NEWS
Embedded, a new publication from PATTERNS, the architecture and design practice of SCI-Arc faculty Marcelo Spina and partner Georgina Huljich, will officially be launched with a symposium on Thursday, February 9, 6:30pm in New York City.
Embedded brings together authors, contributors, mentors and confabulators to discuss some of the most relevant issues haunting contemporary architectural practice and discourse today, such as the perceived divide between progressive design culture, the politics of forms and social responsibility.
Held at StudioX, the NYC launch symposium welcomes special guests including Jeffrey Inaba of INABA, John McMorrough of StudioAPT, Marcelo Spina of PATTERNS, Jesse Reiser of Reiser+Unemoto, David Ruy of Ruy Klein, Michael Meredith of MOS and Mark Foster-Gage of Gage/Clemenceau.
A Los Angeles book launch party is tentatively scheduled February 23.
StudioX is located at 180 Varick St., Suite 1610, New York City.
Faculty members Jenny Wu and Dwayne Oyler of Oyler Wu Collaborative are among the eight emerging practitioners winners of the recently announced 2012 Emerging Voices Awards from the Architectural League.
Oyler Wu’s installations, pavilions, and façade experimentations are informed by and explore fabrication processes and materials. Most recently, they completed Netscape, the SCI-Arc Graduation Pavilion 2011—a hand-woven canopy made from 45,000 feet of rope (show below), and reALIze, a tribute installation dedicated to Muhammad Ali designed in collaboration with artist Michael Kalish.
Netscape - SCI-Arc Graduation Pavilion 2011/Oyler Wu CollaborativeCelebrating its 30th edition this year, the Architectural League award spotlights individuals and firms based in the U.S., Canada, or Mexico with distinct design voices and the potential to influence the disciplines of architecture, landscape design and urbanism.
Being named an Emerging Voice by the Architectural League is one of the most coveted awards in North American architecture, and the program has a superb track record over its thirty-year history of identifying firms that go on to have influential practices. Past Emerging Voices have included Morphosis, Steven Holl, Tod Williams, Toshiko Mori, Enrique Norten, Deborah Berke, Brad Cloepfil, Michael Maltzan, Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi, James Corner of Field Operations, Adam Yarinsky and Stephen Cassell of ARO, SHoP Architects, Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis Architects, Jeanne Gang, Amale Andraos and Dan Wood of WORKac, and Teddy Cruz.
Winners will present lectures this March at the Rose Auditorium in the new Morphosis-designed building at The Cooper Union in New York. The Oyler Wu lecture is scheduled Friday, March 23. For more information on lecture and tickets, visit www.archleague.org.
Read more at oylerwu.com.
Read more on www.archdaily.com.
Ronald Eckels (M.Arch 2 ‘13), Paul Trussler (M.Arch 1 ‘12) and David Ta Yu (M.Arch 2 ‘12) of SCI-Arc will team up next week to represent the school in the 2012 edition of the Julius Schulman Talent Award competition hosted by the Los Angeles Business Council (LABC).
Featuring a new, design charrette format, this year’s competition invites teams of three from schools including SCI-Arc, UCLA, USC, Cal Poly, CSULB, Woodbury, OTIS and Arts Center, to participate in an intensive, 3-day design challenge held February 3-5 at the Gensler offices in downtown Los Angeles.
Student groups will be tasked to develop a large scale, mixed-use project for an existing Los Angeles area facility in need of transformation. Following the announcement of the site, students will have only three days to complete the project. Deliverables include site plans, site sections, renderings, and drawings.
Aside from the prestigious Julius Schulman Award 2012, teams will also compete for a $5,000 scholarship prize, and the opportunity to present their design solution to a professional jury featuring Mia Lehrer of Mia Lehrer Associates, Henry N. Cobb of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, Stefanos Polyzoides of Moule & Polyzoides, and Gabrielle Bullock of Perkins & Will Architects, among others.
The winning team will be announced at the LABC 2012 Architectural Awards luncheon taking place June 20.
Alumna and faculty member Heather Flood (M.Arch '04) of F-lab has recently been awarded one of the prestigious 2012 C.O.L.A Individual Artist Fellowships from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs. Flood's fellowship will culminate in an installation at the Municipal Art Gallery in September 2012.
Flood is a designer of information, graphics, and architecture. In 2007, she founded F-lab with Ramiro Diaz-Granados, a form laboratory that focuses on the popular application of contemporary design and fabrication techniques. F-lab's recent commissions include a retail expansion strategy and store prototype for a new frozen yogurt brand, the design and installation of an exhibition that showcased the work of 45 contemporary designers, and the design and fabrication of their winning scheme for a Board of Director's conference table.
Heather Flood's work has been exhibited internationally. Her winning entry for the DEAD MALLS competition, sponsored by the Los Angeles Forum, was recently exhibited in Los Angeles, New York, and Las Vegas; her proposal for a football stadium development in Los Angeles was shown at the Architecture Biennial in Rotterdam; and her proposal for a Vertical Garden is part of the permanent collection at the MAK Center in Vienna. Her work has been published in Metropolis, Lotus, Praxis, and New York Times.
In addition to her professional practice, Flood teaches in the undergraduate and graduate programs at SCI-Arc. She has also taught in the graduate department at UCLA. Flood holds a Master of Architecture from SCI-Arc and a Bachelor of Art degree from Michigan State University.
The Blossom open-work fruit bowl designed by SCI-Arc faculty Elena Manferdini for Alessi, a renowned Italian kitchen and housewares company, recently received a Good Design 2011 award in the Tabletop category from the Chicago Athenaeum.
Good Design bestows international recognition upon the world’s most prominent designers and manufacturers for advancing original, innovative product concepts, and for stretching the envelope beyond what is considered ordinary product and consumer design.
Blossom is Manferdini’s first item designed for Alessi, borrowing technique and tradition from the arts and crafts movement and featuring and interconnected quatrefoil pattern, as a result of research and testing.
Now in its 61st year, the Good Design Award remains the oldest and most recognized program from design excellence worldwide, conferred annually by The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design together with the European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies.
More about Good Design 2011 awards >>More about Elena Manferdini >>
SCI-Arc alumnae Emily White (M.Arch 2 ‘06) and Lisa Little (M.Arch ‘06) of LAYER recently produced the installation Cloud, part of the Women Hold Up Half the Sky exhibition at the Skirball Cultural Center.
Featuring a transparent canopy hovering over the exhibit, Cloud is suspended over the gallery as a tangible representation of the power of individuals coming together to affect change.
On view through March 2012, the exhibition addresses gender equity and is based on the book Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn.
SCI-Arc/Caltech's Hanwha Solar CHIP House, which took 6th place in the international Solar Decathlon 2011 competition, is prominently featured in the November issue of Architect magazine.
"It’s part astronaut suit, part thermos. CHIP—as the California team called its entry—has an otherworldly appearance that bellies its grounding in mainstream technologies. The house (whose acronym stands for Compact Hyper-Insulated Prototype) features an exterior skin made of 14 and 16 inches of denim batt insulation wrapped with a low-cost, engineered, vinyl-coated polyester fastened with zip ties, dowel rods, and lag screws."
Team SCI-Arc/Caltech’s solar decathlon design will soon be on view at Exposition Park in downtown Los Angeles, starting January 2012. Through a partnership with Expo Park, the house will be open to the public several days a week for free tours through June 30, 2012, giving visitors of the park’s Science Center the opportunity to discover CHIP both inside and out. More details about the exhibition launch will be announced early January.
Alumni Lars Krückeberg (M.Arch ‘99) and Wolfram Putz (M.Arch ‘98) will showcase their work in the upcoming exhibition GRAFT—Distinct Ambiguity, on view at Berlin’s Haus am Waldsee from November 23-February 12, 2012.
An introduction to GRAFT’s thoughts and processes of creation—the way they see the world and the ways they live in—the exhibition illustrates GRAFT’s landscape of inspirations and suggests modes of operation that are never separated from the larger context of life. Most notably, GRAFT will transform the exhibition space of the Haus am Waldsee into a scenario of the 21st century to give an introduction of their modus operandi.
The installation will answer questions such as: How is beauty created? Why is narration important for architecture? Why is style the opposite of curiosity?, and How is ambiguous interestingness created?
Read more at www.hausamwaldsee.de.
SCI-Arc faculty Elena Manferdini, principal of Atelier Manferdini, was recently at work completing two large scale projects in New York and United Kingdom: an interactive installation for Sephora’s sleek, newly opened store in New York’s Meatpacking District, and an inverted crystal cathedral for the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery in the UK.
Launched in a star-studded event September 16, Sephora’s new boutique store in NYC features Manferdini’s Sensorium/Lucid Dream (shown above), a multimedia, interactive experience which, by means of the sense of smell, drives visitors through an individual and instinctive journey through the Sensorium and the world of fragrances. Commissioned by Sephora and leading fragrance manufacturer Firmenich, the installation features scents created especially for the occasion, which populate the air of the Sensorium.
Manferdini designed responsive flowers for the release of perfumes, and laser-cut vinyl screens to host the video projection dreams. By smelling these flowers, visitors trigger multi-forms and multi-color holographic images projected on the screens and the surrounding environment.
Made exclusively out of Swarovski-donated crystal strands, Lost in Lace (shown right) is a new addition to the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery—one that explores the structural behavior of networks hung in space. The weight of the crystals pulled by the force of gravity determines the path and distribution of each cable. 1,000 strands constitute the vaulted surface of the "inverted crystal cathedral" greeting visitors as they make their way into the gallery.
More about Elena Manferdini at www.ateliermanferdini.com.
Patrick Tighe’s Out of Memory installation designed for and exhibited in the SCI-Arc Gallery this past spring received the 2011 American Architecture Award from the Chicago Athenaeum.
"Out of Memory" is an experience at the convergence of sound, material, light, form and technology. The installation in the SCI-Arc Gallery was accompanied by a site-specific composition by world-renowned composer Ken Ueno. Constructed entirely of renewable polyurethane spray foam, the interior of the parabolic structure was a three dimensional representation of the sound-scape contained within carved on site by robots.
The American Architecture Award honors significant new buildings, and landscape and planning projects built in the United States and abroad by internationally-renown, established architects. This marks the third American Architecture Award for Tighe.
Tighe's SCI-Arc project and related research has been exhibited internationally, and was recently featured at the Prague Quadriennial, "US Architecture Exhibit," Czech Republic. It is also currently on view at the International Architecture Biennial in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
For more about Patrick Tighe and Out of Memory, including installation images, click here; to read more about the American Architecture award, click here.
