florence ITALY

suckerPUNCH: describe your project.

I.M.A.D.E: morpholuminesence is a kinetic ceiling prototype, originally described as a simple surface in rhino. the surface was triangulated into panels or “petals,” laser cut from white acrylic, which hang from stems of clear tubular acrylic with planar elbow joints. the acrylic tubes were laser cut using custom fabricated jigs to create angles and grooves along each piece. the compound joints of each petal were created using unique laser cut acrylic angles and pivoting model airplane hinges. the surface is actuated using monofilament attached to small, high torque servos. the servos are mounted to acrylic towers above the mdf top surface, providing maximum leverage. variable value rgb leds above the petal surface are tuned across the visual spectrum to provide a wide variety of lighting effects.

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los angeles CALIFORNIA

suckerPUNCH: describe your project.

yaohua WANG, scott CHUNG + brian FRAUMENI: the program is a subway terminal and park. this studio, a belated exercise in fleshlogy- “becoming-animal” is not about the mimetic career of biology into and onto architecture, but of the transference of multiple physiologic scales into the systemic intelligence of the involute surface-dwelling, and back again. the ocular nerve of the owl, the locomotion of the giant jellyfish, the pack logistics of the rat(s), the program of the frog, are not just forms, organic symmetries and baroque geometries. they are machines, they are solutions, partial grammars to take shape of us and we of them.

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london ENGLAND

suckerPUNCH: describe your project.

johan VOORDOUW: the project describes an annexed library for the museum of manuscripts at villa d’este in tivoli, italy. rather than exploring the configuration of conventional spaces the project sought to explore the library through a series of books, the book becoming an expression of physical and imagined spaces. using a combination of text, illustrations and sls models the project formed architectural space on and through the page, an oscillating interplay between two-dimensional and three-dimensional space and experience, one that can only be fully appreciated when flipping cover to cover.

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ruston LOUISIANAK

suckerPUNCH: describe your project.

michael MCCUNE +casidy KEIM: modulated lattice 5 explores the translation between digital modeling, cnc production and hand fabrication.

studio professor:
robert BROOKS

thesis advisors:
karl PULJAK
robert MORAN
damon CALDWELL
michael WILLIAMS
ed GASKIN

clients/community leaders:
marie and dave RIGGS

oil field welding instructor:
glenn WILLIS

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lund SWEDEN

suckerPUNCH: describe your project.

maria KNUTSSON-HALL: the project is a transportation system evolving from a local scale. a system developed from an organ to a moving mechanical structure. i’m interested in different forms of movement within organs and the human body. and how these movements can be transformed into at mechanical structure.
i operated in the conditions of developing a body from an organ where the organs create a working system. i wanted to explore how a mechanical structure could parasite and integrate with a static housing structure. in this case the transportationsystem crawls into a static bonestructure and gives it life through movement.

lth school of architecture

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philadelphia PENNSYLVANIA

suckerPUNCH: describe your project.

wei WANG: this urban club at lower manhattan is aimed to provide extraordinary leisure experience by designing complex yet designated interior space. the notion of interiority suggests the elaboration of tectonic systems that unfold and differentiate within the terms of their own internal logic. i am interested in developing complex, layered and highly differentiated tectonic systems that can start to compete with the best historical examples in terms of their richness, coherency and precision of formal organization. a multi-layered complexity has been built up with a high degree of lawful differentiation within each system and with a high level of correlation between the various subsystems that constitute the overall tectonic continuity.

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copenhagen DENMARK

suckerPUNCH: describe your project.

sum-THINGS: the swarm detroit! project proposes an urban redevelopment based on an intention of re-introducing the notion of neighborhood. first, the site is divided into small areas by a swarm/network logic that interconnects the existing infrastructural endpoints facing the site. then the network-lines adapt to each other and an optimized infrastructural organization emerges. second, the ares of the site act as spawning plates for a swarm of agents generating an inhabitable structure. the agents strive towards global equilibrium by applying local morphogenetic rules of separation and cohesion. a color-coding analysis of the emergent structures on site represents the differentiated and diverse spatial and functional qualities within the neighborhood. the color-coding is based on the parameters: distance to motorway, distance to site border and distance from ground.

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los angeles CALIFORNIA

suckerPUNCH: describe your project.

alex CORNELIUS: the project explores how we understand the habitation of seemingly uninhabitable territory. the project explores conflicting notions of figure-ground and figure-figure as mechanisms of creating simultaneous ambiguity and specificity of the relationship between the building and groundscape - between interior and exterior. in this sense, the groundplane is strategically and hierarchically thickened with proximity to the building to the point of creating inhabitable space. this decomposition of the boundary, or building edge becomes a means of separation from the hostile environment around. while bunkering, reinforcing, or walling-in/out serve as contemporary responses to protecting oneself from or harnessing hostility (politically, religiously, socially, or otherwise).

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siegen GERMANY

suckerPUNCH: describe your project.

thomas RODEMEIER: the city of siegen is dominated by an omnipresent elevated road. and although it is situated next to a river, there is no access to the water. though the item of contamination makes us think of something negative at first, it also describes the act of merging and diffusion. in order to acknowledge this right the hostel was designed. indeed merging and diffusion are positive terms in contemporary architecture.

university of siegen

instructors: ulrich EXNER and dietrich PRESSEL

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os angeles CALIFORNIA

project team: bin LU + joongsik YANG

suckerPUNCH: describe your project.

bin LU: consistent with the obama government’s national transit and new technology initiatives ,the main focus of our studio is finding the urban strategy considering infrastructure by scripting an parametric design with sustainable building technologies. we started with branching script and voronoi algorithm based on the main stream of the people coming to the bus station. we obtained our main design pattern implying people’s flow from this main path.

sci-arc spring 2009 2gbx studio

instructors: tom wiscombe, elena manferdini, peter testa

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