Studio Mode / modeLab is pleased to announce the next installment of the coLab workshop series: Hybrid Prototypes. As a follow-up workshop to the coLab workshop held in January 2011, Hybrid Prototypes is a two-day intensive design and prototyping workshop to be held in New York City during the weekend of September 24-25, 2011.

As architects and designers, we make things and build objects that interact with other objects, people, and networks.  We’re constantly seeking faster and more inexpensive methods to build prototypes, yet we are frequently hindered by practical and time consuming factors that arise in the process of bringing our ideas to life. Firefly is the new paradigm for interactive hybrid prototyping; offering a comprehensive set of software tools dedicated to bridging the gap between Grasshopper (a free plug-in for Rhino) and the Arduino micro-controller.  It allows near real-time data flow between the digital and physical worlds – enabling the possibility to explore virtual and physical prototypes with unprecedented fluidity. Read the rest of this entry »

This building proposal for the Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art by OTA+ challenges the traditional definition of a museum and the conventional relationship between building and site. The ground floor of the building is reduced to a nominal footprint, enclosing only enough space for basic services, structure and ticketing functions. The ground plane is primarily reserved for exterior public space, including an art park, Hall of Fame, and garden walk. The bulk of the program and building mass are split by the open ground floor. Half of the building is coupled with the earth while the other half hovers in the air. The purpose is two-fold; to minimize the damaging effects of extreme local weather by harnessing environmental flows toward productive outcomes and to re-conceptualize the identity of a modern art museum. The manicured roof plane of the below ground program is pocketed with water absorbing vegetation and catchment systems, while the hovering museum above expands to form open atriums, allowing diffuse light to brighten the space and passive airflow to comfortably condition the building.

The program of the museum is interconnected. The Contemporary Museum of Art, Children’s Museum of Art and Administration are located within the floating mass. The lecture hall, parking, art resource center, library and classrooms are located below ground. The programs below ground are easily accessible and directly connected through vertical circulation tubes, providing both structural support for the floating mass above and space for movement systems, such as escalators, stairs and elevators between levels. All of the below ground programs are flooded with diffuse light passing through skylights that penetrate the landscape. Read the rest of this entry »

London-based design studio Minimaforms (brothers Stephen and Theodore Spyropoulos) questions how architecture can facilitate new forms of communication.Through experimental architecture, they explore these questions in hopes to open up a dialogue about social and material interaction.

Through an invitation from world renowned performance artist Stelarc, Minimaforms was asked to develop a gateway structure for Brunel University. The Gateway proposal conceived a threshold space suspended above an existing reflection pool as an exterior room and sanctuary. This structure is an open-cell system that operates as a perceptual framing device. Read the rest of this entry »

A new paradigm of design based on three concepts from the Korean way of life: abstractness, life, and human nature is the main concept for TASK Architects’ proposal for the Busan Opera House.

TASK started working on the project to create great memorable moments for the visitors from the minute they approach the site. The architects designed three main exterior spaces, the entrance space as the visitors paths under the huge cantilever, the main exterior plaza, designed to be completely isolated, an escape from the city life; and the sky terrace which visitors can easily access from the exterior plaza. Read the rest of this entry »

Architects at EMBT did an unpopular thing for their Comic and Animation Museum Design: they addressed the issue of context. The idea was to engage the surroundings in a visual and associative narrative, delivering a design that joins the Confucian geometry to a mystical appreciation of nature. The intense relationship between object and landscape and subtle referencing to tradition aimed to transform the site into, what the architects called-“a kind of magic land that will enhance the impossible and dare the mind to reach unexpected levels of imagination”. The punch-line iconicity and visual overstimulation were replaced with multilayered experiences of the specific and the imaginative.

The basket-like forms of the museum resonate with images of the Chinese vernacular. Their alignment suggests a processional navigation through the exhibition space, a principle immanent to the Taoist idea of “path”, ultimately embodied in the Chinese traditional garden design. The distinguishable imagery of narrow paths and networks of bridges amid lush green ambiance is reinterpreted, while still essentially rooted in the idea of the Chinese garden as “a cosmic diagram, revealing a profound and ancient view of the world and of man’s place in it”. Read the rest of this entry »

Held in Changsha, China, and supported by Hunan University’s School of Architecture, the ‘Digital Architecture Laboratory’ (DAL) is designed as an intensive workshop, led by invited design and architecture professionals to expose students to the integration of computationally-driven fabrication techniques. The program was organized around the concept of ‘aggregated porosity’, an exploration of dynamically changing density and the lines of intersection between skeletons and solids.

The invited tutors for ‘Aggregated porosity’ are Suryansh Chandra of Zaha Hadid Architects and Shuojiong Zhang of UN Studio, who were asked to propose a design scheme aligned with the workshop’s theme and that could provide shade and fit in a volume of 3 x 3 x 6 meters. Students in the program shared the same brief, and created their own design prototypes at 1:1 scale in addition to assisting in constructing ‘DAL canopy’.

The canopy’s foundation is a 40x40mm L-section steel frame anchored to a wall, to which a grid of laser-cut plywood pieces are secured. steel cable mesh is attached to this grid, and custom joints are used to affix the individual wooden hexagonal panels (also laser-cut) to the mesh, where they can be adjusted by hand and gravity into their desired position. Read the rest of this entry »

Designed by Benjamin Ferns at the University of Nottingham, UK, St. Mary’s Church is an entropic product, dealing with a series of interrelating networks in a dynamic, fluctuating and self-augmenting system. Mechanisms maintain the coastal balance, whilst the architectures of Happisburgh are continually consumed through a cycle of 200 years. Elements from previous systems become reclaimed devices, suspended for eternity in the sunken courtyard of the time arena, a metamorphosis of energy. The architecture seeks to establish a new legacy of St. Mary, one of saviour and recollection, sacrificing the graves of HMS Invinsible to the storms, in exchange for the salt lines that inform the scavenging mechanisms of the impending loss.

A system of petrification and archive, these lands may be re-augmented but they will never be forgotten.

It’s another in a series of cutting-edge projects designed for the blooming Asian market. The competition for the Taipei City Museum of Art has drawn a large number proposals, including the one by Porto-based OODA Architecture, which received a merit award. The aim of the competition was to provide a new landmark for the urban center.

The proposed concept is based on two hypercubes; a 90 degree angled cube suspended within a larger contorted volumetric box. The main museum is located within the cube, and above the Children Museum of Art. The latter is positioned below the open public space and sheltered by the main building. The Museum of Art itself flows on a continuous ramp between the outer skin and the hyper core cube inside, all the way to the top. The galleries are located along the ramp, which spirals upwards, around the art resource center. The administrative units are situated at the top. Read the rest of this entry »

IDEA Studio is a research program for designers, pursiung innovative projects that push design technology to its limits. Its residents have access to latest technology and coaching from Autodesk’s experts who can help them apply the latest technology to accelerate their projects. Shajay Bhooshan, lead researcher at Zaha Hadid Architects, used Autodesk Maya and Autodesk Algor Simulation software to create operative pathways from physically-based simulation designs to structurally sound architectural models. Bhooshan created a plug-in for Maya to visualize stresses in real-time, enabling him to integrate structural feedback into the form-finding process with minimal disruption to the creative experience. To test out the workflow, Bhooshan and his colleague, John Klein, created a case study design of a train station. Using 3D printers in the Autodesk Gallery, Bhooshan and Klein printed the 18 components of the train station design, which fit together to create one fluid form. Read the rest of this entry »

Adults typically make sense of an object and all the sensations it gives them by reference to linguistic and conceptual categories. For new born kids non-linguistic practices come first. The space of the MAXI-ooh! is therefore designed in relationship to a new ergonomic unit: the Babult [1baby + 1adult = 1 BABULT = Unit of playful Learning] .It is a concept design for an innovative playground for kids from 0 to 5 years old. Each BABULT learns by wandering and exploring a continuous space defined by gradual morphologic variations, a smooth space as Deleuze/Guattari would call it. In the MAXI-ooh! space is defined by a field of cells of different dimensions and porosity rather than by walls.

Ground surface is differentiated and folded with the aim of creating an artificial landscape of dunes and niches while all the other structures are hanged up to the ceiling. A forest of water, sounds and smells where the Babults are immersed and can interact with. Babult is not interested in gadgets or inventions but in communication, he’s not interested in studying but in learning by doing. As a consequence all the interactive systems are integrated in the geometry and in the materials of the project augmenting the embedded intelligence of the environment and the potential of learning of the Babult in a dynamic, intuitive but not-prescriptive way. Read the rest of this entry »