Architecture Radio

Action Plans

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 22:03:23 -0500

Young architects and invited guests evaluated the history of the Young Architects Forum (YAF), identified issues important to young architects today, and strategized on how to best advocate for young architects within the profession and AIA. The YAF is using material developed at the Summit to focus their efforts to bring useful knowledge to young architects across the country.

Focus on The Architect

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 22:03:23 -0500

Generational Differences - Marsha Littell, HOK

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 22:03:23 -0500

BIM, BIM, BIM

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 22:03:23 -0500

Future Visions

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 22:03:23 -0500

AIA Strategic Plan - Marion Fowlkes, FAIA, AIA National Board of Directors

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 22:03:23 -0500

Why are we here, and what do we need to do?

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 22:03:23 -0500

Twenty Years of Shaping Civic Design

Sun, 11 Feb 2007 13:51:00 -0600

Twenty years ago, Charleston Mayor Joseph P. Riley, Jr. awoke one morning and realized he was the chief urban designer of his city, or so the story goes. He promptly wrote a letter to Jaquelin Robertson, then Dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia, proposing the Mayors' Institute on City Design - a program that would bring mayors together with design and development experts to discuss the most challenging urban design projects facing their cities. Robertson brought the idea to Adele Chatfield-Taylor, then Director of Design at the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Mayors' Institute was born. Twenty years later, in essentially the same format proposed by Mayor Riley, the Mayors' Institute is going strong - hosting seven to eight sessions and reaching at least fifty cities each year. In fact, the Mayors' Institute has graduated over 700 mayors and over 500 design and development professionals in its twenty year history. To celebrate this momentous occasion, the MICD hosted a public lecture and panel discussion at the National Building Museum on December 13th. Moderated by Paul Goldberger, architecture critic for The New Yorker magazine, the discussion centered around the impact of politics on city design and the future of urban development in America's cities. The Mayors present were: United States Conference of Mayors President Douglas Palmer of Trenton, New Jersey; Mayor Joseph P. Riley, Jr., of Charleston, South Carolina; Mayor David Cicilline of Providence, Rhode Island; and Mayor T.M. Franklin Cownie of Des Moines, Iowa. Mayors' Institute on City Design

So What Would Nature Do?

Thu, 01 Mar 2007 01:57:12 -0600

Non-human living systems provide the only technology other than our own to which we have access. While close copying of nature has a poor history and only limited prospects, much can be learned from this alternative reality. In particular, looking at natural design can free us from the strait-jacket of our own tradition. Here we will consider several situations in which evolution's designs might provide useful guidance for our own technology, situations ranging from fairly specific devices to quite general approaches. (1) Life's need for gas and heat exchange has led to the elaboration of some remarkable ventilatory devices and conservative exchangers - for instance the flow induction scheme of sponges and limpets and the nasal heat conservation system used by small mammals and birds. As an example of biologically-inspired but not slavishly copied design, a heat-trapping ventilation system for a sealed home will be described. (2) Life builds more often to a criterion of strength than stiffness, and its consequent mechanical flexibility is multidimensional in ways we rarely consider, much less capitalize upon. Thus the relative resistance of flower stems and wing feathers to bending and twisting might provide hints for making cheaper and less obtrusive towers. (3) That tolerance of the strong but non-stiff by nature has led to all manner of inflatables, membranes, and ropes - perhaps because stiffness costs material and tension can be resisted more cheaply than compression. We might take her designs as the jumping off point and envision something even more extreme - an entire technology devoid of compression-resisting solids.

Every Designer is an Editor

Sun, 11 Feb 2007 13:51:00 -0600

Every designer is an editor. By editing our work we transform it to new work. We refine, restructure and reconceive, all through the act of editing what we have made before. When we use digital media, we edit by changing the objects the medium supports. We might move lines, shape surfaces and carve solids. In most systems these are isolated acts - we must separately edit all the parts of a work. Parametric modeling systems allow designers to model parts of the editing process. Using them designers design both their work and how it can change in its context.

Natura Naturata: The Civic Stewardship of Urban Nature

Sun, 11 Feb 2007 13:51:00 -0600

The Huron Natural Area Co-operative Project (HNA) is a four hundred acre ecological education park on the periphery of the City of Kitchener, developed with the intent of preserving the headwaters of the Strasburg Creek watershed, one of the few remaining biologically diverse natural landscapes within the boundaries of the rapidly urbanising Kitchener periphery.

Responsive Material / Responsive Structure

Sun, 11 Feb 2007 13:51:00 -0600

Visionary designers and fiction writers speculate today about a future environment of nanotechnology and 'smart dust', able to create its form in response to external factors, or with an apparent will of its own. Although the manipulation of individual molecules on such a scale is still firmly in the realm of science fiction, this talk presents current research that makes this a reality at the millimetre, rather than the nanometre scale. Using digital simulation, artificial intelligence, and rapid prototyping technologies, the microstructure of manufactured objects can be made to optimise itself to accommodate external physical loads or have desired dynamic properties, and can actually learn to improve its performance. The process simulates an interconnected lattice of intelligent structural agents. All materials, while treated as continuous, have complex internal structures that determine their properties: at the cellular level these give wood its strength, at the molecular level differentiate diamond from graphite. Just as each individual cell of living wood or bone is a part of a distributed intelligence, genetically programmed to take the form best suited to its particular relationship to other cells, these structural agents each possess a modicum of intelligence that allows the group to make such a computation quickly and efficiently. Such principles can also be used in the analysis of human behaviour, allowing the environment to respond to us. While less well understood, social behaviour can be handled with similar models of complex systems and machine learning. The new technology can yield objects made of a material that shapes itself at the smallest level, or equally an intelligent structure at the scale of city. With recent architectural projects in excess of one kilometre and the enclosure of entire city neighbourhoods becoming a reality, such an approach may help to form our environment on a truly massive scale.

Multicultural Modernism

Sun, 11 Feb 2007 13:51:00 -0600

Ehrlich's Culver City-based firm is internationally recognized for distinctive designs that extend the traditions of architectural innovation through the fusion of technology with cultural and environmental sensitivity. Upon graduating from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1969, Ehrlich spent six years living and working in Africa, serving for two years with the Peace Corps as the first architect in Marrakech, Morocco. He later traveled across the Sahara and taught architecture at Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria. The lessons of indigenous building were instrumental in forming Ehrlich's approach to design and continue to influence the firm's work today. A visiting professor at USC, Ehrlich has been a guest critic at Harvard and Yale, and has lectured in China, Japan, Germany, Mexico, Costa Rica, and Venezuela. His firm has earned seven National AIA awards and was named the California AIA Firm of the Year in 2003.

Architecture Research Office

Mon, 30 Jul 2007 11:31:47 -0500

ARO was established in 1993 by Stephen Cassell and Adam Yarinsky. Their work has become a model for research-driven architectural practice, as each project evolves out of a deep engagement with specific physical, social, and economic conditions. ARO's work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and was the subject of a critical monograph published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2003.

Teddy Cruz

Sun, 11 Feb 2007 13:51:00 -0600

Inspired by his studio's location at the border between San Diego, California and Tijuana, Mexico, Cruz's work explores the uniqueness of this bicultural territory. Cruz's work integrates research, theory, and design production to create architecture, interiors, furniture, installations, public art, and landscape interventions. Over the past decade, Cruz has demonstrated a commitment to finding architectural and urban planning solutions for global political and social problems that proliferate in international border zones. Taking his theoretical frame of reference as a starting point, Cruz has pursued investigations that stimulate an unconventional practice addressing the future of "divided" cities and the larger phenomenon of border zones. Cruz currently teaches at Woodbury University where he is forming "Border Institute" (BI) to further research the urban phenomena at the border between the United States and Mexico.

Urban Scan

Mon, 30 Jul 2007 11:31:35 -0500

Lot/Ek (pronounced "low tech") a New York City-based design collaboration headed by Ada Tolla and Giuseppe Lignano juxtaposes artifice, salvage, and habitable space into formal constructs. These constructs always include the appropriation of common ready-made objects that are reinvigorated with new life through spatial formulations and transformations of use. Projects vary in size and type, from the recombination of two TV sets into a freestanding lamp to the splitting and positioning of an oil tank truck container in a New York City loft. The work of Lot/Ek is a critical dialogue between artifacts of consumer culture and the possibilities of their context and use. Tolla and Lignano were both born and raised in Naples, Italy, in 1964 and 1963. They studied architecture at University of Naples School of Architecture, both earning a Masters Degree in Architecture and Urban Design in 1989. They continued their studies aboard at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, where both received research fellowships for post-graduate study in 1990. In 1992, they established Lot/Ek in New York.

Brigitte Shim

Mon, 30 Jul 2007 11:31:21 -0500

Shim's innovative Toronto-based firm integrates furniture, architecture, and landscape design. The firm's focus on the intersections between buildings and sites results in a thoughtful questioning of the fundamental relationships between object and ground, building and landscape, people and nature. An AIA SF/SFMOMA Public lecture.

Inventioneering Architecture - Dirk Hebel and Jorg Stollmann

Mon, 30 Jul 2007 11:30:33 -0500

The research of Dirk Hebel and Jorg Stollmann involves applying the details of small-scale objects to the design of larger structures. Their lecture will showcase how they applied the structure of the sprinkler head to the design of the Diller & Scofidio Blur Building at the base of Lake Neuchatel in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland, for which Hebel served as project architect. The building was described as "an inhabitable cloud whirling above a lake" by Architecture Magazine. Dirk Hebel and Jorg Stollmann are Assistant Professors of Architecture and Design at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH).

Inventioneering Architecture - Valerio Olgiati

Mon, 30 Jul 2007 11:29:57 -0500

Valerio Olgiati is Professor of Architecture at the Academy of Architecture of the Universita della Svizzera Italiana (USI), Mendrisio. His research addresses new methods of designing large buildings in terms of structure and organization. His lecture will include studio work with students.

Inventioneering Architecture - Ines Lamuniere and Patrick Devanthery

Mon, 30 Jul 2007 11:29:42 -0500

Patrick Devanthery and Ines Lamuniere were born in Sion and Geneva in 1954. Partnership DEVANTHERY & LAMUNIERE, Architects in Geneva and Lausanne in 1983. Since 1989 they are part of the editorial committee of FACE architectural journal in Geneva, where they pursue their interest in history and criticism of modern and contemporary architecture. Both have taught at the Graduate School of Design of Harvard (1996, 1999) and at ETH Zurich (1991 to 1993, 1994). Since 1993 Ines Lamuniere is Professor in Architecture at EPF Lausanne. Winners of many public competitions in Switzerland, among which are recently: Psychiatric Clinic in Yverdon (completed 2003), Urban Housing District in Neuchatel (completed 2004), Town Hall in Payerne (completed 1999), a 250-room hotel in Bern (building completed 2004), and Public garden in Lausanne (completed 2000). In 2002 they were commissioned for the new Headquarters Building for Philip Morris International in Lausanne.

Inventioneering Architecture - Andrea Deplazes

Mon, 30 Jul 2007 11:25:28 -0500

Andrea Deplazes' research addresses a broad spectrum of architectural design activities, including public and institutional projects, urban design, housing, and industrial buildings, with special focus on wood construction. His lecture, "Constructing Architecture. Materials, Processes and Structures," will showcase studio work with students, in particular sustainable structures in the Swiss Alps. Deplazes is Professor of Architecture, Construction, and Design at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH) and is the author of "Constructing Architecture. Materials Processes Structures" and "Bearth & Deplazes: Constructs."

Inventioneering Architecture - Marc Angelil

Sun, 11 Feb 2007 13:51:00 -0600

Marc Angelil's research addresses contemporary developments in urban design. Using various case studies from Europe, Asia, and the United States, he investigates large metropolitan areas in view of their physical structures. Major attention is given to sustainable processes as well as the dynamic forces that impact the formation and transformation of a city. Angelil is professor of architecture and design at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich and the author of Inchoate: An Experiment in Architectural Education, published by ETH Zurich. He is a practicing architect for agps architecture, with offices in Los Angeles and Zurich.

Meeting Humanity's Greatest Challenge

Mon, 30 Jul 2007 11:31:04 -0500

"How do we dramatically cut down on green-house gas emissions, lessen our dependence on fossil fuels and become more energy-efficient without arguably wrecking the U.S. economy? So far, no one's come up with a viable answer, largely because we keep looking at global warming from the same angle. The result is tunnel vision - we keep missing the forest for the trees with remedies like cleaner cars, fewer smoke stacks, more renewable energy sources. Each is necessary, but solves only part of the problem. What we need is a paradigm shift in the way we view energy consumption in this country. It's architecture - residential, commercial and industrial buildings and their construction materials - that account for nearly half of all the energy used in this country each year. And it's the architects who hold the key to turning down the global thermostat." Mazria, E. 2003. It's the Architecture, Stupid! Solar Today, May/June 2003, pp. 48

Michael Rock

Mon, 30 Jul 2007 11:30:49 -0500

Founded in 1994 by Michael Rock, Susan Sellers, and Georgianna Stout, the design studio 2x4 has developed a reputation for innovative work that focuses on culture and spans print, motion graphics, the Web, and environmental design. Join Rock for a discussion of 2x4's unique methodology and innovative approach to graphic design. An AIA SF/SFMOMA Public lecture.

The Boston Arts and Crafts Movement

Sun, 11 Feb 2007 13:51:00 -0600

Architecture and Public Life

Sun, 11 Feb 2007 13:51:00 -0600

Toshiko Mori

Sun, 11 Feb 2007 13:51:00 -0600

Mori discusses how she integrates innovative materials and fabrication with traditional techniques to produce stunning architectural and design works. An AIA SF/SFMOMA Public lecture.