‘Constructing Realities’ is the summer exhibition at Arup’s Phase 2 Gallery presenting some of the best of London’s young graduate architecture students work. It follows last years Digital Hinterlands exhibition which brought together masters student work from across London’s four leading architecture schools, the AA, the Bartlett, Westminster and RCA.

Justin Goodyre – A Prototype for an Adaptive Bloom

This years exhibition focuses on the best work from the new Postgraduate Certificate Course in Advanced Architectural Research, set up at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, to give students with Masters degrees the opportunity to take their work to a further stage development. The exhibition shows how some of the best Masters portfolios and theses contain the seeds of serious design research proposals, and how these might be taken forward to create new types of place, novel interactive building elements and new façade and structural systems.

Tetsuo Nagata – Monomyths

Architecture and engineering have a history where research and practice go hand in hand, where many great practices have grown as a result of fundamental research and where many research projects arise from groundbreaking design. This is especially true during periods of economic inactivity when recent modes of working are called into question and new modes (sometimes based on rediscovered historical precedent) are established. This can lead to the formation of innovative practices and to the start of academic careers in research and teaching.

Matt Shaw – Subverting the LiDAR landscape

Constructing Realities only shows the tip of the research iceberg these students have gone through turning dozens of drawings, experiments, physical and software prototypes into standalone pieces. Work presented includes a prototype responsive screen proposed as a speculative stage set, site specific responsive installations investigating themes of digital participatory storytelling, virtual environments exploring maze and labyrinths as apposing models for spatial navigation, and laser scanning drawings exploiting the potential for error, mistruth, mistake and subversion within their production.

Vlad Tenu – Minimal Surfaces as Architectural Prototypes

The exhibition runs until the 1st October 2010

website

FABRICATE is an International Peer Reviewed Conference with supporting publication and exhibition to be held at The Building Centre in London from 15-16 April 2011. Discussing the progressive integration of digital design with manufacturing processes, and its impact on design and making in the 21st century, FABRICATE will bring together pioneers in design and making within architecture, construction, engineering, manufacturing, materials technology and computation. Discussion on key themes will include: how digital fabrication technologies are enabling new creative and construction opportunities, the difficult gap that exists between digital modeling and its realization, material performance and manipulation, off-site and on-site construction, interdisciplinary education, economic and sustainable contexts.

Keynote Speakers (clockwise): Mark Burry, Matthias Kohler, Philip Beesley and Neri Oxman.

FABRICATE has emerged as the first in a series of focused events from the highly successful ‘Digital Architecture London’ Conference and ‘Digital Hinterlands’ Exhibition in September 2009. Organised by The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London in collaboration with The Building Centre London, this conference intends to frame discussion around the presentation of built or partially built works by individuals or collaborators in research, practice and industry selected from submissions through our Call for Works (deadline 10 September 2010).

Gramazio & Kohler’s R-O-B. Brick fabrication robot which will be exhibited alongside the conference

Representing the broad disciplinary spectrum from design to production, the presentation of built work will contribute alongside leading invited speakers from Australia, Europe, North America, and Asia. A significant and supportive context for the event will be provided by London’s extensive network of global creative consultancies, many no more than a short stroll away from the venue.

We welcome original, innovative and pioneering projects for the Call for Works and we would also encouraged works in progress to enter too. Submission requirements emphasize strong and informative visual material with succinct analytical text and project synopsis. Selected conference submissions together with articles from keynote speakers will be featured in ‘FABRICATE: Making Digital Architecture’ published by Riverside Architectural Press and launched at the conference.

Dezeen are running a competition to win copies of my recent book Digital Architecture: Passages Through Hinterlands.

http://www.dezeen.com/2010/06/10/competition-five-copies-of-digital-architecture-to-be-won

Homesense is an open research project collaboration between Tinker London and EDF R&D. Bringing open collaboration methods of online communities to physical infrastructures in the home selected households will create their own smart homes and live with the technologies that they have developed themselves without any prior technical expertise.

Over the autumn of 2010, 6 households across Europe will be selected to take part in Homesense and as a result, have access to the latest in open source hardware and software tools. Homes in the UK, France and Italy will decide what they want to do with the tools in their own context, and share the results with the world. Each household will receive support from their own local expert, also selected from the DIY electronics community, who will help them design tools, tackle problems as they emerge and help share the experience of living with smart things in the home.

More information can be found here

The Archigram Archival Project makes the work of the seminal architectural group Archigram available free online for public viewing and academic study. The project was run by EXP, an architectural research group at the University of Westminster. Archigram Began Life as a Magazine produced at home by the members of the group, showing experimental work to a growing, global audience. Nine (and a half) seminal, individually designed, hugely influential, and now very rare magazines were produced between 1961 and 1974. The last ‘half’ was an update on the group’s office work rather than a ‘full’ Archigram magazine. The Six Members of Archigram are Peter Cook, David Greene, Mike Webb, Ron Herron, Warren Chalk and Dennis Crompton. Cook, Greene and Webb met in 1961, collaborated on the first Archigram magazine, later inviting Herron, Chalk and Crompton to join them, and the magazine name stuck to them as a group.

More Than 200 Projects are included in the Archigram Archival Project. The AAP uses the group’s mainly chronological numbering system and includes everything given an Archigram project number. This comprises projects done by members before they met, the Archigram magazines (grouped together at no. 100), the projects done by Archigram as a group between 1961 and 1974, and some later projects.

Speed of Light celebrates the tenth anniversary of broadband in the UK. Stripped back to its essentials, optical fibre is a thin strand of glass, with nothing more than a flickering beam of light traveling along it. United Visual Artists have used this beam as the starting point for the work.

Speed of Light consists of 6 site specific installations connected through light and sound. The story begins with an input from the audience, which is transferred into a pathway of light, leading through the atmospheric environment of the Bargehouse. The continuous line of light evolves through each installation in turn shifting in intensity and form. Speed of Light uses over 148 lasers across four floors and six rooms of the Bargehouse, a raw and industrial warehouse on the South Bank.

Speed of Light opened on the 9th of April and runs through to the 19th, so this weekend is your last chance to see it!

Presented by Virgin Media, for more information visit the Speed of Light Website

Thomas Schielke sent me his youtube presentation of Luminous ceilings a few months ago and usually I bin such emails since I like to find things for myself but I really enjoyed the way this research was put together (except the chessey music). Thomas explains that besides these ceilings providing spacious impressions they this work always metaphors the natural sky. “The historical observation of ceilings reveals that the image of heaven, which reached a theological culmination in the luminous Renaissance stucco techniques, turned into large-scale light emanating surfaces.”

There are few courses as extraordinarily ambitious as the Interactive Environments Minor a semester-long project at TU Delft organized by the Faculty of Architecture – hyperBODY and Industrial Design and Engineering – ID-StudioLab.

“Throughout the course, three interdisciplinary groups of students supported by TU Delft researchers and guest teachers have designed and built three interactive lounge pavilions. The pavilions attract people to enter, facilitate relaxation and provide a refuge from daily chores.”

“Each of these structures is a dynamic system, which communicates with its visitors across different modalities. The installations not only actively adapt to their users’ actions, but autonomously develop a will and behaviour of their own. In this way interactive architectural environments come to life, engaging their occupants in an unprecedented experience of a continuous dialogue with the occupied space.”

While he’s been too modest to put his name up front on these projects, the real passion and brains behind this project has been Tomasz Jaskiewicz bringing together undergraduate students from a range of degree courses to create a unique design space occupied by programmers, engineers, architects and designers. I look forward to seeing how this evolves in future.

You can find out more at http://www.interactive-environments.nl/

“Sublime Flesh: Architectural Experiments for Sacred and Sublime Spaces” brings together, for the first time, new designs for contemporary spiritual spaces developed by students at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. A collection of research projects located in international cities including Istanbul, Rome, Turin, Lisbon, Havana and Miami, each explores a unique sense of sacredness and the Sublime. The complex nature of these themes is articulated in a series of exquisite models that express a new ornamental, spatial and technological approach and also a reconsidered religious and cultural dimension for contemporary architecture design.

Johan Voordouw, Printed Aedicules - Library for Religious Manuscripts, Tivoli 2009

If your not able to make it to London for this show a number of the architects featured also appear in Digital Architecture: Passages Through Hinterlands including co-author Sara Shafiei, Marjan Colletti, Marcos Cruz, Johan Voordouw, Kenny Tsui and Tobias Klien. For those who can come. It opens tonight and runs till April 11th.

Kenny Tsui, Veiled Voids – Chapel Extension at the Basilica of St. Clemente, Rome 2007

Sacred Spaces have long been the apotheosis of architectural genius; buildings created by some of the greatest names in architectural history in which stylistic and spatial innovations are revealed and new technologies tested and developed. The theory and theology of Sacred Spaces holds renewed interest in the current historic moment where religious faith is under intense scrutiny.

Kenny Tsui, Veiled Voids – Chapel Extension at the Basilica of St. Clemente, Rome 2007

Sublime Spaces are primarily associated with experience bound up in the powers of nature, but as nature has changed throughout the ages, so has our sense of the Sublime. Expressing grand passions and utopian ideas, Sublime Spaces illuminate the emotional involvement between the creator and the user of architecture spaces.

Vicky Patsalis, Arcade for Sacred Relicts at the Museum of Anatomy, Turin 2009

Housed in the Nave of Christ Church Spitalfields and displaying designs for churches, mosques and other spiritual spaces, the exhibition will offer a direct dialogue between historic and contemporary theology, theory and practice. The exhibition will be accompanied by a symposium in which key architects, historians and critics discuss contemporary architecture in the context of the exhibition. Speakers are Sir Peter Cook, Marjan Colletti, Rev Rod Green, Robert Harbison, Ali Mangera, Natasha Sandmeier, Yael Reisner, and Marcos Cruz (chair).

Here’s a great project that came out of the Adapative Architecture and Computation programme at the Bartlett School of Architecture. ‘Adaptive Fa[ca]de’ by Marilena Skavara explores the functional possibilities and performative characteristics of cellular automata (CA). In addition to the unique emergent behaviour of CA, a neural network enables a further computational layer to evolve CA behaviour to the context of its surrounding environment.

Building upon the early work of Conway’s ‘Game of life’ and Stephen Wolfram’s extensive research on the wider implementation of CA, ‘Adaptive Fa[ca]de’ becomes a living adapting skin, constantly training itself from the history of its own errors and achievements. For a more detailed description of the project, read Marilena’s article for Vague Terrain.