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.
Vicky Patsalis, Arcade for Sacred Relicts at the Museum of Anatomy, Turin 2009
“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.
Joshua Noble’s new issue of Vague Terrain is definately worth a look. He described this issue as “an exploration of space, functionality in space, and the relationship of the body to the systems around it. All technologies reshape the body and the space around the body, from the bow and arrow to the steam engine to the telephone. It may be that we are beginning to truly see how computing and ubiquitous devices will once again reshape our bodies and our conceptions of ourselves in space. It is with this emphasis that we present a selection of thinkers, artists, architects, and designers and examine and explore how their ideas will shape art, aesthetics, design, living spaces, and social structures and how those ideas will ultimately be shaped by their users and their spaces.”
Articles have been written by Golan Levin, Jonah Brucker-Cohen, Marilena Skavara, Mark Shepard, Pierre Proske and Joshua himself.
Reflexive Architecture Machines envisions architecture that is self-organizing, capable of transforming itself in response to changes in its environment or use. It re-imagines how we shape and assemble conventional materials, like rubber, plastic, and wood through a combination of material and computational processes to develop more complex relations between parts and wholes. This fundamentally challenges the static nature of conventional building materials and sensitizes them to the ephemeral and dynamic qualities of environmental conditions like heat, moisture, air chemistry and gravity. This exhibition in the University of Buffalo Art Gallery presents faculty and student research in responsive materials conducted at the Center for Architecture and Situated Technologies at the School of Architecture and Urban Planning. It displays the products of the design lab, presented through drawings, models, tools, material studies and working prototypes that demonstrate the process by which projects are conceived, researched, and developed.
Projects on view include Allotropic Systems designed by Nicholas Bruscia, which uses flexible rubber molds to produce self-similar plastic casts. By reusing the same mold to produce one plastic sibling after another both plastic’s and rubber’s mutability is exploited to yield a considerable amount of formal variety.
Matthew T. Hume’s Warped offers experiments in plywood construction featuring a set of walls and arches composed from mechanically joined wood plys that change their shape in response to atmospheric moisture by twisting and bending between open and closed conditions. Omar Khan’s Gravity Screens and Open Columns explore the possibilities offered by elastomers for developing an organically kinetic architecture. They use the unique quality of this material to build collapsible and expandable structures that move similar to plants and respond to information gathered by electronic sensors. Omar Khan will also be talking at the Bartlett School of Architecture this coming Wednesday Evening. The lecture is free and open to the public. Details 6.30pm Wednesday 24 February 2010. Darwin Lecture Theatre, Darwin Building, Gower Street, London, WC1
