Looking through an old hard drive, I came across these great Polaroid photos of a 3D printed model of the Strata Tower that we made while I was at Asymptote Architecture.
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Asymptote Architecture: Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture
Yas Hotel Abu Dhabi by Asymptote Architecture - Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture
My friends, mentors, and former employers, Asymptote Architecture - Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture, have launched a new website featuring tons of new projects and recently built buildings as well as extensive documentation of their previous work.
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.
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Asymptote Architecture: Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture
Strata Tower » Aerial View
Strata Tower » Aerial Detail
Google Earth now has images of the Strata Tower in Abu Dhabi under construction.
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Asymptote Architecture: Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture
The Yas Hotel Abu Dhabi, designed by my former employer, Asymptote Architecture, Opens October 2009
Asymptote Architecture, the award-winning, New York-based practice, nears completion of The Yas Hotel project in Abu Dhabi, UAE. The Yas Hotel is a 500-room, 85,000-square-meter complex now under construction by Aldar Properties PJSC. Asymptote was awarded the commission to design the buildings and environs from a closed competition two years ago targeting an opening date of October 30, 2009 to coincide with the Formula 1 Etihad Airways Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.
Here's a pyramid version of the LQ Chandelier on display at Art Basel.
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Asymptote Architecture: Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture
The concept rendering of the LQ Chandelier appears in the the November issue of I.D. Magazine.
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Asymptote Architecture: Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture
The surface contours tell the story in this aerial view. .
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Asymptote Architecture: Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture
I'm coming out of retirement to start an architecture and design firm, Bureau V, with my longtime collaborators Peter Zuspan of Diller + Scofidio and Stella Lee of Asymptote Architecture.
After two amazing / sleepless years working at Asymptote, I'm taking a break to figure out what's next. My retirement party is Friday night at the Spotted Pig. Be there..
Our LQ Chandelier for Zumtobel, as collaged here by Hani, is featured alongside Zaha’s Vortex chandelier in this months edition of Monitor. This image shows a more complete idea of the as yet finished assembly, and more of the set of effects we are after.
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Asymptote Architecture: Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture
Our design for the LQ Chandelier is the latest addition to Zumtobel’s Avant Garde Collection. The form is made from a single minimal surface component that can expand infinitely via seamless edge to edge connections.
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Asymptote Architecture: Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture
We’ve reverse engineered the geometry of our tower down to three formulas and a set of points in excel. The image above shows a Catia model Front generated from the data we emailed over.
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Asymptote Architecture: Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture
I finally got permission from Asymptote to publish some images of the haptic interfaces I designed for Volkswagen. These images have been laying dormant on my site for over a year, so you can either scroll back or just click here to have a look.
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Asymptote Architecture: Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture
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Asymptote Architecture: Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture
David Farnsworth, the structural engineer we’re working with from Arup New York, won the gold prize at this weekend’s Smart Geometry conference by producing a parametric model of the tower I’m designing at Asymptote. Using Bentley’s Generative Components (beta) he was able to resolve the geometry of the tower’s unique structural system and enable the structure to redistribute itself based on changes to the buildings overall geometry.
This a piece of furniture I’m working on based on Hani Rashid’s M-Scape series of work for a show on Asymptote’s product and furniture design to be helt at the Phillips De Pury auction house in the Fall. We’re looking at making it out of vaccum formed Corian at the moment.
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Asymptote Architecture: Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture
Asymptote worked on this project in collaboration with OMA, designing the red slice through the building that houses the exchange. I led the design from our side, which was pretty cool, as Rem referred to me as “dude” the whole time.
This is one of the first real projects that I designed that I thought was any good. It has some glaring problems, but it opened up a door for me to see how techniques I’d been using in experimental work could begin to apply to the real world.
The Budapest Bank Tower we designed at Asymptote Architecture has won an international competition that included Zaha Hadid and Frank Gehry among others. The tower frames the view across the Danube in an industrial section that is being developed by the Orco Group (the competition organizers). The 30 story tower is designed to incorporate a second tower, to be constructed later, and is set to become the tallest building in Budapest.
The scheme is based on a single line that projects through multiple vectors and is given volume through a series of hyperbolic projections. The building is supported by a two rotating cores and a structural skin that we developed in collaboration with ARUP. The mesh skin is based on experiments we conducted with perforated topologies and aggregation, where a surface would become less perforated under heavier loads and more perforated under light loads.
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Asymptote Architecture: Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture
This three pronged, torqued form is the beginning of our explorations for a tower we are designing for a massive development in Abu Dhabi.
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Asymptote Architecture: Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture