Jeffrey Sipprell

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October 31, 2006

Office dA - Lecture Review

Had the opportunity to get off work early and head back up to UCLA for Nader Tehrani's lecture last night (Oct 30). Though it was a bit long-winded at times, it was highly engaging and some of the newer work (which is all on the website), looks very promising, some a little more unconvincing. All in all I was quite impressed by the passion and enthusiasm he displayed for everything from the theoretical concepts running through is work to the banal details of working with constricting sites, programs and of course contractors. As one of the firms I especially admire for their ability to get some quite beautiful work built, I can see why one would have to throw oneself into the minutia of the project.

The firm made a name for itself doing some quite beautiful residential projects and a number of installations (including immaterial/ultramaterial and fabricaitons for MoMA). All of them were imbued with a spirited analysis into the generation of surface pattern through transformation and depth - what Nader, and many of his contemporaries, have termed the 2.5D. Early work (shown below) used the structural and patterning properties of common building components such as brick and corrugated decking in ways that allowed for manipulations in form (shape) and program (screen).

The exploration and manipulation of simple materials according to their inherent specific logics has evolved into more sophisticated and parametrically driven work as the firm has embraced the digital tools of modeling and fabrication. A recently completed installation at Georgia Tech (see below) shows their success in this evolution at the microscale through the metamorphosis of different formal and structural typologies across one simple armature. The piece transforms from a compact, laminated series of sheets to a more controlled set of perforated ribs to the final more playful and sculptural expression at the apex. Geometrially I found the project quite fascinating, particularly the drawings which unfortunately are not shown on their website. However I wasn't crazy about the material as I found the ascending half to be visually cluttered and forcing me to think of Moss's glass vomit behind the Stealth Building in Culver City. An unfair comparison I know, but for some reason that's what popped into my head when I saw some of the images of the project.

A project that synthesizes their work in the 2.5D through parameterization through the macroscale is the recently published Villa Moda complex in Kuwait. This massive project (Tehrani described it as something like 12 NYC blocks) seeks to capture this geometrical and structural manipulation through an egg crate like coffered ceiling that undulates throughout the entire project. The radically different shapes of the program (from sports arena, to housing, to retail) dictate very different formal typologies that are quite difficult to link in one topological system. Their solution is to define and locate specific cell types in the ceiling - say circle, triangle, square, etc. - and then create an ever-changing differentiated tapestry that will blend between these different shape types. It makes for some very sexy images, but to pull something like this off on a scale this big (with a project that is phased nonetheless!) will be nothing short of impossible. I can't imagine what the bids would be on the formwork to pull something like this off in concrete. But it's in schematic design and its not like the firm is unfamiliar with getting work built.

While other projects and ideas were presented and discussed, I've focused on this one area in their body of research as a point of personal interest in their work. Indeed, Tehrani began to discuss how all of this could begin to translate itself into fully spatial three-dimensional systems (as they are attempting to do in the recently proposed Isaam Fares Institute). It's clearly the next step in the evolution of their work, one which will almost certainly be a greater challenge to that which they've accomplished so far.

Posted by jsipprell at October 31, 2006 10:54 PM

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