Kevin Patrick McClellan presented his AA DRL team thesis and TEX-FAB at the AA Visiting Schools Programme at the Universidad Iberoamericana School of Architecture on October 11th. The lecture topic, ‘Emergent Effects: Form and Organization’ was one of several presentations throughout the day that covered the work being produced by ex-AA graduates while there and afterwards.
Below is a clip from the website:
SYMPOSIUM
A one-day event of lectures-presentations given by staff and alumni of the Architectural Association will be organized as a preface of the AA visiting school in Mexico City in January 2010, within the Architectural Week organized by the Universidad Iberoamericana School of Architecture In October 2010.
It will be an opportunity to show and present the work and research methodologies being developed at the Architectural Association, Graduate School with AA graduates.
The Mexico city Visiting school will using the Landscape Urbanism methodology develop at the AA, and lecturers invited to the symposium will share and comments upon their own research thesis and the use of these methodologies in the work carried out outside the school within each individual practice and teaching experiences. This way the symposium will intend to contribute to the exchange of ideas and will confront the leading issues shaping architecture, design and urban culture at the outset of the twenty first century.
Link to the Mexico City AA Visiting School:
Chris Lasch, REPEAT Competition Juror
This is the third 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.
Chris has managed the unique blend of leveraging the academic environment with the professional arena through teaching and lecturing internationally. Chris is currently teaching at Arizona State University for the 2010/2011 academic year.
Chris, along with Benjamin Aranda, founded Aranda\Lasch, in 2003. The practice has pioneered the application of innovative technologies and been identified as one of the leading voices in the exploration of digital technology as applied to the design process. Aranda\Lasch were awarded the Young Architects Award from the Architecture League and United States Artists Fellowship in 2007. Their early work was published in the critically acclaimed Pamphlet Architecture 27: Tooling in 2005. Having participated in the Seville and Venice Biennial with Mathew Ritchie in 2008, this year Aranda\Lasch was awarded the prestigious honor to be selected as the practice representing the United States at the 2010 Venice Biennial. Arranda\Lasch, with Island Planning Corporation, installed ‘Modern Primatives’ as a series of aggregated components configured to accommodate seating and other forms of social interaction according to the theme set out by Kazuyo Sejima entitled ‘People Meet in Architecture.’
As a long time friend and colleague, TEX-FAB is excited to have Chris participate as a judge for the REPEAT competition and as one of our instructors for the workshops being held at the University of Houston on February 12th and 13th, 2011.
www.arandalasch.com/
Q&A
You have recently been teaching at Arizona State University – what do you see being the greatest challenges/ opportunities to your new location? (Temperature is not the answer we are looking for!)
The desert is an amazing place, and what is true of plants and animals is also true of architects: living in a desert makes you tough. As a result, Arizona seems to have more than its fair share of good architects. Building in a place of limited resources (environmental, financial…) forces an improvisatory approach to projects, the best architects here take those constraints and turn them into valuable parts of the design process.
Arranda/Lasch, with Island Planning Corporation (IPC), recently participated in the Venice Architecture Biennale. What can you tell us about the Modern Primitives project regarding the process of design and fabrication, as well as the experience of participating in the event?
The event itself is incredible, its a really unique opportunity to witness a global cross section of whats currently being thought about in architecture. Its not exhaustive by any means, but getting the opportunity to look at our work in that broad of a context is inspiring and, at times, more than a little humbling.
For our project, we wanted to create a space that could be *used* throughout the exhibition, sometimes as an informal event space, otherwise as a lounge or hang-out place. So the project became about furnishing a space with a large collection of experimental furniture. Each piece was a different aggregation of identical units, or rather, the same shape across scales. The pivotal moment in the project came as a fabrication discovery, we discovered a three-dimensional unit shape that could be fabricated using only two two-dimensional cuts. This allowed us to move production to a cnc hotwire cutter and the process boiled down to cutting a large foam block from two cutting paths with a ninety-degree rotation of the block between paths. At the end of the process, the 4′x8′ block is atomized into a ton of identical pieces with very little waste. We were able to produce hundreds of units in a matter of minutes.
This, along with a spray-on truck bed liner for a hard coat, allowed us to produce the amount of material we needed within the punishing timeline of the Biennale.
What are some of the more architecturally peripheral technologies that you are exploring in your practice? What are you working on currently and can you give us a sneak peek at anything?
We are really excited by the prospect of mobile application development (building apps) for location-aware devices like smartphones and the iPad. They know where they are in the world and what orientation they are being held, they are networked and they bring cool new ways to interact with information through the touchscreen. They are basically an irresistible creative platform for architects. We are currently developing our first iPhone app. I wish I could show it to you because that would mean that it is done. As it is we still have a lot of work to do but stay tuned…