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introduction |
One of the really charming things about SCI-Arc is that from the beginning
it had no sense of itself as SCI-Arc. What mattered was not an image
of SCI-Arc; what mattered was the different ways of making space and
objects, ways of discussing, presenting and building those objects.
In the early days, the discussion was intimate and about small buildings
and houses that were scattered all over LA. And the discussion related
to building. The building process involved an intimate connection between
thinking, designing and implementing, and the success of SCI-Arc was
related to this process and to the success of a few now well-known practitioners
who were speculating and delivering those small-scale buildings. People
started to notice and get interested. SCI-Arc was never concerned with
its place in an academic pantheon, and that gave it a naïve quality.
Instead, it focused on what anybody who does anything meaningful focuses
on: what goes on between the hand, the eye and the table. The feeling
was:” Don’t worry about who thinks what”. Over a period of time what
you do will work or it might not. If it works it has durability; if
it does not, you move on to the next thing. That, I think, is what today
endures at SCI-Arc. There are a lot of things we are now doing to update
the discussion, especially with digital design and CNC fabrication,
but it is still the same discussion about thinking and making. Eric Owen Moss, Director |
![]() Installation at the Stazione Leopolda, Florence (photo by: Omar Cotza) |
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Urban
Insects. Wireless affection Instructors: Hernan Diaz Alonso, Paul Preissner |
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![]() Project by Drura Parrish 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. The honesty of the fictional creation gives us as architects the best insight into the tools for development of material urban conditions. The best hope for change isn’t in the heroic creation of singular instances but to be absorbed into the mixture; to spread like a virus, gently affecting the neighbors until the entire solution has changed color. The purpose of the studio is to look at the whole development of a mobile cultural industry and begin to investigate the digital tools and cultural conditions to rapidly profligate architecture throughout the mixture. We will begin to develop a set of architectural techniques. First in rather generic manners in order to advance a sort of cultural catalogue of affects, and then in a more purposeful way by looking at 4 scales, aspects of the utilization and systemic conditions that allow for the increasing intimacy of a mobile and electronically networked biological culture. The reorganization of the common condition to the specific one will require a focused (expert) attack that each project will need to frame and reframe continuously. Exploring the small scale as a major driving force in urban life, the studio will investigate, essentially, how wireless culture will change the paradigms of metropolitan behavior. The studio confronts the notion of architecture as a visual presence and explores it as a continually emerging atmospheric condition of form, culture, geometry, fear, and compression. Dividing up into smaller groups, each will begin to develop an expertise with the tools and production of affects specific to architecture. The groups will then begin to focus in compatible but separate elements involved in the discussion of biology as a digitally interconnected meshwork of material. To operate as separate teams, each with an area of expertise within the same discussion. A final level of distillation of the groups will focus on producing two solutions to the argument, each from a different set of acknowledgements and principles concerning the techniques that were mastered at the start. The class "Urban Insects. Wireless affection" was taught by Hernan Diaz Alonso and Paul Preissner in the Summer 2003. It is part of SCI-Arc's Post-Graduate Master of Architecture Program, Metropolitan Research + Design (MR+D), headed by Michael Speaks. Students: Saad Ahmad, Gokhan Caydamli, Jiayuan Cheng, Kostantinos Chrysos, Mauricio Diaz, J.D. Dowling, Benjamin Ellefson, Andreas Finke, Namon Gomolprittinan, Woojae Jang, Aditya Kumar, Erdim Kumkumoglu, Sarah Lorenzen, Victor Malerba, Drura Parrish, John Passmore, Peter Seinfeld, Veena Samartha Snehansh, Marianthi Tatari, Satoshi Teshima, Phisit Triwanich, Vlado Valkov, Paola Vezzulli. |
Hernan
Diaz Alonso is the principal and founder of Xefirotarch (http://www.xefirotarch.com),
and practices architecture in Los Angeles and New York. Born in Buenos
Aires, Argentina, in 1969, he received his architecture degrees from
the National University of Rosario and from Columbia University, with
honors. His work has been the recipient of numerous international prizes
and awards, and has been featured in "A+U", "Architectural Record",
"Prophecy", "Arquine", "ZOO", "B Guided", and in the books Architecture
the next Generation, Design Intelligence. Hernan is currently
editing the book Character’s. His work has been exhibited in
New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Rotterdam, Tokyo, San Francisco, and
London. Paul Preissner is the principal of Runer Projects. He trained in architecture at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and at the graduate program of Columbia University. |
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