Body Raft

The story of New Zealand-based designer David Trubridge is that of a man discovering, experimenting, and understanding nature. David’s professional journey is linked to his ongoing relationship with the landscape as a source of energy and inspiration.

Trained as a naval architect in England, David Trubridge began his career as what he describes a “craftsman-designer-maker” submerged in the study of materials properties and capabilities. His first furniture designs borrowed from the admiration of artists like Brancusi and the Art Noveau movement – a period in his career of interpretation and translation rather than experimentation.

In 1981 David set sail around the world to finally settle in 1985 in the Bay of Islands, New Zealand. The five-year experience transformed his vision as a designer; he started to focus on the concept and process behind a product rather than the final outcome. This is the story of one of his most celebrated designs, Body Raft, which borrowed from his nautical background. The rocking chaise lounge fabricated in steam-bent American ash and Australian Hoop Pine plywood was exhibited in 2001 in Milan, Italy becoming an instant success among the media and critics. Italian design powerhouse, Cappellini, licensed and began manufacturing the design, which put Trubridge on top of the international design scene. Read the rest of this entry »

Registration is open to students and professionals alike, who are interested in participating in a 10 day AA Visiting School design workshop focused on exploring the legacy of experimental housing in Los Angeles through the lens of contemporary design methodologies.

Expect to explore computational design strategies, implement digital fabrication processes, work with a global network of like-minded designers, researchers, and educators, and experience the iconic legacy of Los Angele’s mid-century modernist homes.

Confirmed design instructors:

Nanjing Culture and Conference Center by Zaha Hadid Architects is under construction. The center’s master plan expresses continuity, fluidity and connectivity between the urban environment of hexi New Town, the agricultural farmland along the Yangtze River and the rural landscapes. The development consists of two towers – the taller is 68 floors high while the shorter one is 59 floors in height. The towers share a five-level, mixed-use podium.

The towers create rather dynamic transition from the vertical urban topography to the horizontal one of the river. The natural landscapes of the river are connected to the urban streetscape of the new center through the fluid architectural language of the mixed-use podium and conference center. At the interface between the tower and the podium, the glass façade slowly transforms into a grid of rhomboid fiber-concrete panels, therefore giving the large surfaces of podium and conference center almost sculptural appearance which underlines the dynamic character of the form and providing daylight to the building’s interior. Read the rest of this entry »

Graft’s design for the Austrian pavilion ‘Naturally Yours’, in collaboration with Alex Daxböck, has won 1st runner up for the Milan Expo 2015, themed ‘Feeding the planet’. The idea provides visitors with the opportunity to plant seeds and then directly eat the food grown on the pavilion. Based on Austria’s high quality, locally grown food, the concept for the pavilion lies within its structural framework – at the end of the expo it will be fully taken over by organic food.

Due to Austria’s size, no other country has more organic food from local farmers in shops and food markets. Being a small country means short distances from locally produced food to its customers. At the beginning of the Expo, the 3.6m structural grid will be fully exposed, its timber frames eventually filled with seeds of vegetables, fruits or herbs. The pavilion is organized as a modular grid system, which enables it to flexibly adapt to increasing numbers of visitors and also easily deconstructed and reused afterwards. Read the rest of this entry »

BIG+Allard Architecture, along with three other international firms, has unveiled their proposal for ArtA, a cultural hub on the edge of the Rhine in Arnhem, the Netherlands. ArtA will house the Museum Arnhem and the Focus Film Theater and reconnect the City with its waterfront. BIG proposes the two programs to be merged with a public Art Plaza – making ArtA a vibrant public building for art, public life, education and recreation.

ArtA brings together creative professionals, entrepreneurs, artists and visitors locally and regionally. Attractively located at the waterfront, the axis of the site forms a symbolic connection between the historic city center and the Rhine River. The architects propose a simple building volume with two poles: The Film Theater, facing the city, and the Art Museum – facing the river. Combining a contemporary exhibition facility with a film theater in a vibrant public building is paradoxical challenge – most successful contemporary art galleries are characterized by the spatial qualities of industrial warehouses – large open floor plans with generous ceiling heights and great flexibility for internal division and daylight control. The film theater is inherently a black box – an introvert space for contemplation and focus. Read the rest of this entry »

La Trobe Institute for Molecular Science has got a new building which will meet University’s long-term needs. The cell façade edifice is designed by Lyons won the competition sponsored by the Australian Institute of Architects and the brief was for the project to have a transformative effect on the overall architecture and identity of the campus, previously built within the strict guidelines for heights and materials employed.

The building offers an environment where students can develop their research needs to the end; therefore it is designed around the University’s specific model for creating a pathway for students in scientific fields. Read the rest of this entry »

Oyler Wu Collaborative designed the winning entry for Beijing Biennale competition. The Cube, a 3-dimensional solid object bounded by six square faces, is exhibited with ten other pavilions at the Beijing Olympic Park. This iconic piece installation is combines basic geometries while presents the successful synergy of art, design and science. At Oyler Wu Collaborative they were interested in challenging the traditional notion of a cube as a solid object, a cube as a space that can lose its distinct boundary once occupied, and the fundamental way a cube sits on the ground. The aim was to create an experience that is optically stimulating and spatially rich through the design of an abstract geometric figure.

The tree-dimensional spatial experience is designed to activate the urban environment, one that capitalizes directly on the inherent spatial characteristics of line. In Collaborative they used semi-repetitious field of twisting “surfaces” and the proposal moves back and forth between complex field and coherent geometric pattern. They were interested in the transcendence of line into a completely engulfing experience that could be occupied as a kind of three-dimensional drawing. Therefore the level of curiosity about the piece is created – the trajectories form the dynamic field while shifting while producing a sense of enclosure. Read the rest of this entry »

The Verlan dress is 3d printed by MarkerBot, now commercially available machine. The dress is the final result of the three-week digital fashion workshop held by fashion designer Fransis Bitonti, in New York. The theme of the project was not to design a piece of clothes but to design a method of making form using computers. Students therefore experimented with form-building software and created samples, using 3d printers. The workshop took place at the Digital Arts and Humanities Research Center of the Pratt Institute in New York.

By employing the MakerBot, which is sold in US by Microsoft, the students were in a direct relation with the material world, unlike the process which would end in the computer only, limited to complex computer simulations without getting tactile, physical results. In Bitonti’s words, the main idea was to create a landscape of geometric effects, things that would have different material behaviors in different parts of the body. Read the rest of this entry »

Studio 505 developed a strategic solution for the façade which encloses and identifies the massive Suzhou Science and Cultural Arts Center. The façade is intricate yet simple and it wraps the base building designed by Paul Andreu. The continuously curved perimeter of the main building, which in plan is shaped like a parabolic half moon crescent, is more than 1.5 km long and consists of an inner weather proofing layer an outer ornamental metal screen, which provides shading but also gives the building its unique external appearance and identity.

It was very important to develop a system which would appear as a continuous and infinite surface, in order to emphasis the seemingly endless extent of the exterior. To achieve this, the designers at Studio505 had to depart from a rectilinear panel grid and to adopt the matrix of three hexagons, superimposed at 60 degrees relative to each other. The hexagonal matrix consists of straight lines, similar to the classical Suzhou window screen made from timber. Read the rest of this entry »

Nameless Architecture’s Concrete Church is located in Byeollae, in Seoul, South Korea. Authors envisioned a new landscape situated between nature and the artificial, creation and extinction, rather than a building on a complete urban fabric. The raw concrete church is set to become part of a new urban environment, materialized through its simplistic form, unified materiality, and program-based continuation of space. Site accommodating simple volume and unified material merges with the multitude of desires originating from the newly developed district. Concrete displays its materiality throughout the church, and in contrast serves as an abstract notion, representing the solid materialization of grounded place. Material reveals its solidity as a metaphor of the eternal religious values in an age of unpredictability. Read the rest of this entry »