Advanced Design Studies Blog: Critical Mass
Today we were pleased to welcome representatives from Taisei Corporation for a joint review in the laboratory. Professors Jun Sato and Takeo Igarashi also joined the presentations. Four teams of students presented their work and their proposals for this year’s pavilion project. There were brief Q & A sessions after each presentation.
Staff and students from Obuchi lab had the pleasure of participating in a review at ETH Zurich this March. The visit was an excellent chance for the UTokyo team to learn about the organization and activities at ETH, and an opportunity for researchers at both institutions to exchange views. PhD students and researchers from Obuchi Lab and Gramazio Kohler Research of ETH Zurich conducted a joint presentation at ETH Zurich’s newly constructed NCCR facility. Followed by the presentations, UTokyo students and researchers were given a series of demonstrations of robotic applications in digital fabrications.
On Monday, March 20, we were pleased to participate in a joint studio review at Itsuko Hasegawa’s gallery. The event, organized by TーADS, brought together five universities: Princeton University, Washington University, Tsinghua University, Nagoya Institute of Technology, and the University of Tokyo. Hasegawa gave a keynote talk at the beginning of the review.
TーADS is proud to announce the work of alumni Kevin Clement and Anders Rod is being featured at the Centre Pompidou Museum in Paris, France. The exhibit, originally conceived as the Harvesting Plasticity graduate research project, is a hanging work featured as a part of the Mutations/Créations event. The event aims to bring together design, architecture, and music.
This work is included as a part of the Imprimer le Monde exhibition, a collection of works exploring the use of the digital for 3D creations.
Mutations / Créations
Imprimer le Monde, A Collective Exhibition
Centre Pompidou, Paris, France
15 March – 19 June, 2017
Galerie 4, level 1
(Mutations / Créations details via Centre Pompidou)
Project Credits
University of Tokyo Advanced Design Studies Unit (TーADS)
Professors: Yusuke Obuchi, Kengo Kuma, Manabu Chiba
Core research: Kevin Clement, Anders Rod
Project Coordinator: Kevin Clement
Project Team: Jiang Lai, Deborah Lopez, Hadin Charbel, Mika Portugaise, Chen Xiaoke, Ruta Stankeviciute, Hirokazu Tei, Wu Ziyi, Alric Lee, Nathalia Rotelli, Emi Shiraishi, Veronika Smetanina, Tom Moss, Yang Ao, Tyler Mcbeth
Jun Sato Lab
Professor: Jun Sato
Project Team: Mika Araki, Ying Xu
Video Production: Deborah Lopez, Hadin Charbel
Special thanks to: Kengo Kuma and Associates, The University of Tokyo Department of Architecture
École Spéciale d’Architecture
Last week our lab had the opportunity to hear Thomas Weaver, Editor at the AA School of Architecture in London, speak on architectural education and the current state of research as a pursuit of architecture schools around the world. The following day, Weaver joined us in the first years’ critiques, which quickly turned into an exciting debate about our laboratory’s goals, the projects themselves, and architecture as a whole. It was a very productive afternoon to say the least.
Thomas Weaver is Editor at the AA School of Architecture in London. Please join us in the lab at 17:00 on Thursday, March 2 for his lecture “Research or Architecture.
Overview: This lecture offers a survey of architectural education through an examination of the momentous events of 1968. Its particular focus is the recent emergence of the concept of research, which in many ways defines the modern university over and above a dedication to any specific subject. The lecture will unpick the idea of research and in the process offer a polemic that counters its ubiquity against the more obvious attractions of architecture itself.
Students and visitors to the lab recently had the privilege of hearing lectures from both Manuel Mensa of the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires, and Doris Sung of the University of Southern California. Professor Mensa gave a talk on “stateless architecture”– or architecture without context and aethetics. Doris Sung presented her works at USC with smart materials, particularly Thermal Bimetal, which reacts to heat and can create structure that responds to its environment by changing shape.
Construction is in progress in Paris, France. The drawn-in-place project (as featured on sites such as Dezeen), a concept developed by a team of former graduate students, will be featured in an upcoming exhibition by the Centre Pompidou museum. The exhibition will open on March 14, 2017.
Today students and staff had the pleasure of listening to Kristof Crolla, architect and assistant professor from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Mr. Crolla showed several of his past projects and engaged the lab in discussion centered around the role of the architect in an increasingly automated industry, the role of craftsmanship and the human, and the role of technology and computation.
Please join us in room #415 of Engineering Building #1 for a lecture by Kristof Crolla. Mr. Crolla is an architect and is an assistant professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong School of Architecture.
Kristof Crolla is a Belgian architect who combines his architectural practice Laboratory for Explorative Architecture & Design Ltd. (LEAD) with an Assistant Professorship in Computational Design at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, School of Architecture (CUHK). He both trained and taught at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, London (AA), and worked for many years for Zaha Hadid Architects. In 2010 he moved to Hong Kong where his academic research and office work focusses on the strategic implementation of computation in architectural design. He is best known for projects such as ‘Golden Moon (Hong Kong, 2012)’ and ‘ZCB Bamboo Pavilion (Hong Kong, 2015)’, which internationally received over two dozen design awards and accolades, including the G-Mark (Japan), Architizer A+ (USA) Awards, and most recently the 2016 World Architectural Festival Award – Small Project of the Year 2016, nicknamed «The Architectural Oscars».
This lecture uses Kristof Crolla’s recently built work in China to illustrate how the deliberate introduction of project-specific material and construction idiosyncrasies, such as limited onsite skill, accuracy, budget and time, into the digital workflow can facilitate materialising unusual and ebullient architectural outcomes from minimal means.
Current evolutions in computational design are radically expanding the design solution space available to architects. In principle, these trends should permit the more straightforward implementation of non-standardised, geometrically complex architecture. Yet, since the digital entered the architectural scene, it has by-and-large encountered non-digital cultures not through authentic dialogue, but through subjugation. As a result, a disjunction has manifested between the opportunities the virtual offers and their real-world implementation. Especially in developing countries, this divide reveals itself in the difficulties the non-standard often faces in dealing with onsite restrictions and unpredictabilities, and is apparent in the discordance between available digital and onsite craft.
In search of an alternative contemporary mode of architecture practice, the work presented from LEAD and CUHK illustrates the surprisingly poetic outcomes possible in contexts notorious for their building quality.
