I made it last night to the WILDCHILD show at the Bridge Gallery. The work on display is absolutely fantastic and the opening was quite a succes.
Take a look at a few pics of the show below.

This evening is the opening of the show Wild Child in the Bridge Gallery down in the LES. The show is curated by Bridge Gallery + Peter Macapia. SOFTlab made the exhibition’s site, featuring a cellular war between East Coast and West Coast. Check it out here.

The list of people include:
THEVERYMANY,
Kokkugia,
KolMac,
SOFTlab,
Emergent,
Aranda/Lasch,
p-a-t-t-e-r-n-s

among others.

My good friends and hyper-talented guys behind studio[mode] – Gil Akos and Ronnie Parsons – have just launched mode[lab], the lab component of their studio. In their own words: mode[lab] “is conceived of as a laboratory and serves as a knowledge base for design research and experimentation. The laboratory is distributed in nature and operates across multiple time-scales and locations ranging from intensive workshops to design studios throughout North America and Europe.

Our primary objective is to discover novel and inventive design solutions through the identification of key concepts relevant to contemporary architectural discourse and the development of related maps of action.”

My good friend Hayley from EFGH just sent me these pics of a sneak-peek from Sunday at the (soon to open) High Line project by Diller Scofidio + Renfro.
Kudos of course to everyone involved in the project, a refreshing addition to a park-starved section of the city.

View more images after the jump below.

This is the first crapotype of the p(h)ixel: a physical pixel that reacts to changes in the environment. The pixel is part of a larger matrix that can create a low-res mapping of the environment by pushing or pulling on a flexible membrane. The first test clip is after the jump below.
Oh and for the record, I used my teeth to cut the cardboard…

[flv:phyxel1.flv phyxel1.jpg 500 375]

We’ve recently launched a sister company called Anyline that provides laser cutting services for Designers, Architects and Artists (or anyone else who needs it really!).

We’re offering a special price of *$50.00/hour* until *June 30th*, so go dig out some of those old files or send us your current project to be laser cut!

Check out the website at www.anyline-ny.com

Sulan Kolatan and Bill MacDonald’s (KolMac studio) Lounge is on display at Moss. Go check it out.

]]> http://www.erratica.us/1180.html/feed 0 http://www.erratica.us/1175.html http://www.erratica.us/1175.html#comments Fri, 08 May 2009 15:17:14 +0000 coche http://www.erratica.us/?p=1175

My good friends at EFGH – Frank Gesualdi and Hayley Eber- were recently featured in the latest issue of Frames Magazine for their design of the Dogmatic restaurant here in NYC.
Go check out the work in their site, pretty incredible stuff.

Congrats guys!

Last night was the (second) official opening for the GAUD++ show at Pratt. The show, which features a cross section of the work produced at the Graduate School in the past year, was curated by Mike Szivos and Maria Tsaftari together with a group of students.

View a few more images after the jump below.

I made it this evening to The Storefront for Art and Architecture for the launch of Evan Douglis’s book: Autogenic Structures. As usual, it was great seeing so many friends and colleagues.

Evan was kind enough to sign this on my copy of the book.

The second phase of the Blue Marlin lighting project was the design and installation of lamps for the existing/future conference rooms and reception area. To continue with the same language as the overall lighting of the space, we developed a chandelier out of the same laser-cut/flat packed elements we used in Phase I and off the shelf components. As you can imagine, I have by now a masters in pipe bending…

More images after the jump below.

SOFTlab recently completed a lighting installation at the Blue Marlin offices in NYC. 6 pairs of branches populate the ceiling and not only distribute light, but articulate and organize the space. The branches end in the light fixtures which we designed and fabricated at the studio, while the rest of the structure was made out of standard electrical conduit.

Take a peek at more images of the installation after the jump below.

Smart Cities vehicle prototype.

We just got back from Boston after being invited by MIT to give a lunchtime lecture. My good friend Daniel Cardoso, a PhD candidate there was kind enough to show us around the media lab, where a few -very generous- people showed us some of their work. We had a chance to see the fabrication labs and some of the robotic work being currently done there, and it was absolutely mesmerizing. Dimitris Papanikolaou gave us a full presentation on his Mobility on Demand (MOD) project for the Smart Cities group, not only was that incredibly generous, but an amazingly interesting solution to urban mobility. What I think was among the most interesting thing -not only of his project but of the lab in general- is the reality of it all. A lot of the research being conducted there is for real applications / products / solutions, which is very refreshing to see after having been involved in architecture school for some time now, where a very small percentage of what is produced has real-world implications. We had as well the opportunity to meet up with our friends Carlos Rocha (ex-Media Lab and current Honda scientist) and Skylar Tibbits.

View a few more images after the jump below.

Dimitris Papanikolaou and a MOD vehicle prototype.

Daniel Cardoso showing us some of the work done at the S.A workshops.

Carlos Rocha, Daniel Cardoso and Mike Szivos post lecture.

The Millennium Falcon
ps. Daniel sent me this brief history or the MF.

The French magazine Stiletto asked SOFTlab to work on a project for their December edition of the magazine. The theme was Utopia.

As architects, this is of course a pretty loaded theme. We were given free reign but the theme had to incorporate 6 different pairs of stiletto shoes/boots, part of course of the overall theme of the magazine itself. The city was thought of as a pattern, and as a bow and counterpoint to Superstudio, it is a distorted, continuous grid that is both landscape and infrastructure, city and world, nature and artifice.

The shoes then, became the towers that break the pattern. Fashion as a liberator you might say?

The team were:
Mike Szivos, Jose Gonzalez, Jason McGee, Masami Ueki and Anjas Maroef.

SOFTlab has just completed the website for our good friends Frank Gesualdi and Hayley Eber at EFGH.

The site was conceived as a pulsing array of pixels that contain the projects. After a while, it looks like the site is breathing, almost alive.

Go check it out.

I had forgotten to upload these images on Zaha’s Pavilion. It was definitely good walking through it, too bad though that (most of) the art was just, mediocre to say the least.

More images after the jump.

The pavilion itself was ‘a cool shape’, but that is about it. It seems like keeping the form a ‘signature’ Zaha form makes whole idea of it being a dismountable structure go through a lot of gymnastics.

Check out our new toy at the studio: a Universal Laser Systems laser cutter: PLS 6.60, with a 60 watt laser and air assist with an 18″ x 32″ bed. Yumm.

Our good friends from EFGH -Frank Gesualdi and Hayley Eber- had the opening of their first completed architectural project: Dogmatic, a nifty little quasi fast food restaurant in Union Square which specializes in gourmet sausages, served in a vertical baguette. Very yummy by the way.
The design of the space is incredibly smart and playful: a hefty communal table takes the center stage, with a thick butcher block top and steel base. The table has cantilevered retractable seats which is such a good move for a small place, avoiding altogether any type of loose furniture. A mural baked into the tile is another great detail, moreover since it’s placed along the area where the waiting line will be. These guys took a lot of care in the details, so go take a look at it and try some of the goodies.

More images after the jump below

The New York Times’ T-Magazine invited SOFTlab, among 10 other design studios/individuals, to create a short intro animation for their online magazine. It will be featured this month for the launch of their Fall issue.

View the intro animation here.

Buckminster Fuller’s exhibition at the Whitney is fantastic. On the first floor is the Dymaxion car, which, cool as it is, is surpassed by the beautiful technical drawings for it.
The fourth floor is where the main exhibit is, and there are some incredible drawings and models of experiments and projects of ranging scales. There were quite a few projects and many drawings, sketches as well as footage of Fuller that I had never seen before, and it was truly a treat.

I left the exhibition feeling a bit uneasy though: there has to be some level of insanity in someone that has such faith in technology as the savior. His completely ‘technocratic-utopian’ view seems in a sense harmless (even naive), yet it displaces man so swiftly.

Don’t miss the fantastic model and drawings of the floating city, the incredible sketch for the World Fair and his geometric models.