It’s now official : Hugh Dutton Associates is taking part the in The Paris Atelier, an advanced academic program run in Paris by the Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. The program is directed by Phillip Anzalone, director of the Laboratory for Applied Building Science, and with the participation of visiting artist Tomas Saraceno.
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IMAGE ABOVE: WikiHouse: Democratizing Architecture – source : www.publicinterestdesign.org/tag/alastair-parvin
“We are moving to a future where the factory is everywhere and the design team is everyone.” Alastair Parvin
It’s been almost a month since the first OUI SHARE FEST took place in Paris. It was a really interesting 3 days festival entirely dedicated to collaborative economy aiming to spread the knowledge and grow the global community of citizens, designers, makers, economists, politicians etc.
Along with well-known speakers, institutions and organizations, there was a collective of designer (or better a community) that truly couldn’t miss the appointment. And to be honest, they were the main reason to me for being there. If you are readers of this blog, you probably already know them. I’m talking about the World’s biggest design team, the WikiHouse platform.
Let me just spend few words to introduce them. “WikiHouse is an open source construction set. Its aim is to allow anyone to design, download, and ‘print’ CNC-milled houses and components, which can be assembled with minimal formal skill or training”. It is a non-profit project that adopts an inclusive approach and grows through the collaborative efforts of a community in an open-source culture.
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Cover of the book “A pattern language” by Christopher Alexander
It often happens that the most significant and interesting contributions in a discipline such as architecture come through unusual routes of unlikely character. And very often the recognition of the person and appreciation of the value of its work comes late. Sometimes too late. But since the seed of a wonderful idea (rather than of a revolutionary theory) has been planted, even if it is ahead of its time, there is a sort of inevitability that will bring it to fruition.
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After weeks of discussions, brainstorming and details organizations, we are very very very happy to finally announce that Hugh Dutton Associates is the organizing partner of the REaction workshop about Smart Cities and Parametric Design. The workshop will be held on July 5th – 7th at SUPERBELLEVILLE coworking in Paris. You’ll find all the details and application form at superbelleville.org/reaction.
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Today we introduce Alessandro Carabini – @xybale, a new guest author for complexitys. Alessandro (on the photo above during a bike trip) is a young and talented designer “looking for innovation at the intersection of People, Technologies and Architecture”. We met him at the 1st Open Drink at superbelleville coworking about social parametric research. Alessandro is also lauching with Hugh Dutton Associates the reaction workshop about smart cities and computational design that will be held in Paris in July ( more info soon on this blog :) Here is an introductory text by Alessandro. Enjoy!
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1st Grid Expo @ CeBIT 2013 – flickr.com
Our “pylons of the future” named GERMOGLI (Sprouts) will be part of the GRID EXPO: Beauty of Power, an exhibition of about 20 pylon designs, which will be shown from the 22nd of April until the end of this year in the Stiftung Mercator in the center of Berlin.
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Michael Najjar’s High Altitude photo superposed with Dow Jones chart
For architects design and architecture are tools to shape the world and make of it a more beautiful and more comfortable place to live in, so we think it is very important to ask ourselves : Is our world being shaped by algorithms or by us? This question arose a few days ago during an exchange between me and Gaëtan at Hugh Dutton Associates. After watching the talk below “How algorithms shape our world” by Kevin Slavin [ENGLISH with FRENCH subtitles - 15 minutes] Gaëtan asked : “Is that what we really want?”
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Peter Trevelyan’s incredible geometric sculptures are a thing of wonder being created out of fragile pencil lead. Fused together carefully with glue these delicate sculptures come in a range of sizes that will boggle the mind. - via designcollector.net
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“Looking at emergent phenomena in nature, don’t you think (traditional) design itself is against nature?”
This question arises from the presentation DESIGNING SPACE FOR EMERGENCE IS AN EMERGENCY in which we were exploring relations between design and emergent phenomena. Computational designer and researcher Andrea Graziano pointed out that we should rather think that “nature is the best designer ever” and suggested two inspiring mini-talks that I am sharing with you today. They both come from the website NextNature, a network that explores the changing relation between people, nature and technology. NEXTNATURE is asking a very simple question: “What is nature?”.
For example, do you think the image above is a photo of birds murmuring or a drawing generated by grasshopper or any other parametric design tool? Does a different kind of nature, created/designed by humans, exist?
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Universal Joint (Jonathan Chertok) presented the results of his ongoing research at the poster session of Advances in Architectural Geometry 2012 Conference held at Centre Pompidou Center in Paris in collaboration with Aurelien Lemonier, Curator of Architecture Department at MNM-CCi and the Ecole Nationale Superieure d’Architecture Paris-Malaquais. This work is the result of a hybrid design build practice based out of Austin, Texas and the research began in 1998 with a project that involved the digital recreation of a classical mathematical model collection housed in Goettingen, Germany.
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