Fellow dysturber, Darrel Ronald, founded Open Form Architecture in Montréal (Canada) with colleagues Maxime Moreau and Maurice Martel. We were recently invited to participate in the Pecha Kucha Montréal as our first public presentation. Following our 20 slides / 20 seconds at the special edition of Pecha Kucha Montréal as part of the Portes Ouverts Design Montréal festival, we have made the slides, as well as video available online.
The title of our presentation is, Simple Rules, Complex Behaviour, and illustrates a limited selection of our work over the past years dealing with generative design, cellular automata, simple programming and complexity. We have been particularly influenced by the work of Steven Wolfram and his book, A New Kind of Science. Having participated in two of his NKS Summer Schools, we’ve been fortunate to collaborate with him and a team of mathematicians and programmers in the United States using Mathematica software.
The presentation is bilingual French and English, just like our favourite city! Unfortunately the first words are cut off, and they are: WE ARE OPEN FORM, and WE LOVE OPEN FORM! We hope you enjoy! Below are our 20 slides, that accompany the video. Continue reading ‘Open Form Architecture @ Pecha Kucha, Montréal’
A new documentary film, archiCULTURE, is in the works about the lives of student architects and the culture surrounding the daily life of design students. The film (trailer) is a grassroots project currently seeking money to finance the project. Continue reading ‘archiCULTURE: The Film’
I had to laugh when I found this video linked from the OMA website. After OMA won the BNA Cube award in the Netherlands, this video was produced by Blue Eye Productions to portray the working atmosphere within the office. I really hope you guys (that work there) respond to this. I can tell that some things are true, but others are misleading, like the fact that the teams in the office “are not competitive.” Also linked from the Blue Eye Productions website are other videos and topics concerning architecture.
And if you get the urge to work for OMA, and haven’t applied all ready, they’re (always) looking for people.
Erection of the Euromast, designed by Huig Maaskant
Since the fog is holding Rotterdam hostage since a few days (my wonderful theory burst into pieces…) you’ll be happy to hear that next weekend (Oct. 11th to 14th) we’ll have the architectur film festival in town.
Reservations are possible since a few days so get to the phone (010) 411 5300 and make sure you get to see a few delicacies.
UN Studio’s design is a continuous dynamic form, a structure ducking to the ground with a motor-sport aesthetic, reminding of the visual language of an BMW ad. MVRDV’s proposal is a group of buildings - blocks breaking from the ground in a sandy desert, creating an ensemble of squares. Where UN Studio’s design is a new object in the landscape, MVRDV’s design forms part of it. More of a place, less of an object. You can download MVRDV’s project PDF, complete with sections and plans (Thank you, Oana!) here:
Typography by Emil Ruder (from Mark Simonsons lecture)
Mark Simonson was invited to talk about typography legend Adrian Frutiger last summer at TypeCon in Boston. He made his inspiring slides available as a PDF. Something you should miss in no circumstance, if you are ever so slightly interested in design! Read more on Simonson’s blog.
Or download here:
Adrian Frutiger: A Personal Perspective. By Marc Simonson: Download
Left to right: Mark Wigley, Ole Bouman, Rem Koolhaas (all photos: Darrel Ronald)
The NAi (new website) hosted the book launch and discussion featuring Rem Koolhaas, Mark Wigley and Ole Bouman Monday night in Rotterdam (10-09-2007).
The three presenters first outlined their positions about the gulf region context, before sitting down to take questions about the book. As a possible strategy to diffuse the potential early judgments and criticisms of the crowd, Bouman asked the question, “Who has been to Dubai [or gulf] and seen it first hand?” Roughly not even 10% of the crowd raised their hands, and only half-heartedly at that. It reflects one of the weaker themes of the evening that ‘we should not judge’ the situation in the gulf region, especially in the UAE. When it came to the questions at the end of the evening, the presenters were at times defensive, and repeated numerous times that the books aims to suspend judgment and rather present a detached overview/reading of the situation. But this is not to say the evening wasn’t full of great ideas, polemics galore, and of course, the exciting subject of Dubai and the Gulf Region itself.
associative design III - berlage institute second year studio (requires quicktime, turn sound on)
Last week I attended the presentations of the associative design 2nd year at the Berlage research studio synthetic vernacular. Led by Peter Trummer and assisted by our fellow dysturb evangelist Martin Sobota, the class investigated traditional chinese building typologies. The principles found in the analysis were used to create a set of rules to create a framework to parametrically derive urban structure and architecture of an exemplary plot in Shanghai: Deus ex Machina.
The research group divided up into for teams, each focussing on different base parameters as FAR, degrees of privacy, climate, internal room organisation, sun trajectories. The formal decisions of the teams also led to varying urban fabrics, from low-rise high-density urban mass not unsimilar to south-american favelas to a styled courtyard & slab network. The results are cutting edge and and visualisations of the process are breath-takingly beautiful. But watch the movie first, then proceed to the review.
