Architect: Faulders Studio (california)
Location: Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Project year: 2009
Typology: Vertical Salt Deposit

The building features a large super structure which will, over time, grow  a skin façade on its own. the system utilizes a vertical salt deposit growth systemthat uses water from the adjacent persian gulf. the water is sprayed onto the mesh of the superstructure using a gravity fed system, allowing the skin to continually grow using nothing but local materials. because the persian gulf has the world’s highest salinity for oceanic water, the sprayed water will evaporate and salt deposits begin to form. ‘the tower’s appearance transforms from a transparent skin to a highly visible white solid plane. the result is a specialized habitat for wildlife that thrives is this environment, and an accessible surface for the harvesting of crystal salt.’ the water would be pumped in using a long underground tube, hence the project’s name.

Architect: Jesse Reiser + Nanako Umemoto
Location: Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Project year: 2006
Typology: commercial tower

The shell is not only the structure of the building, it acts as a sunscreen open to light, air, and views. The openings on the shell modulate depending on structural requirements, views, sun exposure, and luminosity. The overall pattern is not in response to a fixed program, (which in the tower typology is inherently variable), rather the pattern in its modulation of solid and void will affect the arrangement of whatever program comes to occupy the floor plates. A space nearly one meter deep between the shell and the main enclosure creates a so-called “chimney effect,” a phenomenon whereby hot air has room to rise and effectively cools the surface of the glass windows behind the perforated shell. This passive solar technique essentially contributes to a natural component to the cooling system for O14, thus reducing energy consumption and costs, just one of many innovative aspects of the building’s design.

Artist:  Joris Laarman

A young Dutch designer, Joris Laarman, working together with carmaker Opel has designed a range of furniture based on the way bones grow, generating constructions using the exact same principle as bone growth. This idea was first developed by Claus Mattheck and further developed by Opel in Germany to create elegant lightweight car parts of the same strength as conventional furniture.

The furniture was made in collaboration with the research lab the International Development Centre ‘Adam  Opel GmbH’, employing advanced digital tools the carmaker has developed. The form of the pieces were optimized using Opel’s software – which the car-maker uses to refine car parts to increase strength and efficient use of material.

The software mimics the way that growing bones are able to generate additional material where it is needed, but also to remove material where it is superfluous, by making the bone thinner or hollow.

The Bone Chair is made of cast aluminium while the Chaise is cast in clear polyurethane resin, these techniques are studies in shape, strength and different materials. They are now working on a low cost and efficient industrial translation of their concept.

I All Cave, a landmark designed for Paris bid’s to host Olympic game 2012,by Hojung An, Yunghee Kim and Sangun Yeo,not only stands as an physical emblematic statement by mean of its tall permanent existence, but rather orients to cultural sphere actively co-evolving with user’s desires. It is a curious thing in a state of changing by its open nature that self-contains unlimited potentials and constrains. It is a strange machine that explores manifold face of reality without a moral distinction. It links and survives trembling in-between uncensored hidden realities (an exclusive culture) and collective ideology.

Creation in architecture embodies both destruction and preservation. A routine architectural solutions of significant landmark; consider to be extremely preserved, gain its value based on routine valuation system. The objection here points toward to the safe act of just going “categorical process of mechanism that evaluates perceptive cultivation process”. Architect establishes the average perceptive effect as if it is true for everyone. The deductive, heteronymous, and homogenous logic and codes that has served architects well, thus creating a land-mark that does not trace the time of the past event, but it is just revolving around an empty static effect bearing symbolic ideology in public place. Deviated horizon for landmark architecture is imminent.

I-all cave simultaneously embodies an effect (architecture=sign Big?, language that carry out standard average expectation) and conditions that generate unpredictable effects. (Statement of understanding, definition, and potential of its use have been left for its user) This forcibly adds anomaly to authoritative aspects of landmark architecture thus creating “operational landmarks” rather. Operational landmark creates byproduct which, functionally disrupts and further juxtapose individualistic Elysium. This will aggressively reveal actualization of its stasis.

I-all cave consists of two individual operating system environments. In first environment, I-all cave serves all landmark during Olympic promotions and game itself as needed inherent rational functionality. In second environment; after the Olympic mass, it balances symbolic Olympic landmark while maintaining galore or negative balancing. It embodies unpredictable properties towards to operational structure…weather it represents collective or individual thoughts and consciousness. In addition; in local, by its open nature, it provides unlimited programmatic potentials for local people. It is a museum, a dance club, a church, a temple, a theatre, a concert hall, etc. It is public place where people encounter, stroll, rest and be mused by enjoying other people’s exclusive thoughts and feelings. I-All Cave does not imply or imitate any statement, any direction, or anything. It is virtual, physical extension of the people that co-evolves with participant’s desire. It is strange loop that has founded and will surve within personal, public, economic, social, political sphere.

De place was founded in 2004 by Jeong-Der Ho and Deland Leong, and has been exploring the Relationship between urban dynamics and prototypes embedded within urban flows. The studio also researches the Digital technologies that develop the evolvement of physical formation and its links to the living environment.

Volatile architecture. As for the urban dynamics, due to the complexities in urban conditions, prototypes, as liminal bodies, have been devised for tracing and interweaving urban textures based on their operational processing. To deal with the ever changing urban fluxes, instant reactions in various scales are empowered to resonate with the pulses from outside which leads to an architecture of responsive volatility. Being volatile requires that the artificial construction adapts itself from being static to dynamic as an responsive system connecting the multiple layers of human environments. Appropriate technologies are implemented to improve the interaction between the earth and the artificial landscape. Therefore, fluxes of original pattern are reconfigured and a new landscape contour may emerge based on responsive adjustments from the lower level.



Self-sustainable housing. As we know, Hong Kong as a vertical city, it is aggregated with highly dense fluxes of human consumptions. Meanwhile, the complicated networks within the city amplify the damage caused by human consumption at all levels, scales and chain reactions, if inappropriate channels are linked. By shifting within systems, all the pollution and waste can easily spread and do more damage. To stop the propagation, the thresholds within city systems are introduced as gateways to control the movement of consumption flows. Thereby, the consumption flow becomes manageable, and further potential resources if appropriate channels are connected.

The urban rhizome. The plant sustains itself from the surrounding energy. The plant contains various tissues interwoven with all kinds of environmental resources. Within the plant exchange systems, the resources are recycled by the living of the plant, the Urban Rhizome produces shoots upward and roots downward in between existing urban networks. The Urban Rhizome scavenges for potential sources and puts them into the earth and reorganizes the texture map. Thus, the Urban Rhizome reconnects the human dwelling to natural environments as part of the artificial landscape.

The texture map. Through the Urban Rhizome, a new resource network is linked. The texture map includes electricity from fuel cells and plastic solar cells; water is recycled from rain for necessary services and building temperature control; composting from kitchen refuse and garden waste is used to amend the soil, and its by-product methane, from which fuel cells can extract H2 as an energy source; vibrations as the energy source for ubiquitous computing senses the micro-environmental shift, which helps the building adjust its condition to its surroundings. The human consumptions floes are restrained by the thresholds and interwoven with other resource cycles using the rhizome as hybrid of the Nature-and-Human texture map.

Architects: Shigeru Ban, Jean de Gastines

The Centre Pomidou in Metz – a platform for exchange between artists, curators, researchers and graphic designers – is project has great relevance to us as it explores the concept of executing ideas in computational form and digital fabrication. Made by architects Shigeru Ban and Jean de Gastines, who have explored similar procedures in past buildings have collaborated together to make this ‘Satellite’ project of the original Centre Pompidou (Paris).

The 77 meters high, (alluding to the 1977 opening date of the original Centre Pompidou) structure was inspired by the traditional Chinese woven straw hat, and is woven together with 1800 glue-laminated beams with a total length of 18000m. The beams were made in a German construction company (Amann) using CNC milling machines that fashioned the beams to the millimeter. The shells stiffness was achieved using 2000 hardwood dowels and 3500 pins to connect the six layers of beams.

This all would not have been possible if it was not for the use of CAD systems using NURBS surfaces and the use of CNC milling machines. Defining the form, detailing and optimization would never have been realized in the form presented if it were not for the use of Digital planning and fabrication.

Source images: http://www.eikongraphia.com/?p=786

This project was conceived to adapt in an organic way to the surrounding environment. It was designed to harmonize with the existing vegetation, the commercial axe and finally with the local school building. The lightness of the building’s skin allows it to breathe the day and to exhale by night.

Earthscrapers is an installation for the 2010 Biennial of the Americas that imagines the potential of employing CAD and CAM processes in the construction of a proto-architectural landscape—one where the building material source and the building itself are seamless. It also demonstrates the internal design, research and experimentation process by Rael San Fratello Architects in hacking a 3D printer to rapid proto­type and rapid manufacture clays, ceramics and ultimately cement. Mining, desertification, dredging and erosion are a few of the many examples of natural and anthropogenic processes for shaping the landscape and have become the theoretical material sources, sites and contexts for the forms and spaces created. The project also imagines a future scenario for the material and the process as a scalable technology—one that also dissolves the role of the architect and builder—where designer and geomorphologist merge.

A rapid manufactured concrete tower maquette:

http://vimeo.com/13110574