LAVA — Laboratory for Visionary Architecture: Chris Bosse.

Chris gave an engaging, hour-plus long talk that was illustrated with great visuals to the full theatrette at Tusculum. He spoke of his belief that the rules for contemporary architecture must evolve beyond Palladio’s ‘Four Books’, to the creation of a new set of rules that better reflect the evolution of society. He cited the the example of contemporary hi-rise development — extruded floorplates and attached facades — as an idea that is now outdated, offering that buildings should behave more like organisms, that building skins play a crucial role as a responsive element between inside and outside. He continued, describing his vision for architecture as analogous to the architecture of a coral reef — elements with inherent intelligence that form systems of  symbiotic relationships. He warns though against attempting to mimic nature, suggesting that architects would be better served seeking inspiration from the geometries, efficiencies and performance of natural systems.

[continue reading…]

The 2009 SmartGeometry Conference was held at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco from 25 March to April 1. The conference focused around the use of Bentley’s GenerativeComponents associative and parametric design software. The event included a 2 day training course, a four day workshop to construct individual projects, a one-day alumni summit where GC practitioners got to present their work. The final day was a public seminar held at the Intercontinental Hotel (for a review of the seminar take a look at the AECbytes article).

Around 80 delegates (including over 15 from Australia) from practice and academia attended the conference — a little down from previous years but still a good turnout bearing in mind the GFC. Matthew and I were there representing BVN and I’m pleased to say we went ok; we both had interesting(ish) projects and we both achieved an outcome (of sorts). I think it is the most progress we (BVN) have made using GC to date.

[continue reading…]

UTS hosted the inaugural meeting of the Generative Components User Group yesterday. A day-long session, it covered a review of work produced by students of UTS, UNSW, RMIT and QUT, as well as work in practice presented by Woods Bagot, Arup and Asabiyah. The day was fairly informal allowing a great deal of discussion between presentations. Dean Skalski from BVN Architecture presented his work on the Brisbane office tower that he had commenced at the SmartGeometry conference in Munich earlier in the year.

Anthony Burke mentioned this exhibition in his talk at the RAIA the previous week. Digital Origami is the result of a Digital Architecture Master class that set out to ‘develop futuristic architectures that draw inspiration from systems in nature, such as reefs and bubbles’. Under the tutelage of Chris Bosse (from PTW) and Anthony Burke, UTS architecture students conceived, designed, constructed and assembled the installation comprising of 3500 recycled cardboard modules (in two different designs) that almost entirely fills the several floors of gallery space.

[continue reading…]

I was fortunate enough to be able to attend this year’s BE (Bentley Empowered) Conference Europe which was held last month in Prague, Czech Republic.

The conference was well organised and very informative, and I met some wonderful (and very knowledgeable) people from the UK, Europe, the US, and of course Australia. For me, the most impressive thing at the conference was GenerativeComponents (GC), a computational and parametric design tool that sits on top of MicroStation. GC is very powerful, and very, very complicated. The key developer, Dr Robert Aish, is organising for a GC workshop to happen somewhere in Oceania (but likely in Melbourne) later this year.