“How do you make things?

You could lay out the process as a line. You start at one end with a bundle of goals and plans. As you work hard—designing, writing, rehearsing, or doing whatever else is required—you progress along the line. At some point, you get to the end, with a product, a novel, a performance. You’re finished!

You could lay out the process that way. But you’d be doing it wrong.”

These words are taken from a chapter entitled ‘Iteration’, from New Liberal Arts. If you want to read the rest, you can download a free digital copy of the book here. I’d recommend you do. I have only read a small part of the book myself (so far), but it’s free, it’s thought provoking, and it’s concise (three qualities I love in a book).

In fact, one of the proposed courses is on brevity.

If you want to own a hardcopy, too bad. There were only 200 and they sold out in 8 hours.

Declan Shaw’s of Interactive Installation, Bird Soundscapes incorporate a dynamic three dimensional acoustic environment of birdsong which perform accelerated diurnal cycles. Individual ‘birds’ occupy positions in space, which move about in birdlike patterns and also reacting to the movement of the inhabitants. This is accompanied by a coloured light cycle which denotes the times of day.

In this manner the listener may hear an accumulating dawn chorus of bird personalities while her environment is filled with an intensifying morning blue light. She may go on the hear crows and blackbirds interacting in a red evening dusk. Shaws work was developed within the Bartlett School of Architectures Anechoic Chamber hence the menacing image of the spikey walls but the intention is that the constructed environment would be placed within an existing negative waiting space, such as a hospital ward or waiting room, with a view to encouraging positive waiting behaviour in its occupants.

As well as the installation Declan produced a series of college images depicting this changing acoustic environments intended effects in the hospital patients experience of these spaces.

Declan describes how “the context of this project is the construction of a space for waiting and for exploiting the possibilities of waiting. While drawing distinctions between waiting situations as pleasure/play and waiting as punishment/pain, I fixed on the notion of reverie as a crucial condition for the encouragement of the positive possibilities of waiting, which include: rest, renewal, inspired creativity and a sense of satisfaction and wellbeing.” Declans doesn’t have a website but his work and work of many other students from Unit 14 at the Bartlett can be found here

The Royal College of Art Show opened last week with some excellent work which no doubt wmmna will cover in depth. One project I particularly enjoyed was Tom Foulsham, an ex-Bartlett graduate and now graduate of the RCA’s Design Products programme.

In some ways Tom’s work could be compared to Heath Robinson’s imagined machines and certainly he has that mad inventor spirit, but underneath this is a sensitivity that should not be underestimated. His intricate machines are both playful and though provoking.

They are beautifully balanced and responsive objects that play with the forces of nature as well as the forces of information. His work and very much more great work is on display at the RCA this week.

I first saw Jimenez Lai’s work when it was presented at Materials & Applications in LA. Finally he’s put together a website so I thought I’d cover 2 recent pieces of his work. Jimenez describes his work as an exploration of “hypothetical scenarios of experimental architecture. By pressing alternate conditions against our context, the projects aim at interrogating different points of views and broaden the ways we engage conventions. Graphic novels and physical installations are the two primary weapons of choice, and we believe representation is more than half the battle. The drawings often explore storylines of architecture and urbanism that dramatize exaggerated realities. The projects swerve back into the physical world via the interactive installations derived from the stories. These installations are attempts to better understand the spatial implications of the two-dimensional fiction.”

Phalanstery Module

This installation grown from the hypothesizes that in zero-gravity, one can rotate (in) architecture and treat all elevations as plans – i.e., walls, ceilings and floors. Without gravity, all surfaces can be occupied. In essence, the distinctions between orthographic drawings become obsolete. To this end the installation will be a large constantly rotating structure which visitors will be able to approach and use differently every time.

The installation is inspired by a comic book Lai created to assert commentaries regarding the Broadacre City– a 1932 Frank Lloyd Wright vision of a Utopian city where each family own a one-acre agrarian plot and commutes by private automobile. Wright never really took into account that space and natural resources are limited. We are witnessing such an impact today. Wealthier citizens have fled cities for sprawling suburban sub-divisions.

Downtown cores are left to the poor, and cities are becoming increasingly ineffective in controlling energy consumption. Lai takes Broadacre City to outer space. Flipping it on its side and making it an Ark are ways he signifies that resources are finite. It is a world where every man (gets) a dwelling unit and every man (gets) a pointlessly boring job… until the citizen dies.”

Point Clouds

This project uses a set of standard modules and simple geometric rules to compose a system. The com- plexity Lies within the softness of the connection points.

When force is applied to one rotary joint, the entire structure will respond with further geometrical transformations. Softness allows the piece to be interactive, as visitors can converse with the impermanence of its form. Affordances, as defined by psychologist James J. Gibson, embody all action possibilities latent in the environment, objectively measurable and independent of the individual’s ability to recognize them.

Dimensions, in this case, has various meanings in the many ways our bodies may instinctively inform actions such as lean, sit, grab, skip or pull. Any storyline of the above appropriations will have a physical morphology in the diagram. Self-illuminating pigments are applied to the control points to highlight its topology at night. This project engages the limits of the body as abstractions of architectural programs and their relationships to the formal resolutions.

It’s that time of the year and the Bartlett Summer Show begins today. Over 450 students are showing innovative drawings, models, devices, texts, animations and installations. I find it usually takes a few visits to absorb everything.

Location
Main Quadrangle and Slade Galleries of UCL, Gower St, London WC1

Official show opening by Massimiliano Fuksas
Friday 26 June, 19.00

Exhibition open to the public
Saturday 27 June, 10.00 – 20.30
Sunday 28 June, 10.00 – 17.30
Monday 29 June, 10.00 – 20.30
Tuesday 30 June, 10.00 – 18.00
Wednesday 1 & Thursday 2 July, 10.00 – 17.00
Friday 3 July, 10.00 – 20.30
Saturday 4 July, 10.00 – 17.00 (show closes)

Guided exhibition tour by the Bartlett Professors of Architecture
Tuesday 30 June, please arrive at 6.30pm for 6.45pm start, tour duration approximately 1 hour.

The thing that really struck me walking through the museum was the balance throughout. I don’t mean in a the-building-is-almost-falling-down-but-not kinda way: I’m referring to an unusually great combination of art and architecture, and how it felt.

The museum building was designed by a team made up of the architects Ruy Jervis d’Athouguia, Pedro Cid and Alberto Pessoa and hints (rather strongly) at inspiration from Mies van der Rohe. The building’s minimalist concrete form sits in a beautifully landscaped park, concealing bunker-like yet welcoming rooms of marble and wood floors and ceilings. Blinds obscuring the view to outside through floor to ceiling windows reduce the outside image almost to paintings.

Inside, one of the most amazing art collections I’ve ever seen is actually given the space it deserves. The minimalist architecture is the perfect backdrop for an intricately crafted collection which includes everything from Egyptian treasures to Chinese and Japanese tapestries and ceramics, to Rembrants, Rubens’, and Monets. I’m not an art historian, by any stretch of the imagination, but clearly only the best was good enough for this collector.

That one man managed to gather this collection is unbelievable. That it has all ended up together in this setting is even more amazing. In a time when I’m thinking more and more about interactive and reactive installations, and the opportunities an increasing number of permanent commissions will bring, 2 hours walking through the Gulbenkian has reminded me in the significance of balance. Although completely static, save the variation of the small amount of natural light entering the museum, I would dare describe the resulting feeling of being in this museum as immersive. The combination of light, minimal architecture, a subtle connection to the surrounding landscape and an extremely detailed collection of artworks, drew everyone in a way I’ve rarely experienced. I could go on about this forever but I won’t – I guess I just look forward to seeing more and more interactive installations that find this balance too.

Yes, that’s a formula 1 racetrack you can see in front of the hotel in the image below.

The grid-shell encompassing the hotel complex consists of 5,800 pivoting diamond shaped glass panels. With the help of lighting integrated behind each panel, designed in conjunction with Arup Lighting in NYC, the project is said to ‘respond visually and tectonically to it’s environment.

I am yet to figure out for sure whether the individual panels of this facade actually move, but I do remember hearing about a year ago that this was the intention. Regardless of whether this ambitious plan made it through to the final design – the result is definitely spectacular. This hotel is, after all, in the desert.

Asymptote’s founders and partners Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture quote their inspiration for the architectural landmark as ‘aesthetics and forms associated with speed, movement and spectacle to the artistry and geometries forming the basis of ancient Islamic art and craft traditions.’

In 2004 Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture were awarded the Frederick Kiesler Prize for Architecture and the Arts in recognition of contributions to the progress and merging of Arts and Architecture. For this project, I’ll be keen to see what they do with the facade (content?) once it’s up and running.

InteractiveArchitecture.org is pleased to announce a free public OpenFrameworks Workshop on 13th – 14th June 2009 lead by Mehmet Akten, Marek Bereza and Joel Gethin Lewis and hosted by University College London’s MSc Adaptive Architecture & Computation Programme.

“Lights On” audio visual performance driven by openFrameworks created for the Ars Electronica museum in Linz, Austria

This is intended to be the starting point for a number of workshops using OpenFrameworks with an introductory session suitable for people with no “oF” experience but some basic understanding of scripting in Processing, Flash, etc.

Workshop Details

Dates: Saturday 13th & Sunday 14th June 2009
Time: 10:00 – 17:00

Location: University College London, Gower Street
Building: Wilkins
Room: Old Refectory

If you are interested in participating in the workshop please contact us immediately as places are limited. The workshop is free, all you need is a laptop. You may want to bring along other interfaces, microcontrollers, cameras etc that you’d like to play with. Complete Details of Workshop and how to sign up

Interactive Architecture is evolving after 4 years of me writing some 388 articles on my own. I’ve invited Lighting Designer Ben Kreukniet from United Visual Artists & Interaction Designer Paul Skinner from Digit to contribute to the blog as guest writers.