los angeles CALIFORNIA

suckerPUNCH: describe your project.

dave BANTZ + michael GROSS: Rather than taking the “true” or literal approach to materials, this
project attempts to adopt techniques mastered by artists and apply them at an architectural scale. Material in art is used as a representational device for effects and a gateway to sensation. The”Artificial Matters” studio, run by SCIARC professor Elena Manferdini, aims to provoke new sensations through texture, geometry, coloration, and finish. The studio began by 3D scanning literal materials (in this case a sliced peach) and modifying the raw data to produce a synthetic material with the potential to create new sensations.

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los angeles CALIFORNIA

suckerPUNCH: describe your project.

karsten t. HUITFELDT: Meant as a somewhat ironic reaction to the green building crusade, this project for a self-sufficient veterinary hospital on the roof of the Los Angeles public library is exploring the formal possibilities of a building powered by live animals. As an interface between nature and technology, the building acts as a bizarre technological/biological device that adopts the habits and functions of the animal it connects with as a means to create energy. Integrating structural elements, mechanical elements, electronics and parts of biological organisms, the building becomes an extension of the animal body. Blood, nerves and muscles are supplying the building with energy, distributing it through artificial, reproduced, alive or grown muscles, veins, nerves and organs.

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los angeles CALIFORNIA

suckerPUNCH: describe your project.

karsten t. HUITFELDT: Instead of treating the problem of structure as purely an architectural one, this project is borrowing techniques and effects from other fields such as the movie/entertainment industries and visual arts to create a notion of collapse and ephemerality that is not necessarily a result of physical laws and engineering but rather of formal, emotional and visual considerations.

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los angeles CALIFORNIA

suckerPUNCH: describe your project.

bin LU: This thesis is a discipline research about painting. It investigates the architect and the painter, trying to figure out architecture out of painting. In architecture color has been used as a final application to geometry, a last layer on tectonics, used as a lighting device, media, bringing out qualities of materiality, ornamental and generally decorative.

Using color from the beginning in a generative way, one can gain the freedom to design architectural functions as multiple conditions in space rather than limited to objects.

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los angeles CALIFORNIA

suckerPUNCH: describe your project.

bin LU/nicola BECK/ekaterina ZAVYAKOVA/mira LEE/channah LEVY: Today materials are scientifically engineered to serve demanding purposes in a profit and performance oriented world. The expertise of manufacturers grows rapidly to maximize efficiency and push material limits.

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los angeles CALIFORNIA

suckerPUNCH: describe your project.

philip n. KNIGHT: The project is about the movement of components as they become integrated into the design of architecture through macro and micro gestures. The program is a botanical garden located in a barren dirt lot in the middle of the artist district of Los Angeles. The kinematics and structures on the verge of collapse were drivers in the beginning of the project, while building an Architecture of pieces became the interest. The intensive breakdown of massing becomes the interest in the spatial affects that become experienced in the drawings, images, and in the animation. The architecture is an interior and exterior experience with the spatial relationships being blurred through the macro and micro scale of pieces.

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los angeles CALIFORNIA

Advisor: Eric Owen MOSS

suckerPUNCH: describe your project.

joshua MORATTO: If we are to discuss architecture in terms of sensation, the transition of the drawing from the hand to the digital has been relatively “sensationless”. The drawing has been relegated only as a means of clearly diagramming space and organizations. The sensation comes through the rendered image and animations, a means of sidestepping the architectural issues of space, tectonics, and detail.

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los angeles CA

suckerPUNCH: describe your project.

vincent POCSIK/zach SCHOCH/mike GROSS/zifan LIU: This installation stems from an intensive research on ornamental techniques used within traditional Islamic and Persian architecture. A particular focus was placed on a type of corbel known as Muqarnas. Muqarnas is a three dimensional decoration composed of niche-like shapes, arranged in tiers that usually cover undersides of vaults and arches. Its unique ability to transition between different compositional elements was closely studied in order to create our own order of assembly.

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los angeles CALIFORNIA

Graduate Thesis project from the SCI-Arc M Arch I program currently on view in the SCI-Arc gallery
adviser: Tom Wiscombe

suckerPUNCH: describe your project.

Artificial light, relief, and graphic coloration can dematerialize mass and create an ambiguous behavior by tapping into effects which transcend dimensions from 2D to 3D. The production of two specific effects on mass are at stake: 1) flattening and 2) over accentuating. The purpose of creating an ambiguous behavior is to move away from hierarchy and open the architectural reading to multiple interpretations.

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los angeles CALIFORNIA

SCIARC 2GBX Studio 2010 - Instructor: Elena Manferdini - “Intense Interiority and Ornate Enclosure”

suckerPUNCH: describe your project.

dave BANTZ: Guided by studio instructors Elena Manferdini, Marcelo Spina, and Tom Wiscombe, our studio was thrown into an intensive month long scripting workshop. After our workshop, we were encouraged to extrapolate and build from our respectable bank of scripting experiments adding consideration for program, context, and performance. A crisp, patterned, and prism-like exterior shell encases a sinuous structural and circulation network, which in turn, supports more focused plastic interior volumes.

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