through an amazing sense of atmosphere, dimitri CHISTOPRUDOV captures a field of russian skyscrapers at night as an alien cityscape. fog seeps between the buildings reducing colored lights to abstract glowing orbs. by exaggerating the existing conditions of his subject, CHISTOPRUDOV has rendered familiar urban imagery virtually unrecognizable.
london ENGLAND
amazon.com: farshid MOUSSAVI’s the function of form explores the production of singular affects through systems that relate form and content. this is an essential graphic manual on structural systems and their capacity to produce a variety of forms. extracting their base geometric unit, a wide range of historical projects from the medieval to the present are used as systems to proliferate different forms. the book distinguishes tessellation from modulation as a type of flexible system for producing complex repetition through diverse parts. the research presented aims to move architectural experiments away from ‘mechanistic’ notions of systems for re-producing forms, to ‘machinic’ notions of systems that determine how parts of an architectural problem interrelate and multiply. This open nature of transversal systems leads to new actualized forms and novel affects.
tila
ilona anhava: in the finnish language, the word tila is used loosely in defining locality, state or position. it can be translated into english as ’space’, ‘place’, ‘area’, ‘room’ or ’state of mind’, among other meanings. though sometimes synonymous with spatiality, it has a more finite meaning in connections such as lounge space, storage space or shelf space - and before the second world war the germans spoke of lebensraum - ‘living space’. in finnish, a farm is maatila, literally “land space”, a delimited area for the practice of agriculture. finland’s air space is an undemarcated area which the russians are allowed to violate with the blessing of our government.
projects from: asu herberger institute for design and the arts, school of architecture + landscape architecture
image: cindy LOUIE
studio description: the objective of this design studio is to pursue the possibility of an ecologically driven paradigm for architecture, urban design, and infrastructure. critical issues such as the current economic crisis and global climatic changes have had a profound impact on our political and social structures, causing a major shift in strategies that address the global and local needs for alternative uses of energy and natural resources. can ecology lead to the generation of new typologies for sustainable environments?
los angeles CALIFORNIA
suckerPUNCH: describe your project.
tom WISCOMBE: these three prototypes are a family. they are combinatorial in nature, fusions of diverse systems and services which generate emergent architectural behaviors and features. they are part of recent research in the office concerned with unpacking the spatial and ornamental potentials of airflow, fluid flow, and glow, often considered to be ‘minor’ forces in architecture. based on chunk logic rather than layer logic, these prototypes are intended to manufactured and delivered as fully integrated three-dimensional assemblies embedded with all internal infrastructural systems.
cambridge massachusetts
leadership transition in MIT architecture
nader TEHRANI
head of mit architecture
[from july 2010]
andrew SCOTT
march director
meejin YOON
director of the undergraduate architecture program
yung ho CHANG will step down and continue to teach as a professor.
liquified colors appear suspended in air in mark MAWSON’s aqueous series. his photos tranform vivid paint drops floating in water into pulsating deep sea organisms. the otherworldly images capture unpredictable and unbelievably complex forms and nested geometries.
london ENGLAND
suckerPUNCH: describe your project.
CHIMERA: adaptive ecologies brief explores the emergent logics of adaptation and evolution that are constitutive of ecosystems in nature. our vision is to define an urban ecosystem which supports housing and cultural programs and has the ability to adapt, transform, mutate and adjust according to the specific urban and social character of the site and of manhattan. this urban ecological system is taking as a model an organism in nature, specifically the mangrove plant. the mangrove plant and its collective the mangal, provide examples of social associative principles as well as structural capacities and hybrid responses to environmental and contextual conditions.
los angelesCALIFORNIA
suckerPUNCH: describe your project.
yaohua WANG: this studio project, the headquarter of columbia music company is sited in los angeles, with various public and private programs such as auditorium, music studio, offices, etc. i am focusing on penetrating the public space into such a project in the nature of a private building, and how to generate the form by coordinating various kinds of structure types which are required by spaces with different characteristics.
suckerPUNCH: describe your project.
edward KIM: we are interested in exploring potential architectural expressions of a contemporary biopolitical malaise. the symptoms are many and don’t point to any single condition or cause, and we’re working with just a few that interest us in particular.
model assembly and photograph by linda VAKHRAMEEVA
