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 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?

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.

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…

Last Friday I made it to the Guggenheim’s final “First Fridays” of the season. I had been waiting to visit the Cai Guo-Qiang exhibit “I want to believe” in order to check it out during the party, although I was dying to see the exhibit.

The parties themselves are pretty fun, although they’ve become so popular they just get insanely packed and therefore the fun ratio vs. the annoying ratio gets shifted towards the annoying side. After 1 hour in there it is just impossible to move…

I’m still writing my take on the show, but, here are the images for now… I’ll complete this later on.

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The show at The Brooklyn Museum is absolutely amazing. The exhibit, which is separated in two floors, is very extensive and the quality of the paintings/sculptures/videos etc is just incredible.

As usual, I’ll rant about the museum’s ‘tight-assness’ about taking pictures inside -does Murukami care?…- these guys were truly gestapo style, yelling and running towards people with cameras to get them to stop. That’s what they’re being paid for I guess, but it’s an idiotic policy nonetheless. Makes me wonder if Gagosian has anything to do with it.

Don’t miss the transformer girl in the first level (hard to miss, it takes the main central space) , the short clips in the lower level (anyone knows the name of the little fella?) and the large canvas-tiny DOB blue painting.

View some lousy pics after the jump

Also, don’t miss this circus video of the opening from the NYT…

Last night, after an awesome lecture by Jose Oubrerie on the completion of The Church of Saint Pierre, the student work show GAUD++ curated by the independent study group opened in the first level gallery at Pratt.

From left to right:
Sean Dugan, Mike Szivos, Troy Zezula, Jason Mcgee, Andrew Seskunas and Robert Beach.

View some low quality pics after the jump, but check out better pics from the opening in their blog here.

GAUD++

Opening Reception

March 31, 2008
Immediately following lecture

Robert and Hazel Siegel Gallery

61 St. James Place
Brooklyn, NY 11205

To see the development of the project, please visit the blog at: http://www.gaudplusplus.com/

Thomas Hanrahan, Dean of Architecture

William MacDonald, Chair, GAUD

Professor

Michael Szivos

Design Team

Jason McGee

Troy Zezula

Robert Beach

Sean Dugan

Andrew Seskunas

Thanks

GSC, Brandt Graves, Sankshep Mahendra,

Eric Wong

logo.jpg

Last Friday was the opening of United Bottle, a project by INSTANT ARCHITECTS, Dirk Hebel & Jörg Stollmann with Tobias Klauser at the Van Alen Institute. A very smart and interesting solution to the issue of waste.

Read about the project at the Van Alen’s site here.

More images after the jump below.

Just recently I came across Troika’s ‘Cloud’, an installation for British Airlines’ Terminal 5 in London’s Heathrow Airport . It uses a combination of digital input and analog double-sided disks (flip dots) to animate the skin of the sculpture. Absolutely fantastic.

Visit Troika’s website here.

According to their news section, they will have an exhibition at MoMA starting March 12. Not to be missed.

View the YouTube video after the jump below.

via [interactive architecture]

Here is the clip I could get of the interactive animation at Deitch. I would guess that it was made in Processing…