Jeffrey Sipprell

January 3, 2007

Refabricating Architecture

About a year ago I read Kieran & Timberlake's Refabricating Architecture, finding it to be the perfect, not too theoretically deep, architectural manifesto that one could digest over the course of many 30 minute trips via the L train in Chicago. It's sort of the 'Towards a New Architecture' of the early 21st Century - first building up its argument through an attack on historical modes of production before positing its own vision for the future at the end.

It is that 'future' that I read with some extra care as it is always a rare treat to see an architect's polemic actually practiced within the same text. Face it, I'm a guy who needs pictures. Often I'll go to the bookstore, see a very interesting book on some facet of architecture, and find out that it's about 150 pages on of fine print text. NO Thanks! I've gone through enough poorly put together course readers in my days to want to come home from a hard day's work at the curvy titanium farm to want to crack into one of those babies. But, this isn't a rant about architects who can't write for shit, but rather a post to heap praise on the authors of this book.

Even though the examples they showed were somewhat limited, there was a genius in even the simplest examples that one could grasp. The bathroom at Cornell I found the most compelling as I know from experience how many different on-site trades who barely know what they're doing are involved in even the simplest of toilet rooms. Yet here was an example of where something quite exquisite could be done and with the control and precision of something as finely tuned as crafted millwork. It was certainly the beginning of what would be some compelling work.

Why am I writing about this now you might wonder? Well I recently opened the January 2007 issue of Wired Magazine and found myself reading their annual 'Wired Home' section. It featured Kieran and Timberlake's Loblolly House "where the walls and floors are made of panels that were manufactured with wiring, insulation, plumbing and ductwork already in place. And the two main power systems of the home, including two bathrooms and a galley kitchen, were delivered to the construction site in pre-assembled, plug-and-play units. After the site was prepared, the 2,200-square-foot house took three weeks to assemble."

One statistic I was truly amazed by was that "from the fuel used by commuting workers to onsite diesel generators, the construction and operation of homes and other structures generates 40 to 50 percent of all the greenhouse gases in the US, according to the US Energy Information Administration. On top of that, studies suggest that more than half of a home's leftover materials - drywall and lumber - winds up in landfills."

I currently work at a firm that has pioneered the use of a part-for-part digital model of a building - mostly to allow for the construction of highly complex formal moves in the architecture of Frank Gehry. K/T has used the same technology (or something similar) in an entirely different way (and in my opinion more important to the discourse of architecture). Here they have leveraged the software to create pre-fabricated units that contain all of the guts of a living, breathing building - allowing for smarter and more complex systems of design and integration. Not only does the fabrication eliminate waste, but it's also elegantly designed to have as little impact on the environment - the perfect marriage between digital information modeling and sustainable responsibility.

Loblolly in Wired (Available January 9)
Loblolly House in Architectural Record

Posted by jsipprell at 10:29 PM | Comments (0)

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 10:54 PM | Comments (1)

February 3, 2006

Dark Places Pictures

A couple photos from the Dark Places exhibit by SERVO. Installation is up until mid-April, I highly recommend making the trip to theSanta Monica Museum of Art to see it. (Photos courtesy of SERVO and the Santa Monica Museum of Art).

Posted by jsipprell at 7:40 PM | Comments (0)

January 17, 2006

Dark Places - First Review

LA Weekly was one of the first periodicals to review SERVO's upcoming Dark Places exhibit (opening this friday, Jan 20) which I helped out on back in the first week of January. Check out the article here.

Posted by jsipprell at 12:17 AM | Comments (0)