The Biological Morphologies workshop is focused on material efficiency in nature and how this can be the inspiration for innovative structural solutions. This will be a digital craft workshop that considers the forming of structures inspired by biology and realised through a feedback to computational platforms, specifically using the material Bamboo.

Over the duration of the workshop the students will work in teams to develop projects that are directly derived from biological logic, whilst at the same time help construct a bamboo pavilion at the BNCA College in Pune. The deadline for applications is 2nd July 2016.

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Orproject developed a series of algorithms that digitally generate open and closed venation patterns, which can be used to simulate the growth of topiaries. The systems consist of a set of seed points that grow and branch towards target points in order to maximize exposure to light for each leaf. The resulting geometries fulfill these requirements and provide a suitable structural and circulatory system for the plant.

The structural system of topiaries acts mainly in compression and bending. Reversing this, we can obtain a geometry that performs as a tensile system. The installation Vana is designed as a single surface in tension that hangs from the ceiling and descends into the space as four columns of light. The surface is tessellated into triangular segments which are connected by stitched joints. Back lit with LEDs, light shines through the gaps and illuminates the space below with an immersive glow.

As the prototype for a large scale canopy construction, Vana has been developed as an iso-surface around an anastomotic network diagram, as the cortex around the venation system. In a continuous transformation, nature merges into architecture, columns merge into the sky and solid merges into the ephemeral. Vana appears to grow as tree-like branches blending into a continuous canopy that floats above the visitor. The installation was designed for the India Design Forum. Read the rest of this entry »

2000 years ago, the Romans terraced a hillside just north of Barcelona to grow grapes. Those formations still exist in the sleepy town of Teià and were the first place Berta Barrio and her husband and collaborator Josep Peraire took me to on our visit to her project, the small public library Biblioteca de Can Llaurador. The gesture of the terraced slopes and the green-roofed library are immediately apparent. The building yawns out of the landscape, gently funneling in passersby to a womb of knowledge.

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This year Milan Design Week will honor the Miami based Italian designer Vito Di Bari by hosting his newest creation, MyEquilibria, in a solo exhibit at the historical botanical garden, the Orto Botanico di Brera, in Milan. There will be a press conference on Monday, April 11th at 2:30pm and formal unveiling ceremony the day after in the Orto Botanico to mark this historic occasion, and officially launch the annual event.
Following the ceremony, MyEquilibria will be available to visitors free of charge courtesy of Fuorisalone in collaboration with the city of Milan.

According to Di Bari, Milan Design Week was the only choice of venue for the public unveiling of MyEquilibria. Since 1961 Milan Design week or “Salone de mobile” has been an annual event where the world leaders in design unveil the latest trends in design from furniture and clothing to art and architecture. The term “Fuorisalone” is used to describe the tremendous influx of more than 1200 creative exhibitions that sprawl throughout the city of Milan for the month of April. Each year the internationally acclaimed extravaganza draws tens of thousands of artists, tourists, and design elite to share and celebrate the latest breakthroughs and brilliance in design. According to acclaimed architect and designer Gaetano Pesce, “The Milan Fuorisalone has been a benchmark for the Venice Biennale of Art, for the various fashion weeks in New York, London, Paris, for Documenta, Frieze, Pad, Basel and Miami Basel, the Armory Show and so on”.

MyEquilibria was born of Vito Di Bari’s ongoing crusade to promote the “cross pollination of arts and technology for a better quality of life”. The interactive art installation is a vision of beauty that skillfully balances form and function. MyEquilibria is completely comprised of next generation materials and technologies that make it the very first art installation of its kind in existence. MyEquilibria in Milan will pioneer a worldwide fitness community connected through the digital technology woven into the very structure of MyEquilibria’s wellness trees.

At first glance, MyEquilibria appears to be an elegant representation of some unknown organic life form, but the aesthetic appeal is only a fragment of the installation’s genius. The 23’ tall wellness trees are designed to provide an array of over 500 different forms of exercise. Replacing antiquated instruction boards found with other open-air exercise equipment, MyEquilibria has an app for smart phones and tablets that provides instructional videos specifically crafted for each MyEquilibria installation. Thanks to MyEquilibria’s geo-localization and augmented reality features, the app instantly identifies which MyEquilibria installation an individual is using, and offers videos of personal trainers using that very same art installation.

Visitors to MyEquilibria can build their own unique workout routines customized to meet their individual fitness goals through the app’s virtual trainer program. App users can mold their fitness regimens according to their individual body types, health and fitness goals with the aide of the fitness experts that contribute to MyEquilibria. The app also interacts with other smart devices such as wearables and smart phones to provide helpful data for users to monitor their heart rates, time, distance, speed, calorie burning, and progress. MyEquilibria provides a real-time forum for app users to ask advice from fitness experts and get relevant suggestions for improving their exercise experience.

The revolutionary concept of connecting people around the world – united in promoting physical and psychological health and well being, is made possible through MyEquilibria’s social network capabilities. People separated by thousands of miles and across oceans can work out together, compete, help, and encourage each other in real time thanks to MyEquilibria’s online connectivity. The app is also social media friendly for sharing the fun on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

About the Designer of MyEquilibria

Vito Di Bari is the CEO of DiBari & Associates and an innovation designer who develops creative solutions based on next generation technologies and materials. Vito’s Miami based studio, DiBari & Associates is a team of star artists, architects and designers known in the USA as the “Dream Team”, as they are the very best in their respective fields worldwide. Vito has been deemed one of the top three most important futurists in the world, and The Financial Times has defined him as “the Design and Innovation Guru”; Nobel Economics Prize winner, Kenneth Arrow, said, “Vito Di Bari engineers dreams. Concrete dreams, based on concrete facts”. Read the rest of this entry »

The AA Visiting School Hawaii is the Architectural Association School of Architecture’s workshop dedicated to the investigation of flying machines.

Design, fabrication, geometry as well as performance and choreography will be the subject of our studies.

From their earliest use as measurement tools for the city, the 2000 year old history of flying machines is deeply rooted in architectural investigations. Gliding between its leisurely vocation and its scientific relevance, we will immerse into this legacy starting from the world’s oldest form of air-craft: the kite.

The participants will be organized in groups each responsible for the design and creation of one kite, intended as an abstract architectural machine, a modern scientific toolbox or a folly worth of a tropical Grand Tour.

In parallel to that we will be building a drone as a tool to record and document our efforts as well as to interact with our other air-crafts.

We will be testing and flying our air-crafts on the mountains and the beaches of Oahu Island as wells as the roofs of Honolulu, gearing up for our final take off, when all we’ll have built will collapse into one great play.

Website: hawaii.aaschool.ac.uk
AAVS Hawaii Dates: June 6 to 17, 2016
Registration Deadline: May 13, 2016
Director: Costantino Sambuy
Contact: Costantino.Sambuy@aaschool.ac.uk

Australians are by definition sports crazy, so naturally sports architecture should play a significant role in the nation’s psyche. Sport clubs dot the suburbs like fire stations, but none has the kinetic punch and environmental acumen as Templestowe Reserve Sporting Pavilion. The new sport center packs a lot of solar technology on the roof to support the many hot showers taken inside. It also uses the thermal mass from the deconstruction of the previous building buried below, which acts as a heat sink for incoming fresh air to help cool down exerted bodies. The charged design is the real story because it acts as an active participant in the games. Read the rest of this entry »

The Féval city-block is a significant part of the renovation program performed around the Rennes rail-station. The urban project is developed by FGP and Territores. The project suggests to develop a new territory to connect the two sides of the city involving changes in landscape and topography. The railway road passes through urban structures like a river would pass through giant tectonic monuments in a form of large crystals.

The project consists of three buildings made ​​by 3 different architects, the whole project is structured around a landscape rift. The “crystals” are carved in a way to make the inner territory be reachable by sunlight.

We defined a section of the office by calibrating floors to 3.40m slab to slab. Savings in the height of each floor added up to one additional floor for the 28m building. Thus this solution created a large area which gives us the flexibility to “cut” large volumes to produce fancy crystal-like shapes making all composition more spectacular. This ability to resize volumes allows us to create a valley where the three buildings meet on the Féval Street and allow daylight to enter into the center of the block.

Success of the Féval city-block depends heavily on the quality of the infrastructure on the ground floors of the three buildings. We paid particular attention to increasing accessibility to the inner spaces from the outside.

Design: Périphériques Architectes, a/LTA architectes, Hamonic&Masson Read the rest of this entry »

Water is the essential element for life by excellence and abundance since the dawn of time, but it has become a luxury for all but the poorest people. Hydropolis offers an alternative to the use of fresh water, but also a new way of life completely different based on the sea water. Using it in purely artificial and independent oasis helping countries this way that are located in “water-stressed” areas.

The aim of this project is to propose a scheme that is based in developing the biggest necessary activities for the human race around salt water: the production of energy, housing, agriculture and ecological restoration. Aquaculture will be possible thanks to the contribution of seawater. This scheme will meanwhile be reproduced to infinity in space but also in time as long as the intake of sea water is possible.

How is that possible? By creating channels that will bring ocean water directly into holding tanks. These tanks will take an image of a sewage treatment plant as a solar furnace which will collect the condensed water (pure water) and will be divided continuing the life circle proliferating life around. Read the rest of this entry »

The OBU47, designed by Daniel Caven, takes on new ideas of integration of robotics within building skins and using software to record and react to climate conditions. The idea is derived from a low resultant “night purge” that many towers, in hot climates, use to help cool towers during night time temperatures. The OBU47’s operable bay units at night move outward to vacuum suction in cool air and then force the captured cool air into the stationary living areas. Situated in Phoenix, AZ, the tower is in a prime location,due to the desert temperature highs, to incorporate this facade to a new skyscraper.

Taking roots in the Chicago style of architecture, the bay window has been used as a way of extending viewpoints as well creating air passages to the floor plates. (Creating a cross wind mainly through the bay window) The OBU47 bay operates on solar powered electric motors that push a highly sustainable lightweight bay outward cantilevering from the floor plate-thus bringing outside air inward by natural vacuum suction. That air is then compressed and flushed back to the floor plate. This essentially lowers cooling costs as well as promotes and introduces new air into the quarters. The bay also significantly extends views to the surroundings and gives the user a balcony when desired. The bays are capable of filling the living quarters with with more than half the volume of stationary volume- decreasing cooling loads for the overall building. This passive strategy is simply exaggeration from a typical night purge to give the tower not only a new parametric aesthetic but to show how sustainability and parametricism are creating new bonds in architecture. Read the rest of this entry »

Fassadendurst is a B.Arch thesis project by Ralf Bliem, done at the Vienna University of Technology, Studio and Critic under Manfred Berthold. The project is a futuristic concept for dystopian architecture in an urban context, influenced by the behavior of insects berthing on a host.

The basic idea was to think about urban and industrial parasites and the transmission into architecture. The construction is able to move on the facade – trying to find the best spot to stay – always ready to move on. The main structure is provided by steel beams, which carry the large hydraulic system and are needed to connect the parasite among the existing building.

A parasite is located in all devisable areas, so the main structure and the hydraulic system are able to absorb seismic impacts to provide stability on different sites. The machinery houses a type of bio-mechanical heart, able to inject a chemical substance to rebuild the supporting structure of a existing building. Once the parasite places itself on a industrial or urban wreckage, it constantly tries to repair its host and keep the condition of it. Read the rest of this entry »