TRANSPORT

A SERIES OF VISITS TO LEADING ARCHITECTURAL OFFICES/PRGMS WILL SERVE TO EXPOSE SEMINAR MATERIAL AS CURRENTLY BEING INTEGRATED IN PRACTICE.

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*NEW YORK

image:: www.rex-ny.com | VAKKO HEADQUARTERS’ FACADE COMPONENT

REX >>

REX is an international architecture and design firm based in New York City; the office is led by Joshua Prince-Ramus. Buildings currently under construction include the Dee & Charles Wyly Theatre in Dallas, Texas; Museum Plaza, an art center and mixed-use waterfront development in Louisville, Kentucky; and the new headquarters for Vakko, Turkey’s preeminent fashion house, in Istanbul. Projects in the design phase include the Forward Residence in Manhattan, and Vestbanen, a multi-use development including the new Deichmanske Library and Stenersen Museum in Oslo, Norway. Joshua Prince-Ramus, REX’s president and co-founder, was a founding partner of OMA New York—the American branch of the Rotterdam-based Office for Metropolitan Architecture—and served as its director until redefining the U.S. office as REX in 2006. At OMA New York, he was partner-in-charge of the Seattle Central Library and the Guggenheim Hermitage and Guggenheim Las Vegas Museums. Mr. Prince-Ramus received a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy with distinction from Yale University and a Master of Architecture from Harvard University, where he was the first Araldo Cossutta Fellow and an SOM Fellow. In 2007 he was the Eero Saarinen Professor at the Yale School of Architecture in collaboration with Erez Ella. —> image:: Mike Silver | FIBER-PLACED TRUSS MIKE SILVER ARCHITECTS >> Mike Silver currently directs a multidisciplinary design laboratory based in New York. In collaboration with mathematicians, computer scientists, and engineers his office has worked at a variety of scales and has extensive experience in the design of furnishings, consumer products, web sites and buildings. Today, Silver continues pioneering research in the field of digital mapping, advanced composite manufacturing and software development. His current work explores technologies like L.I.D.A.R., numerically controlled fiber-placement technology and high throughput modeling. As an experimental collaborative Silver’s firm is deeply committed to the precise alignment of advanced technology, poetic consciousness, architectural theory, academic scholarship and the logistics of building construction. — > COMMONWEALTH >> Commonwealth is a speculative art, architecture and design studio based in New York City. Founded in 2005, by Zoë Coombes and Francisco David Boira, Commonwealth is intimately involved with new output processes relevant to Art and Architecture such as three-axis milling and Rapid Prototyping SLA and SLS printing. Our dominant means of thinking through design is software driven, ultimately finding expression within a variety of refined and precise material processes. Three-axis milling of prototypes within the Williamsburg, Brooklyn studio is central our experimental, material interests. While we are focused on 21st century technologies, Commonwealth has a strong understanding of timeless craft processes and regularly collaborates with highly skilled artisans. Commonwealth, draws intensely from the field of Art and is particularly interested in the intersection of artistic problems as they relate to the more collaborative nature of design. >> SOM >> info coming shortly > *BOSTON image:: www.officeda.com | VOROMURO INSTALLATION, ICA Boston 2007 OFFICE DA >> office dA is a boston-based architecture and design firm led by principal partners monica ponce de leon and nader tehrani. the firm’s work ranges in scale from furniture to urban design and infrastructure, with a focus on architecture. office da seizes on the challenges unique to each project–the peculiarities of a site, requirements of program, and the specifics of a target audience–as the catalysts for transformation in architecture. an investigation of the potentials of materials and construction techniques, often imported from fields outside of architecture, is foundation for every design. office da explores unique material qualities in conjunction with traditional and digital techniques, of design and assembly, and resolves every project to a high level of detail. office da’s simultaneous rigor and sensitivity have allowed the firm to develop a portfolio of projects around the world-from boston to caracas to Beijing-which uniquely marry local craft and tradition to global and contemporary techniques. KVA  Kennedy & Violich >> > FAB LAB BOSTON >> Fab Labs are the educational outreach component for the Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2001 the National Science Foundation in Washington, D.C. funded MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms, an ambitious interdisciplinary initiative that is looking beyond the end of the Digital Revolution to ask how a functional description of a system can be embodied in, and abstracted from, a physical form. CBA’s laboratory research on technologies for personal fabrication is complemented by the field “Fab Lab” program that brings prototyping capabilities to under-served communities that have been beyond the reach of conventional technology development and deployment. By making accessible engineering in space (down to microns, through precision machining) and time (down to microseconds, through RISC microcontrollers), these facilities have been uncovering what can be thought of as instrumentation and fabrication divides, and suggesting that they can be addressed by bringing IT development rather than just IT to the masses. The engineering capability for design and fabrication at length and time scales described above opens up numerous possibilities for innovative solutions to common problems. Since local communities themselves foster this innovation, it can lead to sustainable solutions. High-end technological solutions have not been addressing problems faced on the local level as yet; therefore, we believe fab labs will provide a thriving incubator for local micro-businesses. > further site visits: LA :: HELIOS HOUSE office dA in collaboration with johnston marklee and big, LA image:: www.officeda.com >

boston :: stata center, mit campus, GEHRY PARTNERS, photographer>>

la :: walt disney concert hall, GEHRY PARTNERS, photographer >>

boston :: ICA Institute of Contemporary Art, DILLER SCOFIDIO + RENFRO photographer>>

*HARVARD Graduate School of Design

(COMMENCEMENT EXHIBITION)

*MIT

MEDIA LAB / ARCHITECTURE DEPT.

*COLUMBIA

*PRATT (tentative)

*LOS ANGELES postponed

CONTOUR CRAFTING >> *tentative

Contour Crafting (CC) is a layered fabrication technology developed by Dr. Behrokh Khoshnevis of the University of Southern California. Contour Crafting technology has great potential for automating the construction of whole structures as well as sub-components. Using this process, a single house or a colony of houses, each with possibly a different design, may be automatically constructed in a single run, embedded in each house all the conduits for electrical, plumbing and air-conditioning.

The potential applications of this technology are far reaching including but not limited to applications in emergency, low-income, and commercial housing.

Our research also addresses the application of Contour Crafting in building habitats on other planets. Contour Crafting will most probably be one of the very few feasible approaches for building structures on other planets, such as the Moon and Mars, which are being targeted for human colonization before the end of the new century.

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Maximilian’s Schell, 2005

BALL-NOGUES STUDIO >>

Ball-Nogues Studio is an integrated design and fabrication practice that creates experimental built environments to enhance and celebrate the potential for social interaction through sensation, spectacle and physical engagement while striving to infuse the matter of the built environment with a downstream purpose. To achieve these results, we work with unusual materials, develop new digital tools, and apply architectural techniques in unorthodox ways. We share an enthusiasm for the fabrication process as it relates to the built object both physically and poetically by letting the properties, limitations, and economic scenarios associated with a material guide a structure’s ultimate form while developing methods to extend the intertwined boundaries of a material’s aesthetics, physical potential and lifecycle.

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SCI-ARC >>

Greg Lynn FORM: Blobwall Pavilion>>

Blobwall Pavilion is a collaboration between Greg Lynn FORM, Machineous who developed the manufacturing method for the “bricks” and Panelite who produced and distributed the architectural material. It is an innovative redefinition of the brick – architecture’s most basic building unit – into a lightweight object made of colorful plastic and reinterpreted into modular elements. Blobwall Pavilion is a freestanding, indoor/outdoor wall system built of a low-density, recyclable, impact-resistant polymer. The blob unit, or “brick,” is a robotically cut mass-produced hollow tri-lobed shape formed through rotational molding, which is then assembled with interlocking precision to form the wall.

Though Blobwall Pavilion is designed in stock shapes totaling over 500 individual bricks in ten different colors, it can also be configured to custom shapes and color combinations. The varied yellow hues composing the body of the installation in the SCI-Arc Gallery celebrate the material qualities and colors of the roto-molded plastic and are arrayed as if bathed in a warm light so the highlights are not white, but instead crimson, plum and pink. (In September 2008, the Blobwall Pavilion will travel to the Venice Biennale as part of the 11th International Architecture Exhibition, Out There: Architecture Beyond Building.)

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