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.

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/1147.html http://www.erratica.us/1147.html#comments Fri, 10 Apr 2009 15:40:43 +0000 coche http://www.erratica.us/?p=1147

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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. .

A few images from MoMA’s permanent collection of Architecture and Design and from the prefab exhibition. It’s pretty incredible what these guys have in their vaults.

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.

SOFTlab entered the City Racks Competition. The proposal was not just about creating a bike rack for New York City, but about creating a networked environment and brand to nurture a culture of bike riding. The design takes advantage of the dispersive nature of bike racks and current technology to record, measure, and display personal, neighborhood and citywide data.

We didn’t make it to the final 10, but we’re still pretty happy with what we produced. Check out more images after the jump below.

We made it downtown to the Phillips de Pury & Company Gallery to take a look at Hani Rashid’s Atmospherics exhibition.

By far the best pieces were the the chandelier, the jewelry boxes and the RP’d vases. The smaller scale pieces just seem to have been figured out a bit better than the larger scale ones.

The table is one example of what I still find lacking in a lot of the digitally designed work being produced: lack of detailing… There is no actual connection between the metal base and the glass top (other than the glass bulging – which is not a connection…). The glass wasn’t actually touching the four points it should and that’s precisely why you would need some detail. Some of the larger ‘scapes’ where also part of those that needed something, this time a connection to the floor. The way they meet the ground is at best haphazard, a profile and a welded plate very close to the lowest section of it is the way it’s resolved. I guess that’s what happens when you render in Maya’s black background…

The New Yorker has an interesting article on Buckminster Fuller’s vision and (failed) projects, soon to be on display at The Whitney Museum of Art here in NYC. It poses the question of WHAT is it exactly that is relevant -yet so hard to pin down- of Fuller’s trajectory.

Read the article here.