Behind the scenes at the SmartGeometry workshops in Troy, New York, Archinect
"Ecology Beyond Building - Interview with Thomas Rau" in Experimental Green Strategies: Redefining Ecological Design Research, Architectural Design, November 2011
"Hive Mind - Rupert Soar Slices Through Structures Built By Termites To Develop a Revolutionary Method of Fabrication", Mark, August/ September 2011
rupert_soar.pdf | |
File Size: | 5047 kb |
File Type: |
"Philip Beesley- Life In Venice", Canada Pavilion Preview at Venice Biennale, Azure, September 2010
Beyond Floor Wall and Roof - Is Biology a New Ecological Model for Architecture?, Jenny E Sabin profiled in Mark 23, December 2009
jenny_sabin_mark_magazine.pdf | |
File Size: | 2150 kb |
File Type: |
"A Cool New Leaf - Sustainable design from Copenhagen and Berlin", Clear, December 2009
acoolnewleaf_small.pdf | |
File Size: | 2263 kb |
File Type: |
Report from Copenhagen Design Week, September 2009
Report from Vitra summer design Workshops at Boisbuchet, France, Metropolis Magazine, August 2009
Review of Smart Geometry 2009, Archinect.com
How are new digital tools changing the way buildings are designed and built? The annual Smart Geometry conference offers a glimpse into the future of innovative design and building. What seems apparent from presentations at the Alumni Summit and the Conference Day is that in practice, architects are using many types of digital tools over the course of a single project. The future of CAD seems to be in software links and custom scripts, not in the development of a single, multi-tasking CAD package. A designer could start with Ecotect, add a bit of Rhino VB script, then a little bit of Visual Studio or Generative Components and then output to both Autocad and Microstation due to the various functionality of both. In this uncertain economic climate, with (all?) high profile architectural projects ‘on hold’, there is little doubt that understanding at least the potentials –if not the specifics—of parametric design is a useful design skill. The annual SmartGeometry conference is particularly relevant because it is about research and practice, combing theory and practical experience. Students of architecture graduating now know they need to have quality examples of their digital skills in order have a competitive CV. This is changing the way schools teach design and technology. In the last five years many schools of architecture have extended their workshop facilities to include laser cutters and 3D printers and there seems to be an expensive game of one-upmanship with ever increasing complexity in multi-axis robot milling machines. The two new robots at Harvard’s GSD may be 6 axis robots, but the TU Vienna has a 7 axis machine, and ETH Zurich has an 8 axis robot....Read more here.
News on Carbon Counting - Green feature for Architectural Record, March 2009
The organizations responsible for the world’s three leading environmental assessment systems for buildings have agreed to establish consistent methods for measuring and reporting carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. The U.K.-based Building Research Establishment (BRE) Trust, the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), and the Green Building Council of Australia, plan to "map and develop common metrics to measure emissions of CO2 equivalents from new homes and buildings.” Along with the UK Green Building Council, the three groups, which administer the BREEAM, LEED, and Green Star rating systems respectively, signed a memorandum of understanding at the Ecobuild conference held in London earlier this month. “If we are to address the impacts of climate change and give a strong message to the industry, it is important that all the rating tools work together,” says Martin Townsend, director of BREEAM. The goal of the efforts, according to the organizations, is to allow comparisons of buildings rated by different tools. Read more here.
100% Futures Tokyo, Tokyo Designers Week 2008, Archinect.com
One small but significant part of 100% Design was 100% Futures, a show of student works that has historically been an important part of Tokyo Design Week. This is the first year that the student work has been included at the main venue of 100% Design and the students made sure 100% Futures rose to the challenge of participating along side grown up work. While end of year or graduate design student shows are nothing new, 100% Futures turned the concept on its head in scale and scope. More than 50 schools in Japan exhibiting the best student work and selective curating focused their energy on creating a coherent exhibition. Students of industrial design, interior design, architecture, graphic design, and spatial design were focused around the concepts of eat, move, comfort, protect and touch... Read more here.
Architecture Supermodels, Smart Geometry 2008
What is parametric design and why do we need it? It used to be that buildings were designed using computer drafting programs, such as industry standards AutoCAD or MicroStation, and then analyzed by engineers using their own software before going to environmental engineers with yet another software. Parametric design is changing the way this works. Standards in architecture are shifting, and setting out a building is done in terms of geometry, mathematic calculations, and real geometry, not relying on translating various computer modeling files to the site plan. Students of new parametric design software will need to know their elliptical arcs from their B-Spline curves – welcome to the world of Smart Geometry. Read more here.
Doug Aitken 'SleepWalkers' NYC, Clear Magazine
Provocative and theatrical, Aitken’s work at MOMA was inspired by the idea of ‘turning the building inside out’, of framing and showcasing the exterior of the building and its environment, the city, rather than shutting out context and focusing on what’s inside the museum. In this busy part of New York, thousands of passers-by have marveled at the electrified façade and watched clips or ‘broken narratives’ as Aitken calls them, of this site-specific cinema, without even realizing what they are seeing or who made it. This free, outdoor spectacle invites interaction and draws in viewers, who could spend the better part of an evening walking around the building, sitting in the garden and watching four screens simultaneously, all without watching bits more than once. Although ‘Sleepwalkers’ has no beginning or end, to see all the narratives, it is necessary to move around the building and see all the screens... Read more in Clear Magazine issue 23.
London design studio Hulger profiled in Clear Magazine
"It seems strange that the bulb, an object so synonymous with ideas, is almost entirely absent of imagination" ponders Nicholas Roope, founder of London based design studio HULGER. Bored with the well meaning, but uninspiring low energy bulbs on the market, HULGER has come up with a new concept, PLUMEN, which “reinvents the utilitarian light bulb” with an advancement of both form and performance. This prototype (not currently in production but Roope hopes this will happen in 2008) is currently at the MOMA in New York in an exhibition about innovation and design ‘Design and the Elastic Mind’. "So much of what makes an object interesting is what’s bound up around it" says Roope, "often product design does the opposite, editing out the meaning and focusing on the form, the aesthetic". This refreshing approach is partly because Roope trained as a sculptor, evident in PLUMEN’s expressive form, not a product designer, and also because HULGER is more of a point of view than a brand. HULGER strives to improve useful, everyday things and celebrate them as potentially poetic and personal. Roope explains "as we developed the HULGER idea, it became obvious that our approach and thought process could easily touch other technologies, performing similar transformations on anything from CD players to sewing machines." More in Clear Magazine Issue 27.
'Three More Architects to Watch', Telegraph Newspaper, print and online editions
Runners-up in the 2005 Young Architect of the Year Award, Daniel Rosbottom and David Howarth founded DRDH in 1999 and teach together at London Metropolitan University. Their works to date have been small and unhurried, from the radical refurbishment of a Victorian house, inserting an exposed concrete structure inside to define the spaces, to a timber flat-pack interior for a 30sqm London flat. New, larger works include a housing scheme in Hamburg and a project in the Moroccan desert. Read more here.
Recycling Design at the [RE]Design Exhibition, London
A chandelier made of hundreds of packets of crisps folded up to look like diamonds, wallpaper printed on brightly coloured recycled newspaper and hard wearing garden furniture fashioned from old car tires -- Play Design, a cutting edge British design consultancy headed up by product designer Steven Koch, focuses on environmental and sustainable designs that are both fashionable and environmentally friendly. With the ‘Tyred Chair’, Koch became inspired by the twenty million tires that are wasted per year in the UK, and began using the recycled materials as a way of adding personality and individuality to the minimal design. Each design is hand-made to order, and they vary in size and shape. At Redesign, a eco-design exhibition launched as part of London’s 100% Design last year, Play Design exhibited the innovative ‘Milkit Lamp’, a do-it-yourself kit of parts that provides all one needs to create lamp that can be customized with a range of easy to apply graphics. The ‘Milkit Lamp’ is successful because it is an elegant and simple object, it allows the transformation of a plastic milk jug into a piece of contemporary design. Read more in Clear Magazine Issue 24.
'Screen Screen Green' Klein Dytham Architects, Art Press Magazine
People have always aspired to monumental architecture, from the Great Pyramids in Egypt, St Peter’s square in Rome, Sir Christopher Wren’s St Paul’s Cathedral in London, to Modern examples such as Louis Kahn’s Salk Institute in La Jolla California and Mies Van Der Rohe’s Seagram’s Building in New York. But monumental architecture isn’t just about imposing scale, robust materials or everlasting strength. Many buildings have these characteristics, yet most are not monumental. There is an intangible quality, with the potential for deeper cultural meaning, that places architecture in a position to reflect, interpret and mediate people’s relationship to the world. Together with qualities of permanence and scale comes a way of interpreting history and culture, space and landscape. Like monumentality, ephemerality in architecture is difficult quality to accurately define, although perhaps easier to achieve. The ephemeral suggests lightness, changeability, portability and, above all, impermanence. Some projects even manage to combine the qualities of both monumentality and ephemerality such as artist Robert Smithson‘s Spiral Getty landscape installation in Utah that emerges from time to time from the depths of Salt Lake, or the lightweight genius of architect Buckminster Fuller’s experimentation with the geometric possibilities of geodesic domes. Translated and Published in French in Art Press May 2005.
'Fusing Concepts' Fuseproject, Clear Magazine
Over the next year between five and seven million children in the developing world will receive a vivid green laptop designed by California-based Fuseproject, each costing their respective governments about $100. Two years ago Yves Behar, founder of Fuseproject, became involved with this radical design and educational project ‘One Laptop Per Child’, a non-profit organization founded by Nicholas Negroponte of MIT, the noted co-founder and director of the MIT Media Laboratory. Behar’s rugged, hard wearing and beautiful design is fairly dubbed ‘the most significant design project in the developing world’ and is obviously Fuseproject’s most ambitious project to date from both a technical and design standpoint. Behar explains Fuseproject’s emphasis is on ‘simple and functional designs, not being overly complicated—it is about designing with a sense of humanity’. With an office of about 25 designers in their San Francisco studio, Behar, who trained as an industrial designer, is passionate about the OLPC project. ‘We basically had to reinvent how a laptop is designed, how it is made’ he explains. In order to meet the unbelievably small budget that makes the project possible, the design had to feature a streamlined component system and it had to use less energy and materials than a conventional laptop. The screen and board had to be integrated, the low energy battery and compact handle are all carefully and simply designed to make the project mass producible and inexpensive. Production is fully underway and the manner in which information and access to learning happens in many poor communities in Brazil, Argentina and Libya (to name but a few) will never be the same again. Read more in Clear 26.
David Trubridge, Clear Magazine
British-born Trubridge relocated to New Zealand 15 years ago and from his small home studio, has been developing a series of lights and furniture concerned with space, form and light. His striking ‘Body Raft’ (2000), is a long, banana-shaped rocking recliner that looks like floating hammock (or given his love of boats, perhaps an enclosed canoe) wrapped in strips of timber. This surprising form and lightweight, sustainable design has been featured in dozens of publications about ecological design and design luminary Philip Stark loved it so much he bought two. His new series of timber lights includes ‘Kina’ (the Maori word for sea urchin), a light with an organic form that looks like a woven, flexible lattice shell, opening out at the bottom. Also inspired by the natural world, is ‘Koura’, a light Trubridge says ‘looks a bit like the fresh water crayfish, with its curled up shape’. He was able to test his design ideas by digitally fabricating the pieces of timber on his 3-axis CNC machine in his workshop. The machine is a large cutter that follows directions from a computer to cut out the shapes of the component pieces much more quickly and accurately than if they were done by hand. This process changes the design process in many ways, as it eliminates the need for standardized or repeated parts, (a usual way of saving money and energy in a design) as it is just as easy for the computer to cut unique parts rather than many standardized pieces. Trubridge tries to minimize waste as much as possible, preferring to use plantation grown Australian plywood. “There is less waste than in the conventional machining of square wooden planks that have been sawn out of a round log,’ he explains, “as in the making of plywood the layers are peeled off a round log.”... Read more in Clear 21.
Swedese, Clear Magazine
A philosophy of environmental sustainability coupled with an obsession with quality and craft have kept Swedish furniture producers Swedese pushing the boundaries of experimental furniture design for more than 60 years. Co-founder Yngve Ekstrom, an iconic Modern designer and contemporary of Alvar Alto and Arne Jacobsen, led the creative direction of the company until his death in 1988. His Lamino chair, designed in 1956, remains an internationally distributed Swedese product. Swedese is defining the next wave of influential Scandinavian and international designers through its cooperation with young emerging designers whose work adheres to Swedese’s Modern principles of simplicity, quality and practicality. The lacquered birch ‘Tree Coat Stand’, recently shown at the 2006 IMM Cologne Fair, is collaboration between British designer Michael Young and Icelandic graphic designer Katrin Petursdottir that combines computer aided design and the simple, organic forms of nature. Available in cool Nordic white or bold, graphic, black the product’s design is playful and fun yet classic. More recently, the Hong Kong based duo continued their collaboration in a diverse range of projects including an interior design for a medical centre in Taipei featuring a geometric ‘lace’ wall that looks like a screen of snowflakes, and a series of innovative glass products for Dupont. Read more in Clear Magazine Issue 21.
'Child's Play' Barnaby Barford, Clear Magazine
Aside from his involvement in Thrink, a design consultancy Barford co-founded in 2002 with fellow classmate Andre Klauser, Barford is gaining a reputation as a solo artist for his ingenious small-scale sculptures. He recently made a series of nine small mirrors adorned with small, white, figurines in various poses. “I was preparing for my first major solo show in Miami and the gallery gave me a lot of freedom,” he explains. “I wanted to look at the relationship between a person and their inner self. You can’t lie to a mirror”. This project is concerned with perception and he enjoys subverting everyday objects and giving them new life. Barford’s early works feature his found object figurines painted all white, making them seem abstracted and uniform. This forces the viewer to focus on the formal arrangement and relationships of the figurines to one another. His new series are the same type and scale of the previous objects but coloured with enamel paint. “Painting on them opened up a whole new world” he enthuses. His “Chav Nativity Scene” is part of a new series exploring ideas of social stereotyping and branding. “I’m fascinated by people that spend fortunes on clothes and cars, all to create an impression of themselves to somebody,” he says. Read more here.
Gucci at 85, Clear Magazine
To mark the 85th anniversary, Giannini has designed a limited edition collection of luxury handbags, each reflecting and reworking vintage Gucci themes and styles with a modern twist. In stores from July to December, each of the bags, which can come in various colours and materials including fur, crocodile, snakeskin and velvet, features a Gucci horse bit hardware, its design reinterpreted and updated. Each also has an enamel and brass anniversary plaque marking the 85th anniversary, and exclusive luxury interior linings. Two new bold velvet prints ‘Tartan Web’ and ‘The Bridle’ are striking additions to the Gucci palette. Gucci has dubbed these bags ‘a visual celebration of all that is Gucci today’. The material itself is extraordinarily precious: the GG velvet is hand loomed silk velvet and is crafted by Italian artisans using traditional looming techniques to produce a superior quality weave. With saddle straps and horse bits, the ‘Tartan Web’ design has patchwork style snakeskin and features green and purple jewel-coloured stripes. A trim of rusty Ostrich claws completes the sophisticated collage of materials and textures. “The Bridle” velvet print bag showcases a bold, stylized pattern taking inspiration from vintage Gucci prints of equestrian themes. Additionally, to mark the milestone year, at the Milan Fashion Week in September, a 450 page retrospective in the form of a glossy coffee table book will be unveiled, titled ‘Gucci by Gucci’. The book draws on Gucci’s rich archives of runway images, historic and current product images and patterns. Available in bookstores in November, ‘Gucci by Gucci’ is designed by Doug Lloyd and published by Mondadori Electra press. Read more in Clear Magazine issue 25.
'Birds of a Feather' Heike Buchfelder, Clear Magazine
Heike Buchfelder’s surreal ‘Pluma Cubic’ suspension lamp features thousands of hand-plucked, white, goose feathers, each individually affixed and pointing outwards in a perfect sphere. The restrained form emphasizes the play between the simple shapes, (she also uses cubes) and the stunning, yet utterly bizarre, material qualities of the lampshade’s feathered surface. Buchfelder’s Pluma Cubic lights are the epitome of extreme interior design: luxurious, exclusive, expensive, and hand-finished but not for the faint hearted. More objet d’art than lampshade, these creations are scene-stealers. Exhibiting a Pluma Cubic lamp demands a grand space where the light refracting qualities of the feathers can be fully appreciated and the geometry admired without visual clutter. It is difficult to imagine them on a sales floor. The lights are meticulously detailed and the manufactured frames are sewn with chintz and use up to 4,000 equally graded cockerel or goose feathers. Read more in Clear 23.
'The Myth of Diamonds Revealed', Clear Magazine
In the 13th century, King Louis IX of France established a law that only the king could own diamonds. Whether you believe the cliché that ‘Diamonds are a girls best friend’ or you prefer to stick to the well-advertised ‘four C’s’ (carat, clarity, colour and cut), there is no denying the seductive and emotive qualities of the world’s most glamorous, durable, rare and precious stones. Gemologists revere a diamond’s brilliance (the light reflections from the faceted surfaces), its fire (the spectrum of colors visible in the stone), and scintillation (the glittering flashes of light that are seen when the diamond, light source or the viewer is moved) but for all the scientific explanations and justifications, there is no denying diamonds have an almost supernatural quality. The hardest natural mineral on Earth, named from the ancient Greek adamas or ‘invincible’, diamonds are enormously popular for wedding rings, after becoming popularized by De Beers (the world's largest diamond miner, controlling 40% of the world’s diamonds) whose marketing campaign in the 1940’s brought the idea of the now ubiquitous diamond engagement ring to the masses. The ancient Greeks and Romans believed diamonds were tears of the Gods and in many cultures the stones have been sought to bring power and luck. One can now even buy diamond face cream--an innovative new facial oil by Ray Simons is topped with a microscopic layer of .006ct brilliant cut diamonds, included for their luxurious therapeutic qualities. Imperfectly formed diamonds unsuitable for use as gemstones are also used in industry, where they are known as ‘bort’, as in diamond tipped drill bits and saws and diamond powder as an abrasive. Read more in Clear Issue 26.