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.
Parrish Rash
Le Chaise Grotesque by Hernan Diaz Alonso
My friends at Parrish | Rash (the go-to firm for art and architecture fabrication) have a new website featuring their work for the likes of Zaha Hadid, James Turrell, Hernan Diaz Alonso, Etc..
Accumulative Micro Behaviors / Final
Image by Erick Carcamo
I’ve compiled the final presentations from the Accumulative Micro Behaviors studio I taught with Hernan Diaz Alonso last Fall. The videos along with the studio brief are posted in the new studio section of this site.
Erick Carcamo
These stills are from Erick Carcamo’s phenomenal and terrifying final project for the Accumulative Micro Behaviors studio I taught with Hernan Diaz Alonso.
Phil Mana
Phil Mana’s exceptional final project for Accumulative Micro Behaviors engages themes of perversion and repetition.
Final Word
The final review for the studio I’m teaching with Hernan Diaz Alonso will be this Friday at Columbia. The critics include:
Jeff Kipnis
Francois Roche
Peter Cook
Preston Scott Cohen
Sanford Kwinter
David Ruy
Ferda Kolatan
Mark Gage
Mark Wigley
Should be interesting.
Accumulative Micro Behaviors | Innovation and Novelty
Hernan Diaz Alonso and I are co-teaching Adavanced Studio V at Columbia. We’re adjusting our approach to what we’ve been researching over the last few years. All elements are now required to be 1” x 1” x 1” or less, forcing larger scale effects to emerge via hyperindexical accumulations.
Accumulative Micro Behaviors | Innovation and Novelty
Columbia GSAPP
Advanced Studio V
Fall 2006
Hernan Diaz Alonso and Alexander Pincus
Historically architecture always starts with a concept, an overall strategy or some kind of pre meaning. The studio proposes to re examine the possibilities of form generation as an autonomous entity.
Hemostology Website
I’ve just finished designing a webpage for the studio I taught with Hernan Diaz Alonso at Columbia. It’s a pretty simple page that tries not to compete too much with the work, but still keeps the feeling of what we were after in the course. Click here to visit.
Greg Derrico
This is a great x-ray view through Greg Derrico’s super organic studio project.
George Makrinos
This is truly an innovation in surface architecture, though I’m not so sure if I think we should be headed in this direction. Still, the rash like patches appearing in the seams of this piece are pretty impressive on the level of effects and technique. This monstrosity can be credited to George “Gorgeous George” Makrinos, future blockbuster film maker and current GSAPP student.
Hemostology Website Prototype
Hemostology Coagulated Architecture
Hernan Diaz Alonso, my former teacher, has asked me to teach with him this semester at Columbia. We’ll be expanding on a body of research done over the past few years into problems of affect.
Hemostology Coagulated Architecture
Columbia GSAPP
Advanced Studio V
Fall 2005
Hernan Diaz Alonso and Alexander Pincus
Liberated from the obligation to communicate meaning whether historical, philosophical, or theoretical, architecture is today once again free to give full expression to its creative potential. Exploring the possibilities of the interiority of the architecture, as a new dynamic field that can be occupied as a network of parts, creating a new continuity trough space. The relation between virtual and physical usually has been defined as a kind of duality, between two different kind of worlds, the studio, will try to explore new boundaries of possibilities of re-definition between these two conditions. Critical to the discussion of interiority is the conditional understanding of the irreducible ‘unit’ that composes architecture. Investigating the nature of the unit and what is irreducible to architecture will allow for us to explore the topic of coagulation and liquidity.
Candelabra
Photo by Isa Wipfli
Candelabra is a design research project I done in collaboration with David Boira and Zoe Coombes, based on the work with minimal surfaces and genetic organization I did in Bill Macdonald’s studio at Columbia. The intention was to produce a chandelier that relies on its architecture rather than its technology for its performance. The curvature of the components was optimized to refract light as well as to connect seamlessly at its edges either in plane or offset. This logic allows for multiple configurations that were in the end sampled from the refractive behavior of digital flocking patterns (very Bill Macdonald). Best of all, its black.
The pieces themselves are made from vaccum formed plastic and fiberglass, covered in tons of bondo, sanded, and finished with primer and auto body paint. They and are attached at the edges by laser cut petg plates. They were made in a very intense 4 day spell in the MOMA PS-1 workshop under the premise that we were building prototypes for their summer jam series.
Photography courtesy of Isa Wipfli.
Assembly
These proofsheets show various configurations of our chandelier during assembly.
Mark Collins
Mark Collins produced this beautiful operational drawing for his final project in this semesters studio with Hernan Diaz Alonso.
Component 1
This is the first finished component of the chandelier I am designing with David Boira and Zoe Coombes. Only 31 more to make...
Prototype Fabrication
SCI-Arc’s 3-axis mill carving a mold out of laminated particle board
David Boira removing the first vacuum forming test at the Warner Brothers set building shop in L.A.
Two unfinished components with the a test connector plate
72 component halves made from vacuum formed PETG plastic
Zoe Coombes finishing the fiberglass connection between the two halves of a component at PS-1
My brother Miles preparing a component for another round of autobody paint
Fleshology | Becoming Animal
Hernan Diaz Alonso, my studio critic from last year, has asked David Boira (my partner in the GSAPP housing studio) and I to TA for him this semester. Have a look at the studio brief and enjoy the Spanish to English translation:
Fleshology
“Becoming-Animal”
The Horrific and the Grotesque
Hernan Diaz-Alonso with Bryan Flaig
TAs: David Boira and Alex Pincus
A.01
This Studio, a belated exercise in Fleshlogy- “becoming-animal,” is not about the mimetic career of biology into and onto architecture, but of the transference of multiple physioiologic scales into the systemic intelligence of the involute surface-dwelling, and back again. The ocular nerve of the owl, the locomotion of the giant jellyfish, the pack logistics of the rat(s), the program of the frog, are not just forms, organic symmetries and baroque geometries. They are machines, they are solutions, partial grammars to take shape for us, and we for them.
Kinematic Surface + CNC Milled Foam
I designed these display pieces with David Boira using a kinematic machinery that I built in Maya. They are going to be used for the GSAPP final show as display surfaces for the work built in our studio this semester. They were CNC milled out of high density foam at Sci-Arc in Los Angeles by our new friend Bryan Flaig.
The Terminal
This is the final image of my presentation in Hernan Diaz Alonso's final review.