Innovation, Science & Technology Building at Florida Polytechnic / Santiago Calatrava
Designed by renowned architect, Santiago Calatrava, the new Innovation, Science & Technology building at Florida Polytechnic University will establish the design scheme for all other structures within the campus’ master plan, which Calatrava is also responsible. Until the other structures within the master plan are built, the new Innovation, Science & Technology building, which just broke ground in March will also need to function as the campus itself; being able to accommodate various events and functions. More images and architects’ description after the break.
‘BubbleDeck’ Technology at Harvey Mudd College / MATT Construction
MATT Construction is utilizing an innovative new slab technology called BubbleDeck, which replaces a significant percentage of a slab’s concrete mass with hollow or foam-filled plastic balls, made from recycled plastic material. The Teaching and Learning Building at Harvey Mudd College (HMC), designed by Boora Architects with structural engineering provided by kpff, will be the first above-ground building in the United States to employ the technology. HMC has enthusiastically embraced this project on their campus. More images and project description after the break.
10th Annual 2×8 Student Exhibition
The American Institute of Architects, Los Angeles Chapter recently announced their 10th Annual 2×8 Student Exhibition which features a display of 16 of the major architectural school programs in California. Although based in LA, they have extended their invitations to the region and are opening the door to more schools. Taking place at the A+D Museum, each of the participating academic programs selects two projects that exemplify its core vision. The students’ design work will be judged by a noteworthy panel of architects and designers. The panel will then announce the winners at the exhibition opening and convene in a forum to discuss the award-winning projects. The exhibition will be on view from June 5 till June 30. For more information, please visit here. More images of past exhibitions can be viewed after the break.
Streamsong Resort and Conference Center / Alfonso Architects
Located in Polk County, Florida, on a 16,000 acre property between Orlando and Tampa, the Streamsong Resort and Conference Center, designed by Alfonso Architects, is a celebration of reclamation, of both land and spirit. The site is formerly mined phosphate land owned and developed by The Mosaic Company, the world’s leading producer and marketer of phosphate-based crop nutrients. The 300,000 sq. ft resort includes 216 rooms in the main lodge, 12 rooms in the golf clubhouse, a full service spa , three restaurants, and 18,500 sq. ft of conference center space. More images and architects’ description after the break.
2012 Architectural League Prize Winners Announced
The Architectural League just announced the winners of No Precedent, the thirty-first annual Architectural League Prize for Young Architects + Designers (formerly known as the Young Architects Forum). The League Prize is one of North America’s most prestigious awards for young architects. The program exemplifies the League’s longstanding commitment to identifying and nurturing the development of talented young architects and designers. This year’s winners are: Jorge Arvizu, Ignacio del Rio, Emmanuel Ramirez, and Diego Ricalde, MMX Studio, Mexico City; Jimenez Lai, Bureau Spectacular, Chicago; Sean Lally, WEATHERS / Sean Lally, Chicago; Seung Teak Lee and Mi Jung Lim, STPMJ, Brooklyn; Michael Szivos, SOFTlab, New York; and Koji Tsutsui, Koji Tsutsui & Associates, San Francisco and Tokyo. More information on the awards, including exhibition and lectures, after the break.
19th Annual Canstruction® Raises Hunger Awareness with Food Drive Exhibit
At this year’s 19th annual Canstruction: Exhibition, a Food Drive and Design Contest at the World Financial Center in New York City, 26 design and architecture firms have built gigantic, gravity-defying sculptures from thousands of cans of food. Over 100,000 cans were turned into works of art to help City Harvest feed hungry New Yorkers. The exhibition, free to the public, is up now until November 21, and encourages visitors to donate high-quality non-perishable foods, such as tuna, beans, and canned vegetables. More information on the exhibition can be found here. More images after the break.
MeasuringUP Symposium
Presented by the Department of Architecture at Portland State University, the MeasuringUP symposium is dedicated to advancing regional knowledge and efforts for environmentally responsive architecture. Taking place May 10-11 on the Portland State University campus, the event sets out to discuss the following questions: Are green buildings in use measuring up to their targets? What role do building occupants play in the discussion of performance? How can research in buildings inform and improve design practice? And how can successful strategies be replicated at a larger scale? More information on the event after the break.
Unveiling Exhibition of VCU Institute for Contemporary Art / Steven Holl Architects
Steven Holl Architects invites you to join them in the unveiling exhibition of their Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University. The event will take place at the Meulensteen gallery in New York on April 26 from 6-8pm. The 32,000 square-foot building will provide gallery spaces for traveling and school exhibits, classrooms, offices, art storage spaces and an auditorium, and accommodate a sculpture garden and a café. Joseph H. Seipel, Dean of the VCU School of the Arts, exclaimed, ”We are honored to have Steven Holl, internationally recognized as one the most inspired and significant architects of our time.”
modeLab Parametric Design Workshop
In response to the overwhelming interest in the April Parametric Design Workshop, this workshop, another intensive parametric design workshop, will be held in Brooklyn during the weekend of April 28-29, 2012 by Studio Mode / modeLab. It will consist of a series of instructional lectures, open work sessions, and guided exercises, beginning with an introduction to Algorithmic Processes and Computational Geometry.
In a fast-paced and hands-on learning environment, this workshop will engage both the conceptual as well as technical domains of applied parametric design. Rhino, in conjunction with the parametric modeling plug-in Grasshopper, offers the possibility to explore parametric and computational design with unprecedented fluidity. Leveraging this capacity, we have structured this workshop around a series of design strategies and case-study exercises with the capacity to generate and control degrees of variation within fields of entities. Emphasis will be placed on workflows that utilize constraint-based design, visualization techniques, and environmental influencers to discover novel and inventive design solutions. For more information, please visit here.
LACMA Distinguished Architects Lecture Series: Jeanne Gang
Founder and principal of Studio Gang Architects, Jeanne Gang, FAIA, LEED AP, will be delivering a lecture at LACMA on May 8th at 7:30pm. Reveal, the first volume on Studio Gang’s projects and processes, was released in 2011 from Princeton Architectural Press. Recent projects include a proposal reimagining the suburb of Cicero, Illinois, as a part of MoMA’sexhibition Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream; Reverse Effect, a book intended to explore and spark a radically greener future for the Chicago River and Great Lakes; Aqua Tower, an Emporis Skyscraper of the Year; and Nature Boardwalk at Lincoln Park Zoo, an educational project demonstrating how nature and city can coexist. The event is presented by LACMA and organized by Francesca Garcia-Marques, with an introduction by Christopher Hawthorne, Los Angeles Times architecture critic. For more details and information on the event, please visit here.
‘Latest Works’ Lecture by Manuel Aires Mateus at MIT
Manuel Aires Mateus of Aires Mateus e Associados will be giving a lecture at MIT featuring ‘Latest Works’. The projects of Aires Mateus e Associados are characterised by materiality, mass and an essential muteness or quietness. The Paulo Gomes Archeological Center, Casa Areia and Furnas Monitoring and Investigation Centre are perhaps the most elemental and representative of their projects, seeming to draw power from the connection or contrast with nature.
Situated at the archaeological site of Crasto Lofts, the Paulo Gomes Archeological Center features an exhibition area defined as the liminal space between a concrete and glass skin and the exposed cliff side. (Australian Institute of Architects).The event, which is free and open to the public, takes place Thursday, May 3rd at 6:30pm at MIT Building 10, room 250. For more information, please visit here.
Resonant Chamber / rvtr
Resonant Chamber, an interior envelope system that deploys the principles of rigid origami, transforms the acoustic environment through dynamic spatial, material and electro-acoustic technologies. The aim of rvtr is to develop a soundsphere able to adjust its properties in response to changing sonic conditions, altering the sound of a space during performance and creating an instrument at the scale of architecture, flexible enough that it might be capable of being played. The project is funded through the 2011 Research through Making Grant, U-M Office of the Vice President for Research, 2011 Small Projects Grant, U-M Center for Wireless Integrated Microsystems, Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada Research Creation Grant. More images and architects’ description after the break.
Information Technology and Media Center / Morris Architects
The project by Morris Architects for a new information technology and media center for Santa Monica Community College in California includes 12,000 square feet of new space and approximately 6,000 square feet of renovation to the existing campus library. The college currently has an enrollment of 30,000 students and is experiencing rapid growth that requires a major upgrade to its current information technology department and computing infrastructure. More images and architects’ description after the break.
Fractured House / Studio H:T
Located in Boulder, Colorado and designed by Studio H:T, Fractured House creates a spatial experience from the fracture implied by splayed property lines. The resulting volumetric fissure of the building mass organizes the horizontal circulation and creates the space of the stair cavern. More images and architects’ description after the break.
What Makes it GREEN? – Live Jury Interviews, Winners Announcement, and Reception
Designers in the Northwest and Pacific Region create some of the world’s most sustainable buildings. What Makes it GREEN? (WMIG?) celebrates the region’s achievements and the interdisciplinary teamwork required to meet the 2030 Challenge®. For over a decade, WMIG? has educated and inspired the larger design community with creative solutions for sustainability.
Jurors from the 2012 What Makes It GREEN? Awards will be interviewing the shortlisted project teams from around the region live at Seattle City Hall April 18 starting at 9am with the winners being announced that evening. For those interested in sustainable design, green buildings, and energy-efficiency, this is an opportunity to learn behind-the-scenes what goes into designing the kinds of buildings that will help us reach carbon neutrality by 2030. For more information, please visit here.
‘Manta’ Installation for SmartGeometry 2012 Conference / Guillermo Bernal, Eric Ameres, Zackery Belanger, Seth Edwards
Drawing from creative minds of Guillermo Bernal, Eric Ameres, Zackery Belanger, and Seth Edwards, and with the support of Smartgeometry, Grimshaw Architects, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute‘s Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, Manta represents the potential of multidisciplinary design. that required expertise in architecture, fabrication, interactive technology, and acoustics. This combination drove the assembly of the design team, who came together for the first time from disparate careers and backgrounds. The result could only be achieved with a holistic design approach: all team members worked together on all aspects of Manta. More images and the team’s description after the break.
modeLab Material Matters Workshop
Studio Mode / modeLab is putting on Material Matters II, a two-day intensive design, prototyping, and fabrication workshop to be held in New York City during the weekend of May 12-13. As the next installment in the modeFab series and building upon the research developed in Material Matters I, this workshop will examine the procedural distinctions between two modes of design production: the first relying primarily on cerebral processing (a conceptual domain isolated from the wildness of matter and energy) and the second motivated by material’s capacity to act as an agent in the discovery of form.
The workshop will operate through a framework of computational and fabrication strategies that hinge on the peculiarities of material and the emergent set of knowledge associated with the work of the hand. In a fast-paced and hands-on learning environment, they will iteratively develop digital and fabricated prototypes utilizing Grid-Based Modeling techniques via Paneling Tools and Machining Strategies with RhinoCAM. Furthermore, the workshop will provide participants with instruction in digital fabrication techniques and direct access to CNC equipment. For more information, please visit here.
Documenting Your Work in a Digital Age: An Interactive Discussion
Taking place at the Center for Architecture in New York April 16 from 6-8pm, the ‘Documenting Your Work in a Digital Age: An Interactive Discussion’ will be an informal panel discussion put on by AIA New York focused on the range of digital tools currently in use to describe and define architecture. The discussion will range from architectural photography to other forms of digital communication, 3D display, and user experience design. Presenters, including Peter Aaron, Sam Travis Ewen, and Matthew Bannister, will integrate ideas about how to optimize digital content so that it can be easily found and viewed online by target audiences. To register and for more information, please visit here.
HYDRAMAX: Port Machines / Future Cities Lab
Future Cities Lab’s HYDRAMAX Port Machines project, which is currently on exhibit at SFMOMA until July 29, proposes a radical rethinking of San Francisco’s urban waterfront post sea-level rise. The proposal renders the existing hard edges of the waterfront as new “soft systems” that would include aquatic parks, community gardens, wildlife refuges and aquaponic farms. A synthetic architecture is introduced that blurs the distinction between building, landscape, infrastructure and machine. More images and architects’ description after the break.
Syracuse University Practice Football Facility / Bernheimer Architecture
Designed by Bernheimer Architecture for Syracuse University, the football practice facility along with a larger strategic masterplan for the Lampe Athletic Campus situated about 3 miles south of the Main Campus seeks to create an identity for this new “middle campus” by making an assemblage of disparate buildings into a strong collection. By creating an environment that would enhance the practice session, the architects stay true to one of Vince Lombardi’s favorite quotes, “Practice does not make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect”. More images and architects’ description after the break.
‘Now Boarding: Fentress Airports + The Architecture of Flight’ Exhibition
The ‘Now Boarding: Fentress Airports + The Architecture of Flight’ Exhibition, taking place July 15 – October 7 at the Denver Art Museum, will allow visitors a rare opportunity to explore the evolution of airport design and to discover the creative processes that lead to their functionality and beauty. The exhibition takes visitors on a journey through the history of airports aided by film, digital art, animation, models, drawings, photographs, and full-scale architectural elements. Visitors will travel through six airports designed by Denver-based Fentress architects: Denver International Airport, South Korea’s Incheon International Airport, Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, Mineta San Jose International Airport, Raleigh-Durham International Airport, and Los Angeles International Airport. For more information, please visit here.
