Disaster Prevention Center
Istanbul, TK, 2011

Prompted by the expectation of a major earthquake in Turkey, the Istanbul Disaster Prevention and Information Center holds a series of disaster simulation galleries, from earthquakes to rainstorms to fires. The building is designed as a single structure that expresses the multiplicitous atmospheres and climates it contains.

Unlike a science museum, where large open halls are sufficient to contain furniture-scale exhibits, the disaster center is a continuous network of distinct spaces. Each exhibit relies on a unique atmosphere and climate supported by its own structural, mechanical and electrical infrastructure.

The exhibit rooms take the form of ‘boulders’ with a single central space at the core surrounded by a ring of infrastructural poche and circulation space. The core of each boulder is a zone of intense atmosphere produced through dramatic effects of lighting, climate and color which leak out to infuse the more neutral lobby and reception spaces around them.

A series of interdependent relationships between ‘boulders’ help to synthesize the varied program into a unified building. While the building may evoke the instability of disaster, its hybrid concrete and steel structure transfers load from one boulder to the next, making it extremely stable – going far beyond current code to allow it to function as a regional shelter and command center in the event of an actual disaster. It’s large ground-level open spaces and terraced landscape are designed to shelter upwards of 1000 people.

The modulated continuity of the building’s spaces allows for multifunctional programming during special events and multilevel passive heating and cooling, while also maintaining subtle thresholds between the education center, conference center and administrative offices. The dramatic entry drive moves under the building allowing for convenient access for conference goers, visitors and employees. On the interior, a single, multilevel loop provides access from ticketing through the lobby and eventually up a grand stair to each element of the education

0 VOTED VOTE VOTE

los angeles CALIFORNIA

UCLA
critic: greg LYNN

suckerPUNCH: Describe your project.

james DIEWALD & matt GOLDSBERRY: Window Shopping Across the Void features three hundred thousand square feet of showrooms for fashion furniture and fine art in downtown Los Angeles. Contemporary media culture’s capacity to distract, captivate and capture large audiences is largely unrivalled by architecture. This is particularly the case in Los Angeles. Our project speculates on the spatial innovation made possible when the potentials of media experience motivate physical organization.

VIDEO 01

Our project is an internalized mass of hyperlinked simultaneous window shopping experiences. An exotic mix of shopping, it mixes the intimate experience of the street with the global nebulous condition of internet shopping to unseat conventions of signage, aperture, robotic media devices and figure/ground.

sP: What or who influenced this project?
jD & mG: Greg Lynn, Sylvia Lavin, Heather Roberge, Los Angeles, Design Research.

sP: What were you reading/listening to/watching while developing this project?
jD & mG: Colin Rowe, Peter Sloterdijk, Jakob von Uexküll, and Thomas A. Sebeok.

0 VOTED VOTE VOTE

new york NEW YORK

Columbia University GSAPP
critic: francois ROCHE with ezio BLASETTI

suckerPUNCH: Describe your project.

mengyi FAN & joseph JUSTUS: The scenario describes a structure that grew out from the ocean—facing a progressive rising of water as its colonizers struggle to maintain an equilibrium. It is forever undergoing constant repair as it struggles to stay afloat—supported only by a system of mechanic agents who supply it with the necessary substances and means to create inhabitable grottoes. Without this ongoing system, the structure would easily collapse, returning back to the depths of the ocean from which it has once risen.

The colonizers live in fragile pockets, grottoes created by the voids between the calcium carbonate deposited by the machines and the resulting upward forces of gases. These spaces are always fluctuating, their morphology adjusting to deal with the constant beating of forces from water currents and pressure. The machines themselves are not immortal—over time as they continue to deposit substance, the calcification process eventually renders them immobile, trapping them in their own secretions. They eventually float to the surface, like the oxygen released by the creation of the structure, and become part of what they had set out to create. Their logic is simple—only flocking towards other machines as they mimic the movements of the currents. The spiraling created by the machines are imprinted in the memory of the structure, layers stratified with the history of the movements.

sP: What or who influenced this project?
mF & jJ: Jacques Cousteau, Greg Egan’s Distress, Werner Herzog, Tim Hawkinson, bubbles.

sP: What were you reading/listening to/watching while developing this project?
mF & jJ: Watching starfish dying, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Sacrifice, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, reading Robert Silverberg’s The World Inside.

sP: Whose work is currently on your radar?
mF & jJ: Atelier Olschinsky, Urs Fischer.

Additonal credits and links:
(n)certainties – acqua alta(2)
Vimeo

symposium: Is Drawing Dead?

Convened at this liminal moment, this symposium will explore drawing in all of its variants and its place in the making of architecture.

Thursday, 02/09 to Saturday, 02/11
Paul Rudolph Hall
Yale School of Architecture
180 York Street
New Haven, Connecticut 06511

Since the early Renaissance the defining act of architecture has been the production of drawings. Originating within the site-bound paradigm of ancient and medieval building practice, architecture as a distinct professional and intellectual endeavor emerged from a newfound ability to define and depict form, space, material, and structure. As conventions of scale, measure, projection, and perspective were developed and sharpened, drawing not only became a tool for creative ideation but also offered designers the potential for control and authorship of the process with patrons, builders, and larger audiences.

Over time, drawing practice proved sufficiently stable and flexible to remain the architect’s primary instrument of investigation and expression. However, as the promise of digital technology is increasingly fulfilled by sophisticated methodologies, such as parametric modeling, computational design, digital design and fabrication, and Building Information Management (BIM), drawing has come under stress and become ill-defined and moribund. Developments over the past decade have challenged a practice that has flourished for a half millennium leading one to ask: Is drawing dead?

For some, the current moment is one of crisis. The proliferation of digital tools has radically changed the historic role of drawing, once the signature skill of the architectural profession. Drawing, and consequently, the entire architectural profession is withering while architects surrender creative agency to digital processes. Designers are demoted to information managers, and the seductive verisimilitude of digital rendering supplants critical reflection. This rapid transformation has led many, such as the Finnish architect and educator Juhani Pallasmaa, to call for “slowness” in face of the digitization of design.

Others see the moment as one of unparalleled opportunity. Digital design has matured through what Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the MIT Media Lab, has called the “accommodative” and “adaptive” phases of integration into conventional design processes. It is now on the brink of the “evolutionary” phase in which digital processes assist designers to advance the formal possibilities of building design while also altering conventional understanding of the process of design and construction through previously unimagined paradigms of conception, representation, and distribution.

Friday, 02/10: Afternoon Session, 2:00 PM
THE VOICE OF DRAWING: HISTORY, MEANING, AND RESISTANCE
Introduction: Victor Agran
—Cammy Brothers, Deanna Petherbridge; Juhani Pallasmaa, Antoine Picon.
Moderator: Jennifer Leung

Evening Session, 6:30 PM
KEYNOTE ADDRESS: Sir Peter Cook
Respondent: Stanislaus von Moos

Saturday, 02/11: Morning Session, 9:30 AM
BURNING BRIDGES: QUESTIONING PRACTICE
Introduction: Turner Books
—Julie Dorsey, Andrew Witt, Patrik Schumacher, Casey Reas, Marvin Chun
Discussion Moderator: Michael Young

Afternoon Session, 2:00 PM
THE CRITICAL ACT
Introduction: George Knight Yale University
—Preston Scott Cohen, Marion Weiss, Greg Lynn, Michael Graves
Discussion Moderator: Sunil Bald Yale University
Concluding Address: Mario Carpo

7 VOTED VOTE VOTE

troy NEW YORK

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI)
critic: carla LEITAO

suckerPUNCH: Describe your project.

vivian BRATONE: The typology of the archive is suffering from the multitudinous ways in which we share information and knowledge today. The citadel-like archives of hard-to-access and deeply nested materials form a landscape that today’s society rarely needs to traverse. On a parallel downward trajectory is mankind’s link to his environment. Information overload has led to a virtual disorientation and on a larger scale, a decrease in territorial identity as the growth and development of our cities are increasing shaped by non-material fluxes.

As a multifunctional, a-scalar presence situating itself partly above and partly within coastal urban cities in the year 2048, the Hydra Index is an institution working to bridge information gaps between inhabitants and their rapidly decaying environment. Literally creating different fronts for itself to operate on, the particles swarm with artificial intelligence and are capable of collecting data, communicating with other particles and existing research institutions, and coming into contact with humans. Shaped by both material and non-material fluxes, the intelligence and potential of the institution lies in its distributed form as well as haptic capabilities. At its core, the project tries to explore ways in which models for architecture can integrate/mediate information and generate knowledge in order to reactive static archival typologies while shedding light on the fragility of the surrounding environment.

sP: What or who influenced this project?
vB: This project was completed in my thesis year under the guidance of Carla Leitao [AUMstudio] who brought the idea of clouds and distributed networks to the partnership at the very beginning. As a thesis cluster, my fellow students and I worked with these same themes in very different ways, and our individual projects were in continual dialogues with one another as they developed. The Hydra Index was heavily born of a materials research that started with a comprehensive present day overview and analysis in order to give the design a basis as well as a springboard into 2048.

sP: What were you reading/listening to/watching while developing this project?
vB: reading: Katherine Hayles, Chris Anderson, Sanford Kwinter, Bruce Sterling, Lev Manovich, John Ruskin, Karl Chu, Jaques Derrida, Phillip Ball, Vernor Vinge, and Jorge Luis Borges. Listening: a lot of Tycho, Pretty Lights, and the Fugees.

sP: Whose work is currently on your radar?
vB: Since completing this project I’ve started work on a masters in Sustainable Urbanism in Germany so my focus has shifted a bit from back then, but I still read a lot in and around the topics of distributed networks, informatics, biomimicry, models and space, visualizations, media space, and design proposals from the year 2040 and onward!

Additional credits and links:
The project was the winner of the 2011 Rensselaer Harriet R. Peck Prize.

On Thursday, February 9th world-renowned architect Francis Kéré will give a lecture at Cooper Union. The lecture, titled “Bridging the Gap,” is a collaborative effort between the Architectural League of New York City and the Cooper Union Institute for Sustainable Design.

In a discussion of his recent and current projects, Kéré will consider new ways architects can exchange knowledge with communities and will propose new models for practice.

Tickets for the general public are $15.00.

francis KÉRÉ
“Bridging the Gap”
Thrusday, 02/09
7.00 pm / Great Hall
The Cooper Union
Foundation Building, 7 East 7th Street
New York, NEW YORK

220 VOTED VOTE VOTE

san luis obispo CALIFORNIA

Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo
critic: stephen PHILLIPS

suckerPUNCH: Describe your project.

brian HARMS: My thesis Involved the reconsideration of the role of robotic technology within the factory. The project is a flexible robotic manufacturing plant located at the edge of the Port of Los Angeles adjacent to San Pedro. It aims to rethink/reconfigure/redesign this production-oriented technology in a way that allows the factory’s program, atmosphere, and physical presence to be constantly renegotiated by the same technology it houses.

VIDEO 01
VIDEO 02
VIDEO 03

My project is concerned with freeing the robots from their fixed positions and their repetitive tasks and release them into the factory so that they may perform various tasks in various locations. The production hall then becomes a series of nodal stations which may be rented by companies to produce anything from jewelry to automobiles.

The primary focus of this project is the production hall of the factory. The vast hall is populated with production “hives” – reconfigurable stacks of workable manufacturing space – which are designed to be custom tailored to a specific client/product to meet their manufacturing needs. The goal of the complex is to move away from accepted methods of manufacturing – seeing current methods as too linear, too inflexible, and under-utilizing existing robotic technology (for example, using a 6-axis robot arm, which has the potential to be programmed to accomplish a seemingly infinite number of tasks, to repeat the same operation over and over, from a fixed position along a line).

The end result is a project which is majorly influenced by the robotic inhabitants of the building. To better understand the relationship between the two I designed one of the factory’s robot operatives (nicknamed A_FAB). This yielded certain technical/mechanical/aesthetic inspirations and constraints to help define the spaces it would inhabit. A_FAB is a walking Hexapod robot with the ability to create/alter it’s environment. Intended for production supervision and light manufacturing tasks (3d printing in this case) this team of robots also have the capacity to transform the factory. Over time, the robots will reappropriate building materials as they see fit and print/construct new architectural elements in their wake.

sP: What or who influenced this project?
bH: The vast arduino/processing/grasshopper/firefly community, connecting digital and physical realms via sensing and actuation, investigating the simultaneity of physical and digital elements.

sP:lWhat were you reading/listening to/watching while developing this project?:
bH: Listening: Deadmau5, Chromeo, Flux Pavilion, Daft Punk. Reading: Rossum’s Universal Robots, Physical Computing.

sP: Whose work is currently on your radar?
bH: The happenings at SCI-Arc’s Robot House, future cities lab, Andy Payne’s work @ the GSD.

HWKN’s “Wendy” wins MoMA PS1’s 2012 Young Architects Program (YAP).

From the designers: Wendy does not play the typical architecture game of ecological apology – instead she is pro-active. . That is why Wendy is composed of nylon fabric treated with a ground breaking titania nanoparticle spray to neutralize airborne pollutants. During the summer of 2012 Wendy will clean the air to an equivalent of taking 260 cars off the road. Wendy’s boundary is defined by tools like shade, wind, rain, music, and visual identity to reach past the confines of physical limits. Wendy crafts an environment – not just a space. Spikey arms reach out with micro-programs like blasts of cool air, music, water canons and mists to create social zones throughout the courtyard.

Any thoughts? See more HERE.

massimo SCOLARI
lecture: “Representations”
Thursday, 02/09
6.15 pm / Paul Rudolph Hall
Yale School of Architecture

180 York Street

New Haven, Connecticut 06511

suckerPUNCH: Describe your project.

murmur: Our proposal wears a loose cloak of color that sweeps lightly across the landscape, leaving elegant contours in its wake. Resembling large sails, the building’s surfaces appear to flutter as lenticular color effects enliven its surfaces. The building’s figure remains elusive like a body concealed behind a loose dress. This elusiveness animates the project’s changing silhouette and draws relationships between the project and the surrounding urban fabric.

Despite its large scale, the museum experience is punctuated by unique and dramatic spaces that move from vast and horizontal to tall and sculptural. Our galleries are both separated and connected by interstitial voids that cascade through the interior and organize visitor circulation. While our cloak protects artwork from the heat and potential damage of direct daylight, it also opens public amenity and lobby spaces to the exterior and defines outdoor spaces including a central art plaza where visitors and staff alike gather for events and exhibitions.

Our cloak draws the organizational and the cosmetic together through the use of sheet logics. The project’s surfaces, both its envelopes and suspended roof canopies, are clad in colorful, glazed ceramic extrusions, capitalizing on the robust ceramics industry of the Yingge District. Each extrusion is v-shaped with unequal faces. The smaller face is glazed a deep blue color. The larger face changes from vibrant yellow to rich purple depending on its location on the building. Here, color is selected in relation to solar exposure, spatial adjacency and massing. The color deepens as spaces become more enclosed and immersive. Across the project, color is not assigned to individual faces; rather it is allowed to roll over corners and creases. This heightens the experience of the façade as vast, flowing sheets. High contrast colors are selected for the outer faces of the building to captivate viewers from a distance while subtle color variations are selected for the pedestrian spaces of the central art plaza.

Design team: Heather Roberge with James Diewald, Juliet Hsieh, Liesl Margolin, and Benzi Rodman