Archinect - Features

A Day At Space Saloon: Exploring Experimental Architecture in the High Desert of California

2019-06-26T12:54:00-04:00

Tucked between Palm Springs and Joshua Tree lies the Morongo Valley. This desert landscape may be an obscure location to hold a week-long student workshop. However, if there is one thing architects like Arata Isozaki and Albert Frey have taught us, it is that the desert is often a perfect backdrop for exploring materials, form, color, and spatial design.

The non-profit organization founded by Danny Wills and Gian Maria Socci provide a unique design laboratory experience for students to collect, explore, research, and experiment new potentials for design education. Not only do the students have the ability to prototype, build, and engage in transdisciplinary forms of architecture and design knowledge, they are also able to engage with practicing architects through site-specific projects. This year's Space Saloon experience titled "FIELDWORKS" allowed students to question various processes and techniques through data and data application.

Talking with Assemble – before they won the Turner

2016-02-09T13:10:00-05:00

My first meeting with Assemble was at their studio in London, in a search to find and speak with interesting people who think that building stuff at 1:1 scale sounds pretty normal. I wanted to convince them to host a workshop at Keio University, where I teach, and I succeeded: our run in with Assemble ended with students building a very rough and very temporary Onsen (the Japanese term for bathing facilities near hot springs), and an equally rough kitchen on a construction site at our university campus.

Prototyping: "Architecture in Digital Fashion" makes parametricism personal

2014-08-29T11:18:00-04:00

Fashion design may seem far removed from architecture, but both disciplines have the human scale at their centers. One intimately wraps the body, the other moderates its passage through the world, but both are occasions for self-expression and vital to survival. The organizers behind Parametrica [Digi Fab School]’s “Architecture in Digital Fashion” workshop are encouraging architecture and design students to apply their skillset in these overlaps, to explore how wearable materials and architectural forms can inform one another.

Prototyping: Developing fantastical habitats for the untamed in New-Territories' "DIY-Feral Child Workshop"

2014-05-20T10:33:00-04:00

True to its name, the DIY-Feral Child workshop is devised around an imagined feral child, found deep in the Thai Jungle and now being assimilated into human society. Spanning one summer month in the north-east of Bangkok, along the Kwai River, the workshop is a tri-fold effort of design, material experimentation, and film, where twenty student participants will create a fictionalized movie narrative alongside their architectural designs.

Prototyping: Tiny House Design Workshop

2014-02-27T16:13:00-05:00

Workshops can open up architectural education to those beyond the university community, rolling theory and practice into concentrated and productive sessions. Prototyping, a new feature series on Archinect, will highlight some of the more ambitious and intriguing workshops out there, to show how they're being put together and what they produce.

Student Works: AI | AA Athens & AA Istanbul Visiting Schools 2013

2013-06-17T12:15:00-04:00

by Elif Erdine (AA Istanbul Visiting School Program Director) and Alexandros Kallegias (AA Athens Visiting School Program Director)

AA Athens | Istanbul Visiting School (AI) defines architecture as "an art of suppositioning ideas, architectural principles which are being performed repeatedly". Its foundations lie on combining theory and practice and shared knowledge, with the goal to go beyond individuality and address today’s challenges via dialogue.

SmartGeometry 2012 in Troy, New York

2012-04-15T18:27:00-04:00

Text and photos by Terri Peters

SmartGeometry is an international community of academics and professionals who hold annual workshops and conference days at academic institutions around the world. Now in its ninth year, this year´s theme was Material Intensities and both the four-day workshop and conference day was held at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center in Troy, New York. Sponsored by software company Bentley, the next event will be held in London in 2013. Previous Archinect features reported on SmartGeometry 2009 in San Francisco and SmartGeometry 2011 in Copenhagen.

SmartGeometry 2011, Copenhagen Denmark

2011-04-07T14:50:52-04:00

SmartGeometry was established in 2001 as an international group of academics and professional architects, engineers, computer scientists and designers interested in the potentials of parametric design and computational tools. Each year, a four-day workshop precedes a conference day with invited speakers, and each year explores a different theme.