san francisco CALIFORNIA

IwamotoScott designed, directed fabrication for, and assembled this hybrid bookcase/screenwall that acts as edge and interface between their own office and the larger offices and headquarters of creative agency, Obscura Digital (also designed by IwamotoScott and completed in 2010). The wall is made from 186 laser-cut white powder-coated five-sided folded sheet metal modules. The modules are suspended from 32 laser-cut light gray powder-coated sheet metal vertical ribs that are anchored to the floor at the bottom, and mounted with beam clamps to a structural wide flange beam at the top.

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guadalajara MEXICO

sucker PUNCH: Describe your project.

juan carlos VAZQUEZ: A modern laboratory designed to alter the culture of research and its sister industry with architecture. An attempt to encourage encounters between material engineers, biologist, and artist to formulate and sustain an environment of cooperation. Laboratories today are plagued with over competition among colleagues creating a culture of secrecy, which hinders the creative process. An interdisciplinary laboratory eases tensions among colleagues by mixing scientist, engineers and artist from different fields who give input and suggestions for innovations within the laboratory. This laboratory type encourages novel ideas explored through this cross pollination of disciplines.

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ann arbor MICHIGAN

suckerPUNCH: Describe your project.

benjamin FOSTER: Relay Drawings stalks a continuous relationship between site, design (survey) and architect (surveyor) through reciprocal techniques of representation. I believe in highly contextual design but also see a difficulty in creating such work with the confines of contemporary architectural practice.

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hollywood CALIFORNIA

suckerPUNCH: Describe your project.

The LADG:This was our competition entry for the BOFFO Building Fashion project. We wanted to insert two giant balloon animals into the given volume. The idea was to make space using character(s). That sounds like a kind of flippant intention—and it was—but we took the balloon animals very seriously, studying posture, the voluptuousness of fat membranes, and the integration of retail display.

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White Horse Lake HANGZHOU

THE MAGICAL ISLAND

The magical island will be a complete experience with natural and artificial features that will play together with the comic museum experience.

A whole reinvention of the concept of a museum experience, a very brand new concept that will be thought exclusively for the city of Hangzhou and for China; making it become a world unique reference in its field.

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MOON

USC Professors Behrokh Khoshnevis (Engineering), Anders Carlson (Architecture), Neil Leach (Architecture) and Madhu Thangavelu (Astronautics) have been awarded a NASA research grant into the potential use of Contour Crafting robotic fabrication technology to build structures on the Moon. The grant was one of only 30 awarded to over 700 applicants by the NASA Innovation Advanced Concepts Program (NIAC). The title of their research proposal is: “Contour Crafting Simulation Plan for Lunar Settlement Infrastructure Build Up.”

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MOON

registration begins 7.21.11

submissions due 12.19.11

awards: US $2500 total and publication on suckerPUNCH

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vienna AUSTRIA

suckerPUNCH: Describe your project.

isaïe BLOCH / ERAGATORY: While the architectonic aesthetic may seem to revolve around a straightforward gimmick, the work is much richer than that. The more you look, the more you realize how many levels it operates on, from its allusions of architectural ruïnification/collapse as in the romantic era to its connections to our current culture of remixes and mash-ups.

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london UNITED KINGDOM

suckerPUNCH: Describe your project.

pablo ZAMORANO, nacho MARTÍ & jacob BEK: This is an exploration through a material system that becomes form, function, and support for contextual relationships. The game is ruled by two operations, cuts and expansion. These operations perform several form finding processes, as an expandable surface system.

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los angeles CALIFORNIA

suckerPUNCH: Describe your project.

adnan IHSAN: The project used the program of a house as a tool to study the shift towards a paradigm of Species as opposed to the ubiquitous platform of Types. If Types are traditionally viewed as categories of standardization, and symbolic expressions of form, then Species are malleable entities that are in constant metamorphosis; adaptation and mutation are the main characteristics from Species. A Species needs a lineage to be acknowledged as such, indeed a Type also needs a lineage to become such. But a Species has more freedom, because it can mutate. A Type can change, but it cannot mutate, it can be combined, or renewed, but it will always be a type.

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