex part of the project, are CNC milled elements. These nodes are connected by the petals, which comprise of water jet cutted flat panels. These panels are laminated to provide the necessary structural integrity.  In order to reduce the energy consumption in this project a twofold method is applied: On the one hand the strict application of computational workflow in the design and fabrication process, providing the chance to minimize material and energy consumption in the making. On the other hand the use of natural, biologically degradable materials to minimize pollution effects.  Some of the possible solutions include the use of pressed cocoa fibers panels, wood for the nodes, biopolymers for the glossy white coating, and OLEDS (Organic Light Emitting Diodes) for the illumination of the space.

On invitation by the ESARQ, Sandra and I joined into the SIMAE Conference in Barcelona. The intense, three day conference covered a wide range of issues involved in the field of contemporary architecture design. The speakers could be devided into three categories: Practitioners of the Architecture discipline, Theorists and figures involved in 

the information of the Architecture field. Whilst Ali Rahim, head of the New York based company CAP and Evan Douglis definitely belong into the first category, Neal Leach, Michael Winestock and Bernard Cache belong to the second. (Yes, I know, Bernard Cache is fabricating a lot around this days, but I still don´t consider him an entrepreneur.)

Today we received a couple of 3D printed models for the show Float. The exhibition will open upcoming Friday in the Gallery Zeitkunst, in Kitzbühel. In case you don´t know Kitzbühel, it is one of the favorite ski resorts for the wealthy of this planet, on the same level as St Moritz or Cortina. It is also the home of the winter seasons sport highlight, the famed Hahnenkamm downhill race. The exhibition in Kitzbühel will feature works by Franz Schubert, Fritz Biedermann and SPAN. We will show a series of huge high resolution Lambda prints, depicting digitally generated blossoms, in high glossy black, Animations of Blossoms and components as well as some 3D prints of the digital model. You can see a couple of images of the models below. 

Friday night I attended the opening Venue of the exhibition The Austrian Winery Boom which Sandra and myself designed last year. The show was commissioned by the Architekturzentrum Wien, and previously on show at the Austrian Cultural Forum in NYC, before moving on to the MODAA Gallery in Culver City, Los Angeles. The shows opening was pretty crowded by a bunch of architecture afficionados. At the midday opening session I was introduced to Wolfgang Puck, Austria´s representative of Haute Cuisine in Los Angeles and favorite cook to numerous Hollywood celebrities. (No way to escape Hollywood in LA, it seems.) The shows opening was also attended by Dietmar Steiner, the director of the Architekturzentrum Wien (Az W), who repeated his introductory words for the show several times this day. Peter Noever, the director of the MAK in Vienna, also happened to be in LA and dropped by to check out the show. The show was well received and I had to answer many, many times answers on the shows concept and design.

Now this was the end of a 9 days module that Sandra and I held at the Urban Strategies studio of the Angewandte. Urban Strategies is the postgraduate program of the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. This module was for the freshmen of the course, in order to familiarize them with a couple of concepts of advanced architecture design. Issues such as emergence, self-organization, gradients, topologies and more are explored within this course, and casted into embryonic ideas of possible urban textures. We will continue the course next semester and develop the ideas that emerged throughout the course in more detail. Hernan Diaz Alonso, Head of LA based architecture firm Xefirotarch was so kind to join into the panel of critics, the panel also included Brennan Buck, Oliver Bertram, Reiner Zettl and my partner Sandra Manninger.

Today a copy of the Indian architecture Magazine IA&B arrived at our office. This edition of the magazine deals entirely with the issue of the Digital Design. The magazine invited us to contribute to this edition with our body of work. IA&B published among other works also the exhibition design for the Austrian Winery Boom, the Marui Project as well as some explorations in performative surfaces and the economy of form. Some of the later issues rely on phenomena emerging from the field of botany such as mimicking the veining present in botanical specimens with the fabrication of corrugated surfaces emerging out of the machinic process of CNC milling. I will eventually also publish the text Trefoil of Obsessions, that was also published in the latest issue of IA&B, here in this blog.

Today we assembled the first prototype of the pods for the exhibition Housing in Vienna. The pieces fit perfectly into each other. We tested a couple of variations of how to include the illumination within the bumps of the pod. The fabrication of the shells will be finished this week, so that the guys at the AzW can finish applying the graphic designs on the transparent top of the pod. Early January we are going to assemble an entire colony of pods to demonstrate the exhibition setting to the Vienna housing authorities who commissioned the exhibition design.