This is the first in a series of posts about our jurors for the REPEAT Digital Fabrication Competition, leading up to our 10/31/10 deadline for submissions, and serving as an introduction or an elaboration on what they bring to our discussion with regards to their professional and academic pursuits.  Blair Satterfield has recently flipped his locale if not his allegiance from the Dirty South to the Great White North and landed an Assistant Professor position at The University of British Columbia SALA.  We know Blair from many crit swaps between UHCoA and Rice SOA and happy hours in between.

His work with Marc Swackhamer in HouMinn has been impressive over the years in its consistent and relentless pursuit of the nature of performative building envelopes.  Their materiality and methods of fabrication have been manifested through a series of studies that have built upon each other’s innovations while each being compelling on their own. These prototypes are intense moments within larger systems that call into question all notions on what a building skin can do and how it’s made.

Blair has been an early contributor to the Hometta collection of modern homes with the Draft House.  It looks like a domesticated hot rod engine with light monitors that scoop the air into a shotgun house typology.

The OS Wall was first exhibited at the UHGBC inaugural Expo during the Fall of 2009 and is now part of the traveling show, curated by Christopher Hight, called Envelopes. The OS Wall features a series of vacuum formed cladding modules that are being explored as clip-on Apps and will function as climate control and water catchment systems.  HouMinn organized a competition for designers to come up with ideas to fill their cells with unique and innovative apps of their own.”

Q&A

What will you miss most about Houston in terms of the growth of your
practice or is geographic location irrelevant?

Houston is a major port, a global center for medicine, and an oil town. Houston is Space City! All of these pursuits involve using technology to investigate, overcome, and reshape potentially hostile environments. They also require the participation of large groups of highly motivated and skilled individuals to succeed. In fact, there would be no Houston as we know it if it weren’t for a combination of opportunity, air conditioning, and the Herculean group effort necessary to make a city in a hot, humid subtropical wetland. This city is the manifestation of the fervent belief that commerce and technology can conquer all. This spirit of overcoming as a group and utilizing all possible tools to do so is Houston in a nutshell (all with comfort food of course). It is the idea of Houston that I will take with me to Vancouver, and back whenever possible. If I can’t find it, or recreate it, I will miss it very much.

What opportunities are you finding in Vancouver that might transform your
projects in new and unexpected ways?

Nature.  A big difference between Houston and Vancouver is how each views the physical environment. In Vancouver, the physical world is something to participate in. In Houston the culture is one of opposition.  The material world is a resource to be managed and tolerated. This difference impacts the placements of boundaries and envelopes. I am finding a world of gear and machinery designed to make a person faster, warmer, dryer, more buoyant, and safer. It is sometimes a subtle shift but it is one that is already impacting our work. The body occupies the “exterior” space and the skin, or envelope becomes more intimate. Instead of heating an entire space that is a controlled microclimate, the body is heated locally and the microclimate is carried by the body. The winter Olympics was a great experience because it heightened this relationship and carried it to extremes. From the vantage point of program, the dynamism and “flash-mob” quality of the film, television, and gaming industries seem loaded with potential. “Shoots” pop up in the city almost like mini-weather events. They snarl traffic and inject capital in a fixed location for a week or two and then disappearing. There is randomness to the events because locations are picked based on story line and not a preconceived notion of place or space. This means the filming might occur in a park for a month (Twilight), a China Town slum for a day (Psyche/Human Target), or a converted shopping mall for a solid year (Mission Impossible 4). It is a kind of roulette that provides temporal jolts to the economy, almost like mercantile acupuncture. It is definitely an interesting phenomenon to consider.

How does Houston in terms of its unique industry and culture relate to the
charge of the REPEAT Digital Fabrication Competition?

Houston is a manufacturing hub. There is no limit to what can be fabricated or assembled in the city. It goes beyond simple capability. I have always found fabricators in Houston to be genuinely interested in ideas. They are doing far more than simply completing tasks. If the designer is willing, the fabrication community in Houston is more than willing to provide iterative feedback on work. This flattening of the relationship between design/designer and fabricator/builder is at the core of REPEAT. Input and output are not two different ideas.

What are you working on currently?  Any preview images?

In the spirit of REPEAT, I am current reinstalling OSWall at the College of William and Mary. Marc (Marc Swackhamer is Blair’s partner in HouMinn) and I are reconstructing the prototype as a part of the Envelopes Show that originally ran at Pratt last spring. We are really excited to be working with the prototype again. The cycle of assembly, disassembly, and reassembly tells us so much about detailing, durability, and logic sequences. We find so much that can be improved upon or eliminated. It is the benefit of working at full scale and with real world output.

Beyond the installation, HouMinn has been asked to collaborate on the developing a few small scale products. This is a welcome shift for us. We are working on responsive mold for forming plastic sheets, and we are continually working on Hometta.

www.sala.ubc.ca

www.houminn.com

www.hometta.com