56 posts tagged “design”

Here are some images of the final review of the studio Sandra and I teached this semester at the Esarq in Barcelona. The studio is part of the Genetic Architecture Studio, a postgraduate course at the Universidad Internacional de Catalunya exploring novel architectural conditions emerging out of the collision of natural science and computational 

design techniques. This semesters task was to design a combination of Bar and Butterfly house on the premises of the parc Guell in Barcelona. The site marks one of the highest points of the park, unfolding in lavish views over Barcelona. The students explorations encompassed topological conditions as well as botanical phenomena such as veining and infloresce

Recently we have been working on a chandelier design, a huge ceiling lamp that can illuminate the space in a twofold method. It has an opening on the top and the bottom, in a diagonal layout. The concept plays with ideas of gradient light scattering. The light bounces inside a tube that form the diagonal connection between the apertures. The entire model is a seamless, topological body, articulated by a series of sinews and folds which create specific shadow patterns. The raw body of the chandelier is fabricated in two components by a seven axis industrial strenght robot. 

We were lucky to get access again to the 7Axis Industrial robot of the TU-Vienna. We have been thinking about a specific Sofa & Ottoman in recent times, it came in perfectly handy that we had the possibility to acess the robot, because it is the only practical fabrication solution for a prototype and the mold. As the robot can also access areas of the piece that would be difficult for a 5Axis and impossible for a 3Axis milling machine.

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. 

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.

Sandra and I are teaching a workshop at the Bauhaus Dessau in Germany. The Dessau Institute of Architecture resides right beside the famous Bauhaus building, designed by Walter Gropius, the mythical birthplace of modern design.

On a personal level I have to say that it is of course a great honor to teach in this famous school, with a distinguished history in design and architecture. Considering that people like Mies van der Rohe, Laszlo Moholy Nagy, Wasiliy Kandinsky and Marcel Breuer used to be in the Faculty of this school, says enough.
The course we are teaching deals with issues such as selforganization, and the behaviour of molecule populations informed by intensive forces such as friction, varying gravitational forces and viscosity as a mean of architectural design. In a first stage, the students had to create a plaster model, an "Abstract Machine" depicting the behaviour described above. After scrutinizing the model for the resulting spatial patterns, created by the process, the students have to create a digital translation, a computational model of the observed phenomena. I will post the link to the studios blog as soon as we finished the course, end of december.