Tonight at 7pm is the launch of the first edition of Evolo magazine at the Storefront for Art and Architecture. Don’t miss it, I’ve seen a preview of the magazine (courtesy of my good friend Carlo Aiello, Editor-in-Chief) and its is fantastic.
Read more about the history and mission of the magazine @ the Storefront’s site here .
See you guys there.

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.

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.

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.

View Koolhaas’ new Prada pavilion in Seoul.
Don’t miss the Transformation time lapse video.

Visit the site here.

via [archinect]

I made it tonight for the opening night at Alice Tully Hall for an incredible performance: Diaspora Sefardi, From Medieval Spain to Eastern Mediterranean. an exceptional concert of revived medieval songs and ballads in what I imagine can be considered old Castilian.

The show itself was just the excuse to make it to the building of course, and right from the approach, the building is truly fantastic: the huge lobby, with a gigantic glass paned curtain wall on one side and the warm wood behind the bar give it the right contrast between scale and warmth. The super long bar of course works wonderfully in crowded evenings like tonight. Heading towards the auditorium itself, the ceiling height is much lower and the scale becomes much more intimate. You walk below the ‘watch-me-im-uber-rich’ balcony then turn right and down towards the auditorium. Upon walking into the orchestra level there is a shift which is pretty surprising: the height from the floor to the balconies is quite low but it soon opens up. The scale of the space is just perfect and the wood/resin paneling looks incredible. It is quite remarkable how close everything looks to the original images. Truly a fantastic building, and can’t wait to go there in the summer.

A couple more images after the jump.

Frank, Amanda and Mara @ the bar.

Horrifying.

Read the NYT news here.

More images after the jump

Wonitata

Google Docs

Take a look at the primitive huts here in the NYT slideshow.

Just as a refresher, the other two entries were in ’07 (Prehistoric Future) and ’04 (Plug-in Drop-out)

The New Yorker’s Paul Goldberger has a pretty good review on DS+R’s renovation of Lincoln Center.

Read the article here and don’t miss the video here.

I made it last Friday to the Make it Work exhibition at the Center for Architecture. The exhibit was sponsored by Arup (among others), and it included work they’ve done with architects around the world and how they’re pushing new technologies/techniques/materials to achieve those projects. The show included a prototype of the Trusset, devised by Phil Anzalone and Corey Clarke. Our good friends Robert Pallman (who works at Arup) and Troy Zezula from Pratt (worked at Arup over the summer) had to do with some of the projects.

View more images after the jump below

Really? 5 different 3d softwares to design the project?

Planda designed the Justice House. Take a look at the video of the process in the link below.

Read the rest here.

Thanks Mike for the link.

I guess making a Justice cathedral would’ve been too easy.

2. Architect
Annual mean income: $62,246
Projected employment in 2016: 155,000
Increase between 2006 and 2016: 18 percent

Try getting that salary at any of the ‘cool’ architecture studios.

Read the article here.

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.

I had the pleasure today of taking a tour of Morphosis’ new building for the Cooper Union (thanks Hayley!). The building, which will be completed approximately in May 09 will be the new science and engineering labs for the school.

Take a peek at some more images after the jump below.

The mesh from the interior pretty much disappears. The stainless steel panels are operable, they are all attached to hydraulics which can open them with just pressing a button.

The grand stair in the atrium. It is a pretty vast space.

This has to be my favorite detail of the entire building. One of the main columns by the lower level gallery rests on a pipe.

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

Our good friend Brian Ripel, founder of RSVP studio, won the New York City Racks competition for the indoor bike racks, which was sponsored by Google. The first prototype, according to the competition, is to be deployed at Google’s offices. I’ll try to get an image from Brian later on to post it here. .