Instalación: The Latest Architecture and News

The ‘Sur Mesure’ Sticker Installation, designed by FREAKS freearchitects, was placed onto the facade of Oscar Niemeyer’s Building for French Communist Party Headquarters in Paris this past December. Known forNiemeyer’s simple construction without ornament, the installation creates a simple, yet interesting addition to the building for people around the city. Completed in the early 1980′s, the intention of letting it “breathe” to the city and not break the site generates an open space district with its undulating forms. This then mirrors the continuity of the urban fabric of the neighborhood and frames the plaza. The video shows the process of installing the immense sticker onto the facade. More images of the installation can be viewed after the break.

Held during the Zagreb Fashion Industry Days, the “Step Inside a Creative Mind” installation by Prodigium allowed young designers to showcase their most intimate thoughts (their collections) and bring them to life for the public. It was up to the architect to design a highly flexible open space, where young designers would set up shop and random people could wander around and shop. A space that was inexpensive yet “hip” enough to attract passers-by that might be interested in fashion. The dome as a starting point reminded the architect of a giant head emerged in the vast plateau on the main square, and he felt that the dome should sub-serve as a beacon instead of merely a confinement of the exhibition space. More images and architects’ description after the break.

General Manifold is an immersive architectural environment installed in the abandoned Federal Screw Works factory complex in Chelsea, Michigan. This installation was the centerpiece of a collective exhibition organized by the architectural collaborative Spatial Ops and students from their Meta Friche research seminar at Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning.

Continue after the break for images and the architect’ project description.

Yasuaki Onishi, who is known for his art throughout Japan and internationally, currently has an installation on exhibit in the Rice Gallery in Houston titled, ‘Reverse of Volume RG’. On display until June 24, he uses plastic sheeting and black hot glue to create a monumental, mountainous form that appears to float in space. In using these simple materials, he is able to successfully meditate on the nature of the negative space, or void, left behind. More images and project description after the break.

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.

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.

Memory Cloud is the winning commission awarded to RE:site (Norman Lee and Shane Allbritton, Artists website: www.resitestudio.com) and METALAB (Andrew Vrana, Joe Meppelink and Michael Gonzales, Architecture + Fabrication) by Texas A&M University for the new Memorial Student Center 12th Man Hall. Through a competition and short-list interview process the team demonstrated the ability to harness the potential of programmable LEDs, remote sensing, parametric design and digital fabrication to create an open ended narrative of the story of the University through animated silhouette imagery of past and real-time present student life on the campus.

Memory Cloud will be installed in December of 2012. Continue after the break for more images, video and the designer’s project description.

“White”, a gallery installation produced by the 20 students of Studio 400, a fifth-year architectural design studio at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, served to present each of the student’s research books. The installation was designed, developed, fabricated, and installed by the studio in a collaborative effort. The students developed the design over a period of about a month, with fabrication and installation occurring over a five day period. 80,000 square feet of plastic sheeting was sliced, loomed, woven, stapled, taped and tied to provide a climbable and malleable surface in the 4,500 square foot gallery. “White” supported a variety of interactive experiences above and below this dynamic surface, opening and exploring the relationships between book, user, material, space, and collective group. More images and the studio’s description after the break.

Oyler Wu Collaborative, in collaboration with Michael Kalish, shared with us their video, reALIze, which documents the development and fabrication of the 2011 reALIze installation, a tribute to the life and cultural significance of Muhammad Ali. The project is aimed at exposing a new generation to this larger than life character by building an appreciation for the nuanced emotional, aesthetic, and technical principles that collectively form experience – a concept that holds true as much for human persona as it does for architecture.

Under the guidance of David Mah, Carl Koepcke and Marshall Prado from Harvard Graduate School of Design created a system for constructing a rapidly deployable ice shelter using snow and ice as building materials. The temporary shelter is intended for cold environments and utilizes the insulative properties and inherent compressive strength of the proposed building materials to craft a spatial catenary volume.

More about the ice shelter after the break.

Together, Skylar Tibbits and Arthur Olson presented a large-scale installation at the 2012 TED Conference in Long Beach, CA entitled The Self-Assembly Line – a large-scale version of a self-assembly virus module, demonstrated as an interactive and performative structure. A discrete set of modules are activated by stochastic rotation from a larger container/structure that forces the interaction between units. The unit geometry and attraction mechanisms (magnetics) ensure the units will come into contact with one another and auto-align into locally-correct configurations. Overtime, as more units come into contact, break away, and reconnect, larger, furniture scale elements emerge. Given different sets of unit geometries and attraction polarities various structures could be achieved. By changing the external conditions, the geometry of the unit, the attraction of the units and the number of units supplied, the desired global configuration can be programmed. Continue reading for more.

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DO|SU Studio Architecture shared with us their architectural research installation, titled ‘Bloom,’ displayed at the Materials and Application Gallery in Los Angeles. The project acts as a sun tracking instrument indexing time and temperature, with a shape alluding to a woman’s Victorian-era under garment, ‘Bloom’ to stitch together material experimentation, structural innovation, and computational form and pattern making into an environmentally responsive form. The project is especially designed for peak performance on spring equinox, March 20, 2012. More images and architects’ description after the break.

An extended view of Water Cathedral, the selected project by GUN Arq for the 2011 YaP installation in Santiago, Chile, shot by photographer Cristobal Palma.

The Water Cathedral is a large, horizontal urban nave for public use. The structure is made up of numerous slender, vertical components, which hang or rise like stalactites and stalagmites in a cave, varying in height and concentration. The project incorporates water dripping at different pulses and speeds from these hanging elements, fed by a hydraulic irrigation network. When filled with small amounts of water, the stalactite components act as interfaces out of which water droplets gradually flow and cool visitors below. The stalagmites topography provides elements of shade, along with plants and water that collect under the Water Cathedral’s canopy.

Last week, the MoMA and the PS1 announced HWKN as the winner for the 2012 YAP in NY.

More videos by Cristobal Palma at ArchDaily:

Bayou-luminescence, one of ten site-specific installations commissioned by the New Orleans chapter of the American Institute of Architects, was a collaboration between Igor Siddiqui, the principal of the Austin-based design practice ISSSStudio and Matt Hutchinson, the principal of San-Francisco-based firm PATH. The project was included as a part of DesCours, the annual architecture and art event on view at various locations in city from December 2 through 11, 2011. More images and architects’ description after the break.

Tired of scurrying under makeshift unpleasant scaffolding hovering over the streets of Manhattan? Back in 2009, Bloomberg launched an urban design intervention initiative calling for designers to provide a “fresh new sidewalk shed” to replace its dingy predecessors. Entitled urbanSHED, the international design competition challenged participants to develop a sustainable and economic prototype to be used for New York’s 1,000,000+ linear feet of sidewalks. Such a prototype must meet or exceed the City’s current safety requirements and regulations, and improve technical and structural performance. The winning shed was designed by Young-Hwan Choi, a student from the University of Pennsylvania. The shed is the first design to be approved under the City’s Buildings Bulletin 2011 and will be installted in Lower Manhattan soon!

More about the design after the break.