Jeffrey Sipprell: April 2005 Archive
April 26, 2005
Digital Fabrication Conference
Ok, so I know this happened a while ago, but we just got this website up recently and it's definitely worth writing about the 2004 ACADIA/AIA Conference. The conference website contains a multitude of resources ranging from professional presenters on the business and legal aspects of what digital fabrication means to architecture, to some very slick exhibition pieces by the likes of SERVO, Arup, and Herzog & de Meuron.
Ultimately the legacy of a conference will hinge on some of the research papers. And although the full papers are STILL not online, abstracts such as Modularity and Flexibility at the Small Scale sound very intriguing.
Architecture Radio has also kindly placed numerous videos of the conference on their website. enjoy.
Posted by jsipprell at 09:33 PM | Comments (0)
April 20, 2005
Cradle to Cradle in Action
William McDonough and Michael Braungart's book, Cradle to Cradle, has begun to inspire a lot of serious research into our environment and the making of things. Recently the winners of the first Cradle to Cradle House competition were released out of a pool of 625 submissions. Some of the designs were quite eloquent, though more impressive was the research and ingenuity brought forth in the execution of sustainable systems - creating a new "machine" as the competition brief states.
More important, however, may be some of the work coming from large companies such as Nike. In the recent issue of Metropolis, a wide array of footwear that adheres to the cradle to cradle principle were introduced. Some of them, including the one shown above, are quite cutting edge in their design.
Posted by jsipprell at 11:35 PM | Comments (0)
April 12, 2005
Concrete - Digitally Remastered
Ply Architecture, headed by Craig Borum and Karl Daubmann, have some really interesting experimentations in the digital production of concrete forms. Instead of being subtractive about their CNC molds, Ply Architecture has used some of the typical methods of digital production and employed them in a more additive sense. The results are pretty cool. They have a number of other experiments posted under the research tab on their website.
Posted by jsipprell at 11:09 PM | Comments (0)
April 11, 2005
Xefirotarch Wins PS 1 Competition
Xefirotarch has been selected the winner of this year's MoMA/PS1 Young Architects Program and will be building the pavilion for the 2005 WarmUp. He recently sat down with a couple of editors from Archinect to discuss his work and the project specifically in more detail.
"..the project had this kind of cross condition between cartoons, and amateur pornography. It tried to restore the notion of play, and ways of creating multiple scales to be discovered and occupied in multiple ways. There is a very conscious development of the problem of the cartoon which is a steady by-product of techniques that explore the grotesque and the horrific, with a kind of childish, playful attitude..."
Hernan is beginning to explore a compelling discourse into what the generation of these forms begin to mean. Many are seduced by the imagery of these topological surfaces while for others, like myself, it is more so by the implications to conventional methods of fabrication and representation. If Hernan can pull this off come summertime (and I am very interested to see what methods he employs to get this built), he will have cemented his role as a central figure in contemporary arch. and without a doubt elevated the work to a new level. Let's just hope he doesn't become too much of a rockstar after this and start teaching at 4 different graduate schools.
Posted by jsipprell at 11:57 PM | Comments (0)