21 posts tagged “digital architecture”

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

Here is the link to an Interview I gave for Serial Consign. The conversation with Greg J. Smith was really great and I hope you also enjoy the discussion we had on issues such as Geometry, the Brancusi Museum, digital fabrication, advanced design in architecture and modes of practice:

Matias del Campo has been assigned as curator of the South American section of the upcoming Architecture Biennale Beijing ABB. Following an invitation by Neil Leach, Matias del Campo will also present SPAN´s body of work at the conference that will take place during the opening reception of the Biennale. The main topic of this Beijing Biennale is (Im)Material Processes - New Digital Techniques for Architecture.

Starting fall this year I have been assigned to teach the Advanced Architecture Studio at the Bauhaus Dessau Institute of Architecture. The studio will concentrate this fall on the exploration of one specific task, emerging from the field of advanced architecture thinking. I will post more details of the Studio outline soon. You can check out the previous course blog here

Based on some of the recent explorations in our practice we designed this semesters task for the Students of the Dessau Institute of Architecture, Bauhaus Dessau: to scrutinize floral entities an their underlying geometric logic to create spatial conditions:

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. 

Following an invitation by Kas Oosterhuis I travelled to Delft for a lecture at the Hyperbody Studio at the TU-Delft, followed by a short stint workshop. The Hyperbody Studios home is the, ONL designed, iWeb pavilion which was setup in front of the Architecture faculty within the TU-Delft campus. Kas Oosterhuis is the head of the architecture practice ONL as well as the head of the Hyperbody Studio. The Studio gained global fame for its explorations in the field of responsive, interactive architecture.

 The lecture I held focussed on the recent work of my practice SPAN, spanning issues such as the  compulsive desire to speculate about architectural opportunities in the presence of animated matter, organic entities and their underlying geometrical and mathematical presence and how this research is informed by a manifold variety of sources reaching from Science Fiction and Fashion to Biology and Botany. The workshop focused on issues such as spores, pollination and colonization, mainly steering along the line of scripted populations.

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.)