For those who have been following us on this blog, please note that future postings will be posted on ENERGY (R)EVOLUTION (http://e-rev.org) and MAT-FAB (http://mat-fab.org). Looking forward to continue communicating snippets on news related to Fabrication and Design Craft.
Yours,
MAT-FAB Mgmt Team
Gernot Riether’s translucent plastic pavilion series launched by AIA New Orleans
The project was selected for realisation at an annual AIA call of entries that asked for interventions to bring to life the historic city of New Orleans. Gernot Riether’s project suggests a series of pavilions sited within usually hidden, often private courtyards. With the city’s webpage announcing different events at their locations the forgotten places turn into new public destination. The pavilions are reactivating the city’s fabric by reversing it - what was a private space during the day becomes a public space for concerts, performances, and other events at night.
In the evening, the pavilions dramatically modulate the host environment, bringing attention to the city’s romantic and mysterious spaces, typically located deep in the block, away from the street. The first pavilion was realised in a courtyard, located on Orleans Street, close to North Rampart. From the street you can only see glimpses of the alien-like, bright glowing object. For curious residents and visitors, brave enough to enter the courtyard through an existing long narrow alleyway the strange object is revealed to be a beacon, an event space of open possibilities.
The pavilion was developed at the ‘Digital Design Build Studio’, that Prof. Gernot Riether directs at the Georgia Institute of Technology. In his studio he is researching the possibilities of digital design and fabrication in order to develop new construction methods for environmentally friendly materials. With his project in New Orleans Gernot Riether shows how plastic can be used to build a new kind of lightweight structure that is affordable and environmentally friendly.
The 200 sq ft pavilion is developed from 320 variations of a single cell. Each cell is generated from different sets of attributes that are derived from the cell’s unique position within the overall form, different architectural and structural requirements and unique site conditions. Scripting allowed for parametrically transforming each cell’s geometry differently into seating, foundation, light fixtures, plant holders and rainwater collectors. The final overall form and spatial qualities of the pavilion emerged from networking the cells into a multifunctional building envelop.
The complexity of the cell’s digitally driven typology allowed combining structure and envelope in a single material hybrid system. The edges of each cell were folded differently based on each cells location within the overall structure. This provided stiffness within the cell. Connecting the edges of all cells form a complex geodesic system. To minimise the amount of material used for the envelope and to create a lightweight structure, the envelope generates wormholes that act brace- and column-like. The formation of wormholes within the surface increases the surface tension, which stabilised the structure of the pavilion. This allowed minimise the weight of the structure to 120kg.
Project Team: Gernot Riether, Valerie Bolen, Rachel Dickey, Emily Finau, Tasnouva Habib, Knox Jolly, Pei-Lin Liao, Keith Smith, April Tann. The pavilion was fabricated at the Digital Fabrication Laboratory, DFL at Georia Institute of Technology. Special Thanks to: Russell Gentry and Andres Cavieres
‘modular fabrication’ by UNstudio in london, england
images courtesy of UNstudio
dutch practice UNstudio is collaborating with premier composite technologies to create ‘modular fabrication’, an installation for 100% design london during london design week 2011. a single…
Location: Pugh Hall, University of Florida - Gainesville
Date: 18 April, 2011
Time: 6:15pm - 8:15pm
Panelists: Neil Leach, Wendy W Fok, Stephen Belton, Lee-Su Huang
* Panel Discussion will follow the Keynote Lecture by Professor Neil Leach
Sponsored by: APX | Alpha Rho Chi / UF-SoA / SCC | Studio Culture Committee
Parasitic Emergency Homes Can Be Implanted Onto Abandoned Buildings
by Yuka Yoneda, 02/26/11
São Paulo, Brazil is known for its vibrant culture, but as of late, it’s also been in the news because of its deadly floods and mudslides. Seeing the aftermath of these disasters, designer Mike Reyes decided to come up with an emergency shelter concept for the survivors of future floods. The result is Rise, a prefabricated, modular dwelling that could be implanted onto an abandoned building like a parasite.
Reyes envisions that the pre-constructed structures could be airlifted by helicopter to sites where they are needed and then guided into place with the help of survivors.
“With an avant-garde approach and forward thinking, as a designer, my goal was to provide sustainable homes for the stranded survivors in all the overly populated mega city, for this project specifically São Paulo,” writes Reyes of his design. “These emergency shelters are designed to rebuild a new community and help start future development. Rise’s method of creating a community is like a parasite, they take ownership, re-purposing and aiding abandoned structures; providing resources.”
Inspired by favelas or Brazilian shanty towns, the structures are box-like homes that can be attached onto the facades of other buildings. Reyes’ concept is unique in that it actually enlists able-bodied survivors to assist with the implementation of the shelters – a cool idea, since it empowers them to take action instead of simply sitting around, waiting for help. Reyes envisions that the pre-constructed structures could be airlifted by helicopter to sites where they are needed and then guided into place with the help of survivors. They “clip” onto building facades using leverage.
Each shelter would contain beds, lighting, storage and a skylight and be made of recycled materials from local construction sites. There would also be attachments for solar energy, water purification and organic farming. Finding muse in the famous favela paintings of Rio de Janeiro, Reyes also hopes that survivors will be able to use the walls of their shelters as canvases once they are settled in, using painting as a creative outlet as they begin the process of healing.
source: Inhabitat
Watching Chris Marker’s mesmerizes, as two films La Jetée and Sans Soleil on DVD. There are fascinating connections between Marker’s films and W.G. Sebald’s books. La Jetée (1962) is a photo-roman, the cinematic version of a photo-novel, constructed entirely of haunting still photographs and a single voice-over which relates the story. The circular narrative involves a young boy who, upon visiting Orly airport to see the planes with his parents, witnesses a death and becomes fixated on his memory of the event. Years later when Paris and presumably much of the world is annihilated by atomic warfare, the man’s obsessive memory link to this pre-apocalypse event makes him an ideal candidate for involuntary time travel experiments, conducted by his captors, who hope to discover a way to acquire medicines and supplies from the past or the future. (The conquerors speak in untranslated German, and its hard not to compare their pseudo-medical experiments with those conducted by the Nazis.) Over the course of repeated trips to pre-apocalypse Paris, the man ultimately discovers that it is he, the time-traveler, who is killed on the jetée of Orly airport to the everlasting horror of himself as a child.
Nothing tells memories from ordinary moments. Only afterwards do they claim remembrance on account of their scars.
Even though La Jetée is a post-apocalyptic sci-fi film (and the basis for Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys), it is, like the work of Sebald, deliberately antiquarian. The film seems longer than its brief 19 minutes length. Marker’s use of still images gives it the rhythm of a slide show (while reminding us of the early films of the Lumière brothers), but the pace also results from the fact that the film is visually rich and densely allusive. There’s just a lot to look at and multiple directions to explore before the next image appears. Although I didn’t catch this the first time through, La Jetée is an homage to Hitchcock’s 1958 film Vertigo. And this, to my mind, brings things full circle back to Sebald. Marker and Sebald are both artists whose works are structured around the ideas of history, memory, nature, ritual, apocalypse. For me, some of the most evocative scenes in La Jetée occur in a natural history museum, redolent of the narrators in Sebald’s books who wander through museums and zoos. The man (and the woman he falls in love with during his time-travels to pre-apocalypse Paris) views the melancholy beauty of the twice-dead bestiary, for he alone bears the knowledge that these dead and stuffed animals are soon to become extinct as species.
La Jetée and Sans Soleil were re-released not long ago by Criterion and are available via Netflix. At Markertext, the English-language scripts for several of Marker’s films can be found, although the translation for La Jetée found there differs somewhat from the narrative on the new Criterion DVD.
Next post: Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil.
http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind/index.html#/156/
(Submitted by Audrey Gutierrez (zaharaza@ufl.edu))
Post-Traumatic Urbanism.com
Post-traumatic Urbanism, Architecture in the Aftermath
Nam June Paik Museum (2003)
Also:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ad.749/pdf
(Submitted by Amelia Shahrabi)
http://blog.rhino3d.com/2011/02/new-digital-design-forum.html
(Source: code-collective)
