brooklyn NEW YORK
Pratt Institute
critic: Erich SHOENENBERGER
suckerPUNCH: Describe your project:
Circuit Architecture (Fajer AlQATTAN, John TORPY, & Victor NUNEZ): This project expands the function of standard car showroom and creates a facility that not only provides space for the display and sales of automobiles, but also serves as an educational tool to create awareness of Hydrogen Fuel Cell (HFC) cars.
los angeles CALIFORNIA
suckerPUNCH: Describe your project.
Heather FLOOD (principal, F-Lab): In 1951 Mies Van der Rohe completed the Lake Shore Drive Apartments in Chicago, Illinois. The slenderness of the structural frame afforded by the Chicago skeleton in combination with the transparency of the envelope afforded by the curtain wall allowed Mies to push architecture towards his ideal of “Beinahe Nichts” or “Almost Nothing.” This proposal seeks to re-frame the envelope of the tower typology toward an architecture of “Beinahe Alles” or “Almost Everything.” Instead of focusing on the singular objective of transparency, Beinahe Alles, proposes a thick skin that through excessive materialization produces a wide range of performance and atmospheric effects.
philadelphia PENNSYLVANIA
University of Pennsylvania, PennDesign
critics: Cecil BALMOND & Ezio BLASETTI
suckerPUNCH: Describe your project.
Jaclyn L. SPOKOJNY & John JOHNSTON: Framed in the context of the salt basin in Death Valley, California, and with a growth and decay timeline of nearly a century, durat-Ion+ represents the confluence of architecture and generative design with advanced construction and material technology. The evolution and setting of the project is critical to its form, structure, and multitude of textures. While salt is the primary building material, this project truly reveals its identity over the course of many years.
los angeles CALIFORNIA
suckerPUNCH: Describe your project.
The LADG (Andrew HOLDER, Claus Benjamin FREYINGER, & James CHESTNUT): Consider, as a problem of material and form, a litter of piglets suckling at the teats of a plump sow. The language of formal analysis is not readily equipped to describe this situation. The disposition of one pig against another does not appear to be regulated by clear systems of repetition and adjacency. The pig bodies themselves resist decomposition as assemblages of skin and structure; they are too fat—all fat, in fact. What formal analysis struggles to rationalize, the languages of character and posture easily accommodate: the piglets nestle and suckle; the sow sprawls; obese bodies squeeze and abut one another.
![Cameron NEWNHAM, Terrai[n]: The Speculative Campus. Bird's-eye view.](../../../../wp-content/uploads/2013/08/CAP3_FRONT.jpg "Cameron NEWNHAM, Terrai[n]: The Speculative Campus. Bird's-eye view.")
melbourne AUSTRALIA
RMIT University
critic: Vivian MITSOGIANNI
suckerPUNCH: Describe your project.
Cameron NEWNHAM: This project explores hypothetical and speculative learning environments—specifically a design campus for RMIT University, although the ideas are universal. It is a given that there may be a necessary leap of faith in understanding the project(s), but they display in a physical manner what has recently been theorised, and extend upon many of the ideas. It is intended that through these works the ideas are pushed to the extreme—to understand the potential—even if a lesser variant may be more functional.
ann arbor MICHIGAN
University of Michigan, Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning
advisor: Ellie ABRONS
suckerPUNCH: Describe your project.
Nick SAFLEY: Animal House proposes a series of above ground tornado shelters placed within suburban homes and figured as architectural characters. Normally these exist as generic steel or reinforced concrete boxes hidden within the wall cavity and possessing extreme material durability to resist extreme weather that might destroy the structure around it. Taking the suburban single-family house as site these hyper-durable cores are freed and given personas and postures that enrich the interior with implied subjectivity and vitality.
paris FRANCE
Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture
critics: Ricardo de OSTOS & Christian DELECLUSE
suckerPUNCH: Describe your project.
Tom BENARD: This project challenges the narrow condition that has always existed between the human and the architectural, following the human being in his or her fantasy of transcendence. Spiritual and mystical architectures have often taken hybrid shape between a spiritual and physical attempt to reach a higher state of wisdom and understanding. This project speculates on the opportunities offered to us in this new millennium, analyzing transhumanism as a contemporary expression of mysticism.
chicago ILLINOIS
Illinois Institute of Technology
suckerPUNCH: Describe your project.
Daniel CAVEN: Center for Aerial and Circus Arts (CACA) is located on the Northern portion of Goose Island. Situated in a busy upcoming business area of the Near North Side of Chicago, the center takes on a new symbolism of architecture, orchestrating a new typology for performers and the public-realm. The exterior form and programmatic layouts coincide with each other with rationell towards fluidity and movement. This new type of language in architecture is developed and decomposed through formal and spacial studies of the performers.
![Shang-Jen Victor TUNG, [N]on-line High Street. Model.](../../../../wp-content/uploads/2013/08/006_FRONT.jpg "Shang-Jen Victor TUNG, [N]on-line High Street. Model.")
london UNITED KINGDOM
Royal College of Art (RCA)
suckerPUNCH: Describe your project.
Shang-Jen Victor TUNG: As all shopping can potentially be completed online, the physical space of the shopping center is free to absorb new urban activities that will strengthen its relation to the city. In response to the current crisis of High Street, this research draws inspiration from East Asian cities and hybridized retail or transport facilities. Various kinds, and lengths, of interval (waiting time) for transport define ranges that a passenger can reach from the transport node, and define the route network to surrounding resources. To be adapted to shopping in the above condition, shopping spaces should be dynamically changed in both function and attribute.
innsbruck AUSTRIA
University of Innsbruck, Institute of Urban Design
critics: Hernan DIAZ ALONSO, Peter TRUMMER (Chair), Jose Carlos LOPEZ CERVANTES
Patrizia PFANZELT, Thomas PUKLJAK, & Viktoria OBWALLER: “Sheepshelter as a place for thoughts dealing with transformational beauty”
The pursuit of natural beauty, considered as a need of mankind, forms the basis for the developement of the geometry and project. That also means prototypical designs, such as the affinity of life forms, are translated into a working symbiosis of particular systems; outsourced systems which are getting in touch by recombining them.
