75 posts tagged “architecture”

This Semester I had three students to coach as second adviser for their Thesis work at the Bauhaus Dessau, DIA Dessau Institute of architecture. They all had the same typology, a highriser. All of them used computational design techniques to explore the morphology of the highriser, especially in the aspects of performativity. Sandra and I travelled to Dessau for the presentation of all the thesis works that spanned two days of presenations. One very special guest appeared on invitation by Prof. Alfred Jacoby director of the postgraduate master course of the DIA: Lars Lerup, Dean of Rice University in Texas. A University I consider highly interesting considering the amazing faculty that includes the likes of Sanford Kwinter, David Erdman, Clover Lee and Sean Lally.

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.)

Well, its not hard to guess which is the best place in the US for an exhibition about Wineries. Right, you got it: Napa Valley....give the man, lady a penny! After a successful stint in fantastic Los Angeles the show The Austrian Winery Boom moved on to Napa, the US winemaking heartland. I joined for the exhibition opening and a little winery tour through Napa.

 The exhibition, curated by the Architekturzentrum Wien is on show in Copia, an institution dedicated to Wine, Food and the Arts. Frankly said I was surprised about the extent of the rather modestly sounding institution. It´s a full fledged Museum, about the size of the Kunsthal in Rotterdam, or the Wexner Center. I loved the wonderful, diagonal garden, featuring a full range of fruits and vegetables, used in the Museums fabulous Restaurant (It better be...remember: Wine, Food and the Arts!). The beautiful Cherry Blossom was almost unbearable. The Garden was filled with the scent of fresh spices and flowers. 

Last Friday, following an Invitation by Wolf D. Prix (Coop Himmelb(l)au) and Reiner Zettl, I joined into the Panel of Critics for the Diploma Presentation of the Density group. The Postgraduate Students of the Angewandte had to present their final Thesis to receive the Master of Science degree. The Panel included Wolf D. Prix, Jeffrey Kippnis, Rainer Pirker, Robert Neumeyer and Brennan Buck (Assistant, Greg Lynn Studio) . The postgraduate course is called Urban Srategies, and that is basically what the students presented.

The last two weeks Sandra and myself have been conducting a workshop at the Genetic Architecture Master course of the ESARQ in Barcelona. The main Issue of the workshop was the exploration of the opportunities present in the manyfold conditions of floral entities. The explored issue included venetion, plication, inflorescence, topology and ornament.

After a short research stint the students had to apply their specific findings to the design of a Flowerstore. The store was supposed to be a free standing structure about 180m2 size. For the first, hands on, exploration, we made a short excursion to the Park Güell, in order to scrutinize flowers, and to examine Gaudis work in terms of relations to floral ornamentation. The harder work was to avoid simple mimicking the observed floral conditions, but to apply it in accordance to the discussed issues.  After 9 days of hard work the students presented their work to a Jury we put together including Marco Verde and Max Zinnecker from Barcelona based architecture firm Cloud 9. I have to say that both Sandra and myself were astounded by the enormous progress the students made in nine days.

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. 

Here are a couple of images of the test assembly we put together yesterday. We tested if everything works as we planed, and how long it needs to setup a portion of the exhibition "Housing in Vienna". The record for building up one pod was set by Phillip, one of the AzW´s hands, with 3min and 42 sec. The Podium of the Architekturzentrum Wien (AzW) doubled as impromptu exhibition space, providing enough space for one colony which at the end had a size of 20ft by 9ft. This colony consisted of eight individuals. Now the entire population consists of forty pods, you get an image of the final appereance.

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.

At the moment we are working on a new exhibition design, commissioned by the AzW in Vienna. The topic of the exhibition Housing in Vienna and deals with the quality of subsidized residential housing in Vienna. Vienna has an interesting history on this term, rooted in the red Vienna of the 20ies of the twentieth century. The efforts continued after the second world war, and by today Viennese authorities take pride in the tradition of providing the sector of social housing with the highest possible quality in terms of the architecture and living standard.The main focus of the exhibition lies on the projects of the last decade and the present. As we had to design the exhibition as a traveling exhibition we had to think about ease of setup, lightweightness and simple transport. Again we relied on the concept of pods, as we did also for The Austrian Winery Boom. (PS.: Still on show at the Austrian Cultural Forum in NYC)
This time we changed the way how the pods interact with each other. The show in New York relied on the combination of three different pods to form a family of objects. This time we used a mathematical tessellation as basis of the setup.

The Cairo Tessellation makes it possible to create one repeating pod that can be assembled in a manyfold way. Different groups of pods cover the various typologies of housing projects described in the exhibition.
The fabrication method: The computer generated form was divided into three sections: Upper Shell, Lower Shell and Limbs. In this way we saved pieces to be assembled to one pod. It´s only three pieces that fit into each other and are connected by small cable fasteners. The forms were milled as negatives by a three axis CNC milling machine. The molds were then casted into hard material to facilitate the vacumforming process. Yesterday I checked out the first test shells. Next week we hopefully will have a finished prototype, and then we can finish the fabrication of the pieces.

The 4 day long conference of the IASS (International Association of Shells and Spatial Structures) in Venice turned out to be a very interesting venue. The enormous amount of lectures included lectures about the strucutural engineering of complex obejects, advanced material applications, computational design methods for complex geometries, programmable molds for glass and concrete casting and more.

Some of the lecturers: Manfred Grohmann (Bollinger Grohmann), Werner Sobek, Rivka Oxman,  Sawako Kaijima and many more. Our paper Moments of Transition was accepted for publishing and oral presentation within the conference. It was interesting to join some discussion sessions dealing with contemporary approaches in architecture and engineering. Apparently there is a confusion in the discourse regarding the terminology. For example the meaning of the term Freeform Design: does it mean that it is free of form, as a result of the form finding process induced by the ideal mathematical, or physical models? Or does it mean that they are freeform because of the architects hand inducing an object freely with form? I tend to the first opinion, and tend to be suspicious about the second, as it lacks precision in the description of the form, especially in terms of computational design. Along with the presentations and the discussions the organizers of the conference put together a splendid program including a visit to the Guggenheim Museum Venice and a great Gala Dinner outside Venice in a Palladio Villa.