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Asymptote Architecture: Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture
We’re in a competition to design a set of office towers in Budapest for ORCO, and I’m using it as an opportunity to explore some issues of patterning and structure that I’ve been thinking about lately. What’s going on here is a translation of the research I was doing on structural meshes into a strategy for fenestration and surface patterning.
I’m working on the design of a parametric structural mesh that uses engineering calculations to drive the design of a surface and then uses the resultant form to re-engineer the structural members. Its a pretty simple concept, when there is a need for more structure, the surface compresses producing a tighter mesh, when there isn’t much force, the mesh becomes looser and the surface expands. I got the idea from looking in the window of Wolford on my way to work and seeing the mesh of some stockings stretching and getting tighter are they went over the mannequin. The trick is getting the surface to realize exactly how much it needs to deform versus how much it can deform. The analysis creates a feedback loop the cycles through the structural data and the surface until the form settles on the best balance between structural and design performance.
Here's a concept rendering of a digital wall surface for the stock exchange we’re designing with OMA
This is amazing and terrible all at once.
David Jackowski’s project for this semester’s Mega Brand Edge City studio has achievied an incredible sophistication in surface geometry.
We’ve teamed up with Rem Koolhaas / Office for Metropolitan Architecture for an international competition to design the Shenzhen Stock Exchange and I’m leading the design from our side. This is the first sketch of how we are dealing with some challenging interior spaces created by the structure of the largest cantilever ever?
Hani Rashid has asked me to co-teach a design studio on Dubai at Columbia. We’re on the verge of some major projects there and will be using the studio as a laboratory to explore Dubai’s imagined but untapped architectural potential.
The studio brief follows:
Mega Brand Edge City | Dubai
Columbia GSAPP
Advanced Studio VI
Spring 2006
Hani Rashid and Alexander PincusDubai is a place of extremes, from it’s climate and physical context, to it’s economic and geopolitical strategies to it’s urban infrastructure and architecture. Here limits are constantly being tested and surpassed, producing a city that today is subject to a darwinian trajectory. Dubai is either quickly becoming one of the most extraordinary and evolved cities on the planet, or a travesty of extravagance and excess, the potential result of both misguided vision and ambitious yet flawed enterprise.
Just as we were submitting our final drawings to the Bauhaus, we learned that the exhibition on piano design that we were participating in had been cancelled. This image was just finishing rendering as the news came in. The End.
Two of my good friends are part of Holiday Home, a project by UN Studio opening at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Philadelphia on January 20th. Noah Olmsted of Imaginary Forces is the project leader for experiential design and Isa Wipfli is the architectural photographer.
This is a chandelier that we are designing at Asymptote for lighting manufacturer Zumtobel. The idea is to produce a a single minimal surface component that can expand infinitely via seamless edge to edge connections. The form is generated by a scripting process I’m developing that evolves the topology of a primitive towards particular goals, in this instance heightened refraction and a lack of undercut surfaces.
We were recently invited to submit a design for a show at the Bauhaus on architecture and piano design. As we had yet to design anything, Hani Rashid and I took a weekend to pump out this prototype design. This is the realization of our first sketches and analysis that focused on shaping the form based purely on the performative requirements of a concert grand.
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.
This is a great x-ray view through Greg Derrico’s super organic studio project.
I took these polaroids with my Land Camera while riding my bike around New Orleans a few months after Katrina. The damage on the photographs is from keeping them in my pocket as I rode around, but I think I makes sense.
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.
More from the DJ Spooky + Chuck D video that never ends.
We have developed a dynamic advertising display for VW that presents company data in a morphing three dimensional network. The display is driven by dynamic forces in Maya, fed new data through Excel, and rendered in realtime, enabling endless combinations of form and information.
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Asymptote Architecture: Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture
Some more work we’ve been developing for VW… These two scenarios show the graphics for vertical touch screen information kiosks that will be positioned throughout VW’s headquarters.
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Asymptote Architecture: Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture
These four screens control the navigation of the 3d interactive environment we've designed for Volkswagen's Autostadt.
PROJECT / IMAGE CREDIT »
Asymptote Architecture: Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture
