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AIA Tuesday Night Talk — Chris Bosse
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the example of contemporary hi-rise development — extruded floorplates and attached facades — as an idea that is now outdated, offering that buildings should behave more like organisms, that building skins play a crucial role as a responsive element between inside and outside.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.
Reflecting on the emergence of computers within architecture, Chris noted that while it is now easy to draw and produce seductive images and renderings, care must be taken not to neglect fundamental considerations of buildability, functionality, program and performance. Once buildings are understandable in 3 dimensions and are geometrically and mathematically describable, architects will be better prepared to design for these considerations. To achieve this, the new tools and technologies of digital architecture have allowed more intensive collaborations, and while they have made aspects of design easier they also encourage architects to tackle greater challenges. Chris finds that rather than distancing the architect from the design process, computational design approaches promoting the creation of many rule-based options allows architects to ‘navigate’ many different outcomes, ultimately producing a more intelligent outcome than was previously possible.
Chris presented a range of projects, starting with the oft-presented Watercube from his days at PTW, to more recent work from his own practice LAVA: the Digital Origami workshop with UTS; a bank headquarters in Stuttgart; the unfortunately named Michael Schumacher World Champion Tower in Abu Dhabi; and the Green Void installation at Customs House in Sydney. He finished with the impressively ambitious MASDAR project in Abu Dhabi where LAVA has recently won a commission.
Each of these projects demonstrated LAVA’s desire to ‘put the human back at the centre of design’, through the use of latest 21st century technologies (tools, processes and materials), and spoke clearly of their aim of delivering projects that achieve 3 criteria: to create atmosphere, be novel and exciting spatially; to perform well as an organism (through structure, efficiency, sustainability, light and air), and to perform well as a building (through program and functionality).
All images are photographs of Chris’ presentation
SmartGeometry San Francisco
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.
Conference days went from 8:30 or 9:00am to usually after 7:00pm, although many attendees stayed back much later voluntarily to work on their projects. At the end of the week the tutors (and in particular Ben Doherty) were looking mighty haggard from all of the late nights. My worst night saw me getting to bed just after 6:30am, and sleeping through the 9:00am start. It was worth it however as Ben made a brief reference to my project during the public seminar.
The full schedule limited any opportunities for sightseeing. I made some time to take photos out the hotel window and of the hotel lobby, and managed to get out briefly one evening to snap as much as I could. I needed to get a photo of a dog, a cat and a rat, so how lucky was I with photo 5 below?
Fortunately Matthew and I had a few hours before our flight home on our final day, so we cabbed it to Golden Gate Park to photograph the de Young Museum (Herzog & de Meuron Architekten) and the California Academy of Sciences (Renzo Piano). We finished up back near the hotel giving me a chance to snap pictures of SF Moma (Mario Botta) and some random shots around the CBD.
Inaugural Australian GC User Forum in Sydney
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.
Digital Origami
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.
BE Conference Europe
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.