innsbruck AUSTRIA
University of Innsbruck, studio 3 / institute for experimental architecture
critic: Volker GIENCKE
tutor: Tobias KLEIN
suckerPUNCH: Describe your project.
Ferdinand FRITZ: The art of music is one of the most direct ways to intoxicate to express emotions, and manipulate. I think one of the earliest ways to describe virtuality.
new york NEW YORK
Princeton University School of Architecture
thesis advisor: Michael MEREDITH
thesis director: Elizabeth DILLER
suckerPUNCH: Describe your project.
Toshiki HIRANO: In the world of capitalism, buildings’ values are determined on how much inhabitable space they have—which is to say, Total floor Area. Based on this logic, slab has been put in higher hierarchy among other elements in architecture since modernism, and a notion of stacking floor slabs has been the smartest technology of increasing the building value for maximizing the total floor area while minimizing the amount of structures and envelope area.
new york NEW YORK
ReGeneration
New York Hall of Science October 27, 2012 to January 13, 2013
SOFTlab and The Living produced the exhibition design for ReGeneration at the New York Hall of science. ReGeneration includes ten installations produced by various artists that explore immigration, urbanization, and sustainability through art, science and technology. Our brief was for the exhibition design to not only be a platform for the other installations, but to also be an installation in and of itself making it one of the ten artist installations.
atlanta GEORGIA (the Dirty South)
Georgia Institute of Technology School of Architecture
critic: Jennifer BONNER (TVS Ventulett Critic)
suckerPUNCH: Describe your project.
Jennifer LEWIS: “Off With Their Heads! Decapitating Atlanta’s Post-Modern Tops.” How can we imagine a new urbanism in Atlanta? Currently the skyline is dominated by exclusive post-modern capped skyscrapers with a failed aim to distinguish themselves and promote an identity for the city. “Off With Their Heads!” is a drastic snipping of the post-modern tops across the city beginning in Midtown. New nonexclusive public spaces will occupy the top floors and allow tourists and native Atlantans to regain control of the city’s skyline.
atlanta GEORGIA
Georgia Institute of Technology School of Architecture
critic: Jennifer BONNER (TVS Ventulett Critic)
suckerPUNCH: Describe your project.
Annie McCARTHY: “Bu-Hi Gift Shop: A Collection of Curious Propinquities.” Atlanta’s Neo-Suburban strip and cultural mecca, Buford Highway, serves as the inspiration and logic for the world’s largest gift shop. Buford Highway is a suburban palimpsest of burger joints and Chinese restaurants; fast food and Korean jewelry stores; single family homes and hotel staffing agencies. The patterns of use and culture are not at all homogeneous along this stretch of seven lane roadway, and it is the lack of similitude that defines curious propinquities. Propinquities are most distinctly manifested in the iconic strip mall.
atlanta GEORGIA
Georgia Institute of Technology School of Architecture
critic: Jennifer BONNER (TVS Ventulett Critic)
suckerPUNCH: Describe your project.
Cynthia OCAMPO SMITH: The premise of the studio is to catalogue and investigate Dirty South “icons” that will be used to compose an unconventional guidebook of Atlanta. These work samples are of the world’s first Scent Depot: a collection of Atlanta’s geography of smells. The collection is stored within a parasitic addition to the architecturally significant Marcel Breuer library located in downtown Atlanta.
vienna AUSTRIA
Technical University of Vienna
critic: Manfred BERTHOLD
suckerPUNCH: Describe your project.
Andreas KOERNER: Caterpillar is an experimental concept for dystopian urban architecture. The aim of the design studio was to think about urban and industrial parasites. Architecture that works itself through urban areas and settles wherever it “wants”.
I placed my concept on an old FLAK-Tower in the center of Vienna. Due to the fact that those huge Nazi anti-aircraft towers are nearly undestroyable and that they will penetrate the Viennese skyline for centuries, I thought the place suitable for an “urban parasite” which, same as the towers, just does not belong there!
los angeles CALIFORNIA & chicago ILLINOIS
SCI-Arc
suckerPUNCH: Describe your project.
Nikita TROUFANOV & Gonzalo PADILLA: Representation can be thought of as the place of articulation between architectural practice and theory. It is precisely in such moments of change where critical thought and new theories are produced and practice is radically restructured. What makes representation a crucial field in the understanding of architecture is the mediated character of representation itself. — Stan Allen
DrawDEL Strands is an experiment in the oscillation of materiality—layering information sets and shifting focus, materialized as part drawing part model.
thessaloniki GREECE
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (A.U.Th)
critic: Anastasios TELLIOS
suckerPUNCH: Describe your project.
Georgios TSAKIRIDIS & Efthymia Dimitra KOTSANI: The project “Lapis Callidus” engages with the re-negotiation of spatial, architectural, functional and eventually, social structures that emerge from the blurring boundaries between contemporary definitions of the physical world in natural and artificial milieus. The project suggests the introduction of a highly sophisticated robotic system with swarm-like behaviour properties, in an inherently dystopic territory, such as the abandoned sulphur mines, located in a volcanic subterranean area called ‘Paliorema’ on the Greek island of Milos.
sharjah UNITED ARAB EMIRATES
American University of Sharjah
suckerPUNCH: Describe your project.
Talin HAZBER: For Bedouin poets, the desert is not an arena of war but a place of community. It isn’t not a site of alienation and exile but a location for self-fulfillment and meditation. They don’t see it as a devoid of nature but consider it full of life. The desert in its presence or absence is power, a nomad source of power that’s always shifting and changing forms. This research speculates the notion of camouflage which is, the means of obscuring, screening objects so that they are lost in their surroundings. The location is the outskirts of any busy city, in a site that by its nature is isolated and of a desert nature. I was fascinated by the desert and how one can’t easily lose the sense of direction, space and views.
