A creative and technical team from HDA | Hugh Dutton Associés will be in Turin next week to direct and coordinate one of the group of international Smart Building Workshop in the context of Turin’s nomination for the European Smart Cities project.

The following key people from HDA are composing the team for the workshop:

Hugh Dutton | architect and designer, director of HDA | Hugh Dutton Associés
Gaetan Kohler | architect, co-founder of OZ collective
Sebastien Perrault | engineer and architect, sebastienperrault.com
Francesco Cingolani | architect, communication and urban strategy consultant, immaginoteca.com

The workshop will focus on contemporary key concepts such as smart buildings, new technologies, sustainability and new issues for public spaces. You can find more information (in italian) about the workshop at smartbuilding.oato.it

We will share as much as possible real-time information during the workshop. If you want to follow us, keep an eye on this blog and follow us on twitter at @HDA_Paris

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Larry Bell , né en 1939 à Chicago, est une figure majeure de l’art contemporain. Son oeuvre explore la lumière et sa perception. Photographies, sculptures et dessins forment un corpus dont la richesse est étonnante. [...] La perception périphérique est au centre de ses recherches, le verre devenant peu à peu son matériau privilégié. La réflexion et l’opacité possibles de cette matière lui permettent d’inventer des processus afin de créer des objets sculpturaux qui déjouent les frontières entre les catégories établies de la peinture et de la sculpture.

“Après avoir considéré qu’un tableau était en soi un volume, j’ai fait des sculptures basées sur la forme du tableau, qui lui reprenait le principe de fenêtre. Il s’agissait d’oeuvres en trois dimensions, mais, lorsque je les ai réalisées, je ne me suis pas rendu compte que j’étais en train de devenir sculpteur. Je n’abordais pas mon travail sous cet angle-là et ce n’était pas une décision consciente, volontaire, de changer de discipline et de me mettre à la sculpture. C’était plus le résultat d’une évolution logique… Je ne me suis jamais qualifié de minimaliste, parce que mes œuvres ont un poids et une masse et qu’en ce sens, elles sont finalement assez traditionnelles.”

Texte de Marie de Brugerolle

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Exposition “Larry BELL, en perspective” à Nîmes au musée d’art contemporain – Carré d’Art jusqu’au 22 mai (video ci-dessous).

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Si cet article vous a intéressé, vous pouvez aussi lire:
Engineered transparency | a recent lecture in Dusseldorf by Hugh Dutton
FACADES TEXTURES ///
Réalité, Matière, Lumière

It’s Friday… It’s almost the weekend…It’s a full moon….You can download ‘The King of Limbs’ now if you so wish! Thank you good people for waiting … Have a great weekend wherever you are….

By this informal post on their blog, Radiohead announced last Friday their new album “The King of limbs”.

At the moment the album is exclusively distributed on the web as it was for the previous one “In Rainbows”. Unlike Rainbows choose-your-own-adventure price, The King of Limbs (available digitally here) has a fixed price of  $9 for an MP3 download. [ via Music Mix ]

This new album gives me the opportunity to talk about a project by Radiohead I really loved and its name is RADIOHEAD / HOUSE OF CARDS (first image above). For the making of “House of Cards” video (below) from the album “In Rainbows”, Radiohead made an interesting experiment combining different digital technologies.

No cameras or lights were used. Instead two technologies were used to capture 3D images: Geometric Informatics and Velodyne LIDAR. Geometric Informatics scanning systems produce structured light to capture 3D images at close proximity, while a Velodyne Lidar system that uses multiple lasers is used to capture large environments such as landscapes. In this video, 64 lasers rotating and shooting in a 360 degree radius 900 times per minute produced all the exterior scenes.
You can watch below the very interesting making-of video to learn about how the video was made and the various technologies that were used to capture and render 3D data.

I also recommend you to explore this amazing data visualization through a 3D viewer where you can use your mouse to further manipulate the data and create your own visualizations.

For further information and updates about Radiohead, you can follow their blog Dead Air Space

The Skylon was a futuristic-looking, slender, vertical, cigar-shaped steel tensegrity structure located by the Thames in London, that apparently floated above the ground, built in 1951 for the Festival of Britain.
A popular joke of the period was that, like the British economy of 1951, “It had no visible means of support”.

The Skylon was the “Vertical Feature” that was an abiding symbol of the Festival of Britain. It was designed by Hidalgo Moya, Philip Powelland Felix Samuely, and fabricated by Painter Brothers of Hereford, England, on London’s South Bank between Westminster Bridge andHungerford Bridge. The Skylon consisted of a steel latticework frame, pointed at both ends and supported on cables slung between three steel beams. The partially constructed Skylon was rigged vertically, then grew taller in situ.[2] The architects’ design was made structurally feasible by the engineer Felix Samuely who, at the time, was a lecturer at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in Bedford Square, Bloomsbury. The base was nearly 15 metres (50 feet) from the ground, with the top nearly 90 metres (300 feet) high. The frame was clad in aluminium louvres lit from within at night. Both the name and form of the Skylon perhaps referred back to the Trylon feature of the 1939 World’s Fair. Mrs A G S Fidler, wife of the chief architect of the Crawley Development Corporation, suggested the name and said she derived it from skyhook and nylon.

A few days before the King and Queen visited the exhibition in May 1951, Skylon was climbed at midnight by student Philip Gurdon from Birkbeck College who attached a University of London Air Squadron scarf near the top. A workman was sent up a few days later to collect it.
Questions were asked in Parliament regarding the danger to visitors from lightning-strikes to the Skylon, and the papers reported that it was duly roped off at one point, in anticipation of a forecast thunderstorm.

As HDA often works with glass and light steel structures, transparency has always been a central point of interest in our design process.
We share today the paper and its related presentation given by Hugh Dutton on 30th September 2010 in Dusseldorf, at  Engineered Transparency international conference.

HDA Projects

Here is the introduction of the paper:

Structural glass has become a commonplace component in architecture. Early pioneering work on structural glass that created the spherical bearing articulated bolts for suspended tempered glass and tensile cable wind bracing cable trusses was carried out by Peter Rice and the RFR group at la Villette, Paris in the early ‘80’s. The author had the good fortune of participating in that project and co-authored Structural Glass with Peter Rice telling the story of the development process.

For HDA, it is the architectural potential of structural glass that is the most appealing to me. At the time, maximal transparency was the objective of our work. The architect of the museum, Adrien Fainsilber, wished that the Museum have an open dialogue with the park, using the south facing Bioclimatic Facades as a ‘zone tampon’ between the museum and the park. The glazing system consisting of 2m x 2m panels of tempered glass were suspended from each other using investment cast components in stainless steel. An entire bay measuring 8m x 8m is an autonomous structural glass panel
gravity supported by the glass itself and using the glass surface to stabilize the cable system. The ‘cable truss’ was developed as an alternative to glass fins. The cable truss itself was a pioneering development of non-linear analysis engineering at the time.

RFR’s work has attempted to explore the architectural potential of structural glass, applying it in varied contexts with maximal attention to the architectural message of each case rather than an expression of the technology itself. There has been notable attention to the recent concerns of sustainable design.

Please find below the full article or download it here > HDA: Structural Glass, Work in Progress (519)

For those who read French, the following is a passage from a Hugh Dutton’s text about transparency, glass and light in architecture:

“Je crois que le Verre Structurel a permis la naissance d’une nouvelle architecture de la transparence et avec une nouvelle qualité centrée sur la notion de lumière. Également, cela a rendu possible aussi une approche sculpturelle au traitement de la matière des structures porteuses. Dans ce sens, la pyramide inversée de Pei me parait un exemple brillant de cette symbiose entre verre structurel et lumière. On y vois l’éclatement des points iridescentes, la clarté et, enfin, une révérence quasi sacrée de l’objet en verre meme 20 ans après sa conceptoion et realisation.”

Francesco Cingolani will be presenting today, Tuesday 12th October, in Madrid, some works of parametric architecture developed by HDA | Hugh Dutton Associés and Ecosistema Urbano.

The conference is based on the previous HDA’s lecture at Ecole d’Architecture de Paris La Villette, and it will include presentation of examples like Terna’s Electric Pylons ( designed by HDA | Hugh Dutton Associés) and parametric research for the Air Tree project, designed by Ecosistema Urbano for the Expo of Shangai.

Pylons of the future -Dancing with Nature – HDA | Hugh Dutton Associés

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Open Source Air Tree, [ ecosistema urbano ]

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Please find below the presentation in PDF format shared on issuu.

“Un architecte / un projet – Enseignants d’architecture à l’Ecole Spéciale” est le titre de l’exposition qui aura lieu du 16/10 au 7/11 (vernissage le 15 octobre) à l’Ecole Speciale d’Architecture. Chaque enseignant en architecture de l’école est invité à exposer un projet d’architecture réalisé ou non de son choix.
Hugh Dutton, et donc l’agence HDA, participe avec le projet de la passerelle de La Roche sur Yon, inauguré en février 2010 et conçu en collaboration avec Bernard Tschumi.

Ci-dessous les deux panneaux qui seront exposé à l’école.

Il primo luglio, Hugh Dutton ha ricevuto il premio “Architetture Rivelate” per il progetto della Centrale Termica Iride Energia, che abbiamo realizzato a Torino insieme all’architetto Jean Pierre Buffi.

Il progetto è descritto dal comunicato stampa dell’Ordine degli Architetti di Torino, come un “Brillante intervento scenografico, diurno e notturno, che qualifica la ingombrante presenza della macchina tecnologica  nel nuovo contesto urbano di Spina 2.”

Come avevamo già fatto per la Passerella Olimpica di Torino, abbiamo creato anche per il progetto della Centrale Iride un gruppo flickr partecipativo, di cui potete vedere le prime foto qui sotto.

E’ disponibile anche un press-kit del progetto, visualizzabile e scaricabile in PDF dalla nostra pagina issuu

Comme nous avions dejà annoncé sur Twitter, nous organisons en collaboration avec Rhinoforyou une formation Grasshopper à Paris incluant un Atelier d’Architecture Paramétrique. Le stage est prévu pour le 28,29 et 30 juin prochains.

Les 2 premières journées sont consacrées aux « fondamentaux » de Grasshopper avec en préambule une introduction au design et à l’architecture paramétrique et leurs impacts dans la conception, la création et la construction. La troisième journée sous forme d’atelier est dédiée à l’étude de cas concrets proposés par les stagiaires, qui, quelques jours avant la formation, pourront envoyer leurs projets par mail à info@rhinoforyou.com.

D’après ce que j’ai pu constater, les formations de design paramétrique et de Grasshopper en France, et en langue française, sont encore assez rares, mais nous allons essayer d’y remédier…
Si vous êtes intéressez, réserver votre place dès que possible car nous avons décidé de limiter les places à 10 participants maximum.

Pour voir le programme ou pour plus d’information, consulter le PDF ci-dessous où téléchargez Formation Grasshopper (310)

Hugh Dutton animera principalement la conférence. J’interviendrai plus personnellement pour parler de la passerelle de La Roche sur Yon, en Vendée, qui a été inaugurée le 6 Février 2010. Le dossier de presse de cet ouvrage a déjà été publié lors d’un précédent post sur le blog.

Lors de mon intervention, je m’appuierai sur le support power point qui suit :
Conference EPF: Réalisation de la Passerelle de La Roche sur Yon