After more than four years of work, and with a budget upwards of 15 million dollars, Original Music Workshop is Bureau V's most significant project to date. I won't go into details as it would require quite an essay, and likely a bit of psychoanalysis, but this project, probably more than any other, has made me re-evaluate everything I thought about making architecture, from process, to ambition, to execution. Mostly for the better (I think). I can say, with much excitement, that we are now roughly at mid-construction, with an opening set for the end of 2013.
Highlights / 2003 > 2013 / Deliverables
Radiant Emblematic Structure » Paint, Reflective Tape, and Ink on Archival Paper | 30” x 60”
Radiant Emblematic Structure was exhibited at Land of Tomorrow in 2009 along with other works in the Deliverables series. These drawings, created through processes such as computer-generated graphics, hand drawing, applique, paint, and collage, make up an ongoing experiment that seeks to find new values for the architectural deliverable outside the functions of presentation and construction.
Radiant Emblematic Structure » Detail
Radiant Emblematic Structure » Detail
Highlights / 2003 > 2013 / Abacus
Here's another in the overly long list of projects that went unbuilt. This undulating landscape was commissioned by the Whitney Museum for its retrospective, Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe. It was part of a collaborative performance piece we developed with playwright Lars Jan that recombined material and rhetorical tropes of Buckminster Fuller’s oeuvre. Our ambition was to combine the flourish of Fuller's writings with a wild interpretation of his strategies for assembly. Unfortunately, we lost funding for the project before we could begin construction.
Highlights / 2003 > 2013 / Drag Race New Jersey
In the summer of 2007, Isa Wipfli and I drove deep into New Jersey to take pictures of a drag race we had heard about. My photos from that day only scratch the surface of the wildness that ensued, but I'm drawn to them as the combination of the film stock, development process, and subject matter produced a mood that I had been after in both photography and architecture for quite a while. Somehow I still haven't seen Isa's images from that day. I can only imagine.
Highlights / 2003 > 2013 / Strata Tower
The Strata Tower was my final project at Asymptote Architecture. I remember one night in Dubai just before we started, Hani Rashid and I smoked cigars at a floating nightclub (so Dubai) and talked endlessly about our ideas and ambitions for the building.
I spent a sleepless year on the design, working solid through Christmas and New Years without taking a day off. Still, it all felt worthwhile when construction started.
Unfortunately, and this tends to happen too frequently in architecture, it did not get much further than this.
PROJECT / IMAGE CREDIT »
Asymptote Architecture: Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture
Highlights / 2003 > 2013 / Drums of Death
Drums of Death was supposed to be a vector animation music video the the Chuck D and DJ Spooky collaboration B Side Wins Again. It was the first paid project Noah Olmsted and I took on after graduating from Columbia. Our ambitions were impossibly high, and our project management skills non-existent. In the end we came out with some pretty interesting work, but we could never quite finish the video in a way that lived up to our expectations. Eventually the project died, and not surprisingly, no one was happy with us.
Highlights / 2003 > 2013 / Jesus Saves From Sin
I took this photograph in Saluda, North Carolina in the summer of 2005 with my Nikon F100. It's part of a series of images taken throughout the South while travelling after I graduated from Columbia.
Highlights / 2003 > 2013 / Topological Branching
I designed LGB in Hernan Diaz Alonso's studio at Columbia University in 2003. It is one of the earliest examples of the use of subdivision surface modeling in architecture and the first example of the single surface branching structure that has become an increasingly popular design technique.
Highlights / 2003 > 2013 / Parabolic Solar Facade
Ecco Eco New York is one of the earliest buildings we designed at Bureau V. Combining branding and environmental performance, the signature element of the project is an intricate patterned facade comprised of custom parabolic solar panels and grassy landscape elements.
Highlights / 2003 > 2013 / LQ Louis XV
I came across this rendering of the LQ Chandelier while working on the new version of my website. This was the final model before we began fabricating components, but I don't think we ever built any in this configuration.
PROJECT / IMAGE CREDIT »
Asymptote Architecture: Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture