Andrew Vrana will moderate a roundtable discussion:

Facade Innovation:  Performance, Optimization and Integration

The ability of computational technology to inform facade design from novel geometries and enhanced environmental performance to rationalized component optimization and digital fabrication is creating new possibilities in the development of intelligent building skins.  The confluence of visible forces (structural, functional and physical) and invisible forces (cultural, political and temporal) can now be measured, managed and realized through the integration of enhanced information processing, cross-disciplinary material organization and computer assisted manufacturing ingenuity.  From a broad spectrum of expertise representing the professional, academic, applied research and engineering consultation community, the speakers participating in this discussion present a series of façade design case studies that articulate these forces of innovation in practice and lead the speculative dialogue on where this trend will head in the future.

Performative facade systems
Anna Dyson, CASE
Case Study:  Helioptix

Optimization of facade systems
Erik Verboon, Buro Happold
Case Study:  King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture

Integration of facade systems
Phillip Anzalone, Columbia University GSAPP
Case Study:  Columbia University Building Intelligence Project

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:

http://mexico.aaschool.ac.uk/

AA School Mexico City

Brad visited UTSA on March 26th to give a lecture on the work being done at UTA. Brad spoke about the TEX-FAB effort and the success of the February workshops, the impact on the school and within the architectural community there. His lecture covered a broad range of topics nested within the discourse of digital design, its implementation and processes. Additionally Brad lead a day-long workshop that covered both 2D and 3D parametric techniques within Adobe, Rhino/ Paneling Tools which resulted in small laser cut prototypes and digital structures.

Performative Connections Studio – Embrace – visit YouTube to see the digital fabrication video, from finalized unit prototype to test laser cutting, the video documents the last 4 days of the Performative Connections Studio, co-taught by Armando Araiza and Kevin Patrick McClellan, at the UTSA COA. Embrace is a portion of an overall design solution for a theoretical redesign of the UTSA Downtown library, wherein the students developed several schemes to address issues of noise control, visual privacy and spatial delineation.

The TEX-FAB initiative is featured in the May/June issue of Texas Architect