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
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.
I don’t usually advertise jobs on the blog but this is an opportunity to work with the Bartlett Interactive Architecture Workshop! Its a 2 year position and available for the right candidate at £22K PA plus £4K benefits. You need to be an architecture or design engineering graduate, preferably with experience of detail design and hands on workshop skills. You will be based in Litchfield and at UCL (UK) . The job is to help design, prototype, test and install a new interactive retrofit facade product. Contact Stephen Gage.
“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.
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 has been quiet for the past 6 months mainly due to taking on a new teaching position at the Bartlett School of Architecture’s Adaptive Architecture and Computation Masters. More about this in the near future but for now all I’ll say is that my plan is to get blogging back into my weekly routine so if anyone has any interesting suggestions for new articles please let me know.
Exploded Axonometric of his most recent electro-acoustic system
Architect Richard Roberts electro-acoustic systems have been developed to explore the sonic properties of environments, and reveal the way in which sound and space co-habit one another. The system uses speakers and panels of resonating metal and gains its input and mode of operation through the cyclical feedback of sound waves from the environment in which it is placed. It is extremely reactive and capable of changing in real-time to anything that alters the acoustic properties of the environment that it exists within.
Richard using one of his electro-acoustic systems to explore the sonic properties of Fort Brockhurst, Portsmouth
Through this work Richard describes how he “discovered that sound is an effective method with which one can explore first and second order cybernetic principles, and that any observer is an integral and inescapable part of their own acoustic space.” Richard explorative works are refined through iterative processes involving prototypes, experimental models, digital animations and drawings. His work is currently being presented at the Pask Present exhibition being held in Vienna from 26th March to 4th April 2008.
Shaun Murray‘s projects are harbingers for a meaningful ecological (both machinic and natural) audit of specific sites and the development of a series of tactics and protocols that can deliver to architects a full understanding of their sites and of the agents, provocateurs, cybernetic systems and disparate observers and drifters that influence and use them in some way.
Modern architecture has currently failed to provide architects with these now very necessary tools for them to create architectures that are fully in tune with the wide gamut of artificial and natural ecological conditions. For those of us interested in the architecture for the new cyberised, biomachined inhabitants of the twenty-first century Murray’s research and propositions are a beacon in a still dark landscape of the future.
Murray has not only helped to develop this interesting and original approach to architecture and ecology (the subject of a Phd) but he has also developed various methods of representing architecture. Like any architect which deals explicitly with the ravages of time; the choreography of sudden and not so sudden shifts in geography and geometry have to be charted. Murray has needed to generate a draughting style that facilitates and explains his ideas.
