here’s a flickr pool with some interesting output from the material intelligence (intensive) fabrication and prototyping workshop held in new york city during the week of august 16-20.

…and a little more info on the process of the workshop:

the workshop progressed through a series of focused strategies beginning with material testing, followed by the development of prototypes, and arriving at aggregations of a single topological type. each prototype was created by simple operations, undertaken through a specific disposition, and evaluated for performative potentials. all assemblies were designed in an associative environment (grasshopper) and iteratively tested utilizing digital fabrication equipment (CNC 3-axis mill and CNC high-force cutter). the workshop concluded with a reception that exhibited design prototypes and full scale assemblies built by participants over the course of five days.

material Intelligence was conceived through a collaboration between studio mode/modeLab and tietz-baccon.

at TED 2010, mathematics legend benoit mandelbrot develops a theme he first discussed at TED in 1984 — the extreme complexity of roughness, and the way that fractal math can find order within patterns that seem unknowably complicated.

jeimei shen & huan miao khoo

a selection of work from our students at university of sydney digital architecture research studio.  the work presented here is an image from each students design proposal in relation to their brief which aimed to investigate digital design and fabrication techniques specific to environment and location through composite strategies.

The footprint of a prefab construction impacts far less on the building site compared to a traditional building foundation.  As this method also employs off-site fabrication and assembly, there is a significantly reduced impact on the site with regard to disturbance, run-off and waste. It is much easier to control waste streams in a factory, as waste can easily be separated for recycling at the point of creation on an assembly line than on a building site, where experience tells us, material separation is often difficult to achieve. From required building material, up to thirty to forty percent of building material waste generated from conventional building ends up in landfill, compared to as little as two percent waste achieved through prefabrication methods.

This work focuses primarily on pre-fabrication and kit assemblage of individual dwellings through digitally fabricated timber construction methods.  Through the investigation of parametric design & fabrication students looked at implementing these alternative ‘advanced’ geometry & organizational strategies for a more architectural response: housing units.

We see the prefabricated or off site kit variable assembly as the future mediation between low budget one size fits all modules and one off  high end boutique architecture.  Whereas the prefabricated process is governed by efficiency of space often complying with minimum area requirements and replication of unit type we are interested in the potential spatial variations possible both internally (double height volumes, overhangs), externally (courtyards, terraces) and on a neighbourhood scale that modern fabrication processes allow for.

claire hosking

yao ma & wei shi

nicola strange & justine simpson

xiao wen qian & ni wen

thomas pinyon & maryam boroumand

connie si jia zhang & simon lien

melissa koronel & raymond tam

matt gallagher

maria orellana & nisha shankar narayan

andrew woodward

sarah iskander & christine kiriacos

this saturday and sunday (19 and 20 june), our friends – artistic duo: lucy mcrae and bart hess of lucyandbart will collaborate with stylist alister mackie in a unique editorial shoot for anOther magazine.  lucyandbart will be crafting wondrous, one-of-a-kind sculptural extensions on models to explore and manipulate the expression of the human body,  nick knight will be shooting and SHOWstudio will broadcast all the action live from the set.

check out SHOWstudio’s site for further info + the streaming link: http://www.showstudio.com/

monk, mathematician, and builder of polyhedrons and polytopes, father magnus wenninger has been working on his spherical paper models since the early sixties.   in doing so he  has journeyed on a path of mathematical enlightenment leading him to publish a host of books and feature in numerous journals that discuss his interests in polyhedrons, sphere tiling and dome structures.   the work has an quality of obsessive rigour that has been finetuned over decades of experiments and his choice of colour is rather nu rave in its palette!

father magnus at work

a little more info on the 10×10 project…

“some of sydney’s most respected creative minds, including sass & bide’s sarah jane clarke and heidi middleton, dinosaur designs co-founder liane rossler, and film critic margaret pomeranz, have contributed to an inspiring online project for creative sydney called the 10×10 project.

launching on June 4, and prepared from nominations gathered in the lead up to creative sydney’s program of free discussions and presentations at the MCA, the 10×10 project invites 10 creative leaders to each introduce 10 sydney-based creatives who inspire their own outstanding work, drawing from film, fashion, music, performance, media, events, architecture, design, advertising and technology.”

sydney creative will be launching the list of 100 nominees on friday june 4. check back for a link to the dedicated 10×10 project mini site, created in partnership with The Loop.

ufo(au) will be there for the launch night so hopefully we’ll see you all there! 

we’ve finally moved back into the city from the beaches! the sydney office has now expanded and is now located at:

184-186 st. johns road
glebe. nsw. 2037
+61 295 716 336

this thursday, london metropolitan will host the opening night of an international travelling exhibition that documents the first fifteen years of urban future organization.

the opening event will be based around a lecture title ‘identifying ufo’s’ by marco brizzi, a renowned italian academic and critic.  marco brizzi’s talk will be followed by the exhibition opening in the ASD gallery.  the evening will be rounded off with a sneak preview of the completion of nexted house v1.03 by ufo.  drinks and snacks will be served.

ufo operates as a network of independent practices, each office responding to tit;s own locale whilst being able to draw on the resources of a global collective.  to date this includes offices in australia, china, greece, italy, korea, the netherlands, scandinavia, turkey, usa and the uk.   ufo is a new form of practice seeking the emergence of a group identity by allowing individual members to be free of a fixed structure inhibiting the will to speculate, experiment and create.  our ambition is to combine conceptual sophistication, social sensibility and technical innovation with practical inventiveness in creating an idea driven ecological architecture.

ufo has won a number of international competitions and prizes exhibited its; worjk at the venice and beijing biennale’s and was recenty featured in 10×10 v.2

the exhibition opens thursday 27th may, 630pm at the:

spring house forum
40-44 holloway road
london metropolitan university

tom verebes (OCEAN UK) will be presenting a lecture at uts next tuesday entitled ‘computational urbanism: strategies confronting rapid urbanisation and the problem of disposable buildings’.

in an attempt to investigate the phenomenon of the insta-city approach of mainland china, toms studio’s at the DRL and Hong Kong University have set out to develop parametric frameworks for the generation and simulated effect on the urban condition.

toms previous studio at the AADRL, focused on endurance & obsolescence – a term to describe an oscillation ‘between political discourses and speculative design work driven by advanced design and productions techniques, on a range of scales dealing with duration and design life of architecture and urbanism.  as an alternative to throw-away architecture and the design of instant cities, the projects sought to argue for the economic benefits of high-quality design, with an emphasis on innovation backed up with credible computation and material research, aiming for increasing the design life of buildings, and the capacity of cities to evolve and adapt to dynamic contextual conditions.  key to achieving the objective of greater endurance of the social and material space of future chinese cities – i.e. to increase design life – is to approach environmental performance as an opportunity for greater local specificity rather than a global problem to solve.’

the lecture will be held at:

level 5 architecture studios, building 6, uts, city campus
6-7pm, 25th may.

team 21, mo*town, , DRL v10

AM/PM, dunes, DRL v10

urban future (au) were recently invited to participate in architectura 21 – a map of young architecture practices with portuguese links.  luckily, being an international practice, we had one to deliver.  the article profiles the tri-wall, a collaboration between the offices of urban future , studio wsh and the university of technology sydney (mda Lab) which featured as the interior space for the transcapes / artificial nature exhibition launched at the uts gallery, sydney.

the geometric module was originally conceived by students from the mda lab and had been further developed as an iteration of the prototype.  parametric values such as aperture opening and flange rotation were set up in bentley’s generative components and transferred to rhino3d for fabrication.

an entire scaffold was compiled with over 2500 modules of the sheared cube component which were assembled according to its effect and location within the wall.   the tri-wall is part of urban future’s ongoing research into digital fabrication techniques of parametric and associative smart geometry.

check back soon for the full article.