Detroit based artist Catie Newell’s Salvaged Landscape is a pretty amazing project, taking the scorched wood of burnt buildings and reusing it to create some pretty cool spaces and some pretty sensational surfaces. The video is very much a rough cut, but gives a great sense of the space of the project. This is a great project to take a look at before starting the weekend, very creative and a very positive contribution to her community.

from ::Colossal

P&A Lab (P-AND-A Lab) has creating a really interesting process, titled “Swarmy”, for generating particle dynamics with Processing and porting that information through gHowl into Grasshopper. If that sentence doesn’t make sense, that might actually be a good sign…

If you haven’t heard of Processing, it’s a really interesting programming language that handles design computation design workflows extremely well and then interacts with other environments really smoothly. While there are a lot of programs that can create interesting generative computations and analysis, Processing is gainly a lot of steam because of it’s ability to integrate with so many other platforms (websites, animations, 3D modeling programs) so easily.

gHowl is a great component for Grasshopper that lets Grasshopper receive information from other programs. This ability to take a live computation from Processing and use it to generate form is one of the really interesting components of P&A Lab’s investigation.

The other interesting thing about Swarmy is the use of Weaver Bird. Weaver Bird is another component for Grasshopper that allows the creation of very complex, precise subdivided meshes. These meshes are an interesting alternative to other 3D objects, like NURBS surfaces, because their digital structure is reflective of their curvature. NURBS surfaces are constructed as an interpolation between curves, and their structure is a homogenous UV grid between those datums. A subdivided mesh allows the number of divisions and shape of the divisions to be reflective of the curvature, creating a more precise and manipulatable 3D object.

I’ve been reading Farshid Moussavi and MIchael Kubo’s The Function of Ornament, a compelling index of formal techniques and their performative characteristics. Many of the projects they reference are pretty familiar, but one that was new to me was Eladio Dieste’s Church of Christ the Worker. Built in Uraguay in 1952 for a minimal budget, the roof and walls are both undulating brick shells, one supporting the other. This not only produces a remarkable space, but what’s even more striking is how difficult this must have been to achieve. Not does the curvature of the wall mean that there are a different number of bricks in each course, but each brick is canted uniquely in two different directions (parallel and perpendicular to the wall in plan)… in 1952 on a shoestring budget. Its a pretty incredible project, check out wikiarquitectura, design by many, and studio999 for more images.

I recently came across the University of Kassel’s Radiolaria Project and was very impressed. A group of students and faculty (shown in the last image) did some pretty interesting analysis of D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s studies of radiolaria. Architects and designers from Frei Otto to Marcelo Spina have looked to Thompson’s work to better understand the structural organizations of multi-celled organisms and utilize these organizations in Architectural projects. What’s unique about the Radiolaria Project is the team’s imposition of their analysis on a surface in order to create a more constructible proposal. The construction itself is very compelling, a series of aluminum tubes connected by CNC-milled MDF joints that allows supple curvature and a smooth realization of curvature. The project website has extensive documentation of the process, and is very much worth checking out.

I had the chance to see Matthias Kohler of Gramazio & Kohler speak last year at AU’s Design Computation Symposium and it was pretty amazing. It was an amazing event with lots of fascinating people, but Kohler was a stand out (Gregory Epps of RoboFold was another). Kohler’s presentation was amazing, with many impressive projects with very interesting robotic construction techniques. One in particular was the Gantenbein Winery, a project in Switzerland with beautiful infill walls of robotically stacked brick. Each brick is individually rotated to create a mosaic of grapes on the facade, creating both a striking exterior and an incredible interior space.

Now, a year later, Gramazio and Kohler are back with another radical innovation- flying construction robots. In the beginning of December, teamed with Raffaello D’Andrea, they created a 6 meter high tower, completely constructed by flying robots. Yes, flying robots. At this point I only have renderings of the proposed project, if anyone has images of the actual construction, please send them my way.

from ::dezeen.

I’ve been doing some research into fabric formed concrete recently, and I’m pretty amazed with the concept. In conventional concrete construction, the form work is usually at least 50% of the cost and the vast majority of the time. You end up with elaborate systems of plywood and wood studs that are completely temporary and discarded afterwards. While fabric forms do need some wooden forms, the concrete is poured into a fabric sleeve that is sandwiched between two pieces of plywood. The profile of the piece is cut out of the plywood, and the fabric bulges to create supple, organic shapes.

I’ve found two amazing resources for fabric formed concrete research: the University of Manitoba’s C.A.S.T. (The Centre for Architecture Structures and Technology) and the website of TU Delft’s Arno Pronk.

Stay tuned for fabric formed concrete experiments in the future…

Felix Jerusalem’s design for a home in Eschenz, CH takes a fairly old material and repurposes it nicely for a contemporary architecture. With the exception of a concrete core, all of the load bearing elements are compressed straw panels with a inexpensive plastic sheathing. What’s remarkable is not only the load that straw can carry, but it’s a significantly better insulator than timber, so the assembly is both a structural element and the main insulator of the house. For those of you who aren’t familiar with building technology, there are a few other materials that can do this (concrete, rammed earth, adobe) but typically they are very difficult to assemble and you need a set of specialists… which is usually expensive. This technology is economical, efficient, and easy to construct, providing an interesting model for construction in areas with lots of straw.

from ::dwell

I recently came across the “colorfully” named eff yeah brutalism, a tumblr feed that is a consistant stream of vintage photographs of brutalist architecture. maintained by michael abrahamson, it’s a fantastic collection of some rare photographs of well known works and some lesser known masterpieces.