Adam Fure
University of Michigan
SIFT

In his work, Adam Fure evades the pristine and exact in search of the rough and raw. Through specialized treatments, he extracts unconventional traits from conventional materials, grafting them onto ill-formed objects or seeping them into saturated environments. Stubble Step replaces the charred, rustic textures of Detroit with colorful casings that prod physical touch and suggest fictional histories. A bulbous metallic canopy of treated fabric hangs over stacked cedar posts washed with pinkish stain, creating a strange yet intimate interior. The dangling steel pyramids of Chandelier are spun with burnt polyester fibers, producing a thick, sullied object that looms over an otherwise conventional stage. In Hover, a base of cotton batting is melted, dyed, and stretched into a series of compressed passageways. Fure’s design process undercuts sentimental notions of material essence through intensive blends of synthetic and organic matter. Through base aesthetics, raw materiality, and intensive atmospheres, SIFT’s work infuses experience with a visceral dimension that challenges human’s impulse to aestheticize their natural surrounds.

Andrew Atwood
University of California, Berkeley
First Office

Andrew Atwood and Anna Neimark advance architecture through an aggressive assertion of its center. Avoiding trends to expand architecture’s perimeter in search of the “new,” they push the discipline from within, reconsidering its internal conventions of drawing and modeling. Their project Mountains highlights an irreconcilable gap between the subjective bias of contemporary rendering, due to the perspectival aspects of the rendered camera, and the abstraction of nineteenth century renderings, which were constructed orthographically and rendered obliquely. This observation leads to a proposition, “Rendering something obliquely…” which leads to a provocative set of abstract mountain images modeled and drawn in high contrast. Mountain House extends these techniques by “domesticating” a mountain into a house, translating the singularity of the former into the regularity of the latter through a disciplined set of drawn translations. Their interest in convention extends to the regulatory mechanisms of construction, the basis of their project …And Pedestals, which demonstrates their belief that architecture possesses within its own infrastructure all that is needed for a contemporary disciplinary project.

Andrew Holder
University of Michigan
The LADG

In the work of Andrew Holder and Benjamin Freyinger, fat folds and creases replace facets and corners, as the clichés of formal composition give way to the idiosyncrasies of bodily physics. Through rigorous physical and digital processes, they produce objects that blur the boundaries of architectural and anthropomorphic form. 48 Characters combines bellies, creases, and limbs, into animalistic unities that hover just below thresholds of recognizability. Following their disciplinary commitment, these objects enable them to rethink classic architectural paradigms of aggregation and representation. Chiaroscuria, a series of painterly drawings, revamps the Baroque technique of chiaroscuro through tonal contrasts that condense into figural profiles. Pigs in a Box stuffs one of these plump characters into an undersized container, demarcating space through the proximities of human and architectural bodies. From conjured images of suckling piglets to unanticipated urges to cuddle buildings, LADG’s work diagrams new subjective territory for architecture.

Angie Co
Syracuse University
Co LeCavalier

Angie Co blends analytical documentation of architectural components with imaginative speculation as to their use and deployment. Working through catalogs of basic components (domes, ornamentation, arcades, etc.), she creates prototypes that vary in scale from very-large furniture-objects to very small building objects that uncover unexpected characteristics of inhabitable things. In Critters, vaults are situated relative to one another to suggest biomorphic features such as legs or underbellies while domes take on expressive facial features. The volumetric profile of Bramante’s Tempietto dome becomes the site for her project titled Full Scale Balloon Tempietto, +/- 15%, which when inflated liberates itself from Bramante’s Tempietto spatially (from surface to volume), structurally (from load bearing masonry to tensegrity), and materially (from solid to transparent).These “End-game Transformations,” alienate everyday objects, our relationship to them, and our understanding of their capabilities and limitations. Under this rubric, the object of architecture is ambiguous, and while possessing specific characteristics and qualities, has open-ended applications and implied rather than expected utility.

Anna Neimark
Southern California Institute of Architecture
First Office

Andrew Atwood and Anna Neimark advance architecture through an aggressive assertion of its center. Avoiding trends to expand architecture’s perimeter in search of the “new,” they push the discipline from within, reconsidering its internal conventions of drawing and modeling. Their project Mountains highlights an irreconcilable gap between the subjective bias of contemporary rendering, due to the perspectival aspects of the rendered camera, and the abstraction of nineteenth century renderings, which were constructed orthographically and rendered obliquely. This observation leads to a proposition, “Rendering something obliquely…” which leads to a provocative set of abstract mountain images modeled and drawn in high contrast. Mountain House extends these techniques by “domesticating” a mountain into a house, translating the singularity of the former into the regularity of the latter through a disciplined set of drawn translations. Their interest in convention extends to the regulatory mechanisms of construction, the basis of their project …And Pedestals, which demonstrates their belief that architecture possesses within its own infrastructure all that is needed for a contemporary disciplinary project.

Antonio Torres
Instituto Tecnologico de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey Campus Guadalajara
Bittertang

Michael Loverich and Antonio Torres animate architectural objects through a signature style of bodily topologies and fleshy colors. With a mysterious, yet sophisticated, sensibility, they amputate, fatten, or deform architectural extremities in ways that both comfort and estrange. Burble Bup amasses custom balloons in a colorful pile with dangling limbs that entice visitors into a range of playful activities, while enclosing a thick figural ground of sausage-like tubes stuffed with wood chips. The exterior of Blo Puff is made from a bronze lobed inflatable held together by bending bamboo. Inside, a plush vegetal interior is outfitted with body-sized pillows designed liked fat bodies that entice occupants to literally embrace architecture. Romulus & Remus and Animate Sensate reflect their recurrent extra-disciplinary excursions, activities they engage in to invigorate their own form making while extending architecture’s capacities to produce allure. From plush toys to pavilions, Bittertang evokes strange associations and exotic passions often absent from architectural form. When confronting their work, laughing, gagging, licking, and cringing are all likely (and welcome) outcomes.

Benjamin Freyinger
The LADG

In the work of Andrew Holder and Benjamin Freyinger, fat folds and creases replace facets and corners, as the clichés of formal composition give way to the idiosyncrasies of bodily physics. Through rigorous physical and digital processes, they produce objects that blur the boundaries of architectural and anthropomorphic form. 48 Characters combines bellies, creases, and limbs, into animalistic unities that hover just below thresholds of recognizability. Following their disciplinary commitment, these objects enable them to rethink classic architectural paradigms of aggregation and representation. Chiaroscuria, a series of painterly drawings, revamps the Baroque technique of chiaroscuro through tonal contrasts that condense into figural profiles. Pigs in a Box stuffs one of these plump characters into an undersized container, demarcating space through the proximities of human and architectural bodies. From conjured images of suckling piglets to unanticipated urges to cuddle buildings, LADG’s work diagrams new subjective territory for architecture.

Brennan Buck
Yale University
Freeland Buck

Unlike the majority of digital practices that singularly bias structure, surface, or ornament, Brennan Buck and David Freeland elegantly interlace them in intricate geometric arrays. It follows that volume is not simply the space in and around form, but rather is trapped within dense manifolds. In MOCA Listening Room, what appears to be a taut tessellated surface turns out to be a drastically deep mass comprised of faceted cones. In Yale Assembly Pavilion One the reverse happens; a pavilion with deep structural walls vanishes from certain viewpoints. By carefully calibrating the orientation of its structural fins, they are able to make the depth of the structure disappear. At night, changing intensities of colored light further accentuate the pavilion’s alluring levity. In Slipstream, the lines of a 2-dimensional drawing are extruded 3-dimensionally to create structural fins, visual filters, and material instantiations of fluidity. Through expert geometric control, aesthetic attention to patterning, and a playful approach to color, Freeland Buck renders the dynamic qualities of digital form material and experiential.

David Freeland
Southern California Institute of Architecture
Freeland Buck

Unlike the majority of digital practices that singularly bias structure, surface, or ornament, Brennan Buck and David Freeland elegantly interlace them in intricate geometric arrays. It follows that volume is not simply the space in and around form, but rather is trapped within dense manifolds. In MOCA Listening Room, what appears to be a taut tessellated surface turns out to be a drastically deep mass comprised of faceted cones. In Yale Assembly Pavilion One the reverse happens; a pavilion with deep structural walls vanishes from certain viewpoints. By carefully calibrating the orientation of its structural fins, they are able to make the depth of the structure disappear. At night, changing intensities of colored light further accentuate the pavilion’s alluring levity. In Slipstream, the lines of a 2-dimensional drawing are extruded 3-dimensionally to create structural fins, visual filters, and material instantiations of fluidity. Through expert geometric control, aesthetic attention to patterning, and a playful approach to color, Freeland Buck renders the dynamic qualities of digital form material and experiential.

Ellie Abrons
University of Michigan
EADO

Ellie Abrons’ work develops acute tensions between atmospheric interiors and figural exteriors. Maximizing the potential of both domains of architectural production, she crafts unexpected frictions, fissures, and jumps between a form’s outer profiles and its inner intensities. In Mirror Mirror a dark outer crust conceals an interior of opalescent objects that infinitely reflect in an angular array of taut, mirrored surfaces. The strategic deployment of two-way mirrors produces an experiential rift between the immediacy of the object’s rich textures and their illusory visual reflections. Peep Peep, shrouds kaleidoscopic interiors within round, velvety shapes, transforming the architectural model from a scaled representation to an experiential proposition. In Pup Huddle, accessible interiors give way to shaded enclosures created from supersized, furry figures that huddle together. In this pavilion proposal, walls and roofs give way to hairy legs and oversized heads that invite sitting and resting as much as hugging and climbing. Combating the routine distraction of architectural audiences, Abrons deploys objects as attention-getters, luring subjects into new forms of experiential contact.

Jason Kelly Johnson
California College of the Arts
Future Cities Lab

Jason Kelly Johnson uses interactive technology to create what his office terms “live models,” dynamic virtual and physical formations that measure, register change, and adapt. Varying in scale and application, these models collect, sort, and animate data, providing new analytical and conceptual frameworks for architecture. Live models transcend representational conventions and produce interactive, habitable, and sensorial spaces. Glaciarium transforms the real-time degradation of a melting ice core into a sensible object, directly linking human perception and environmental flux. Tapping hidden data from smartphones, Datagrove converts invisible information into atmospheric intensities of light and sound. Moving from the experiential dimension of interactive technology toward their potential to impact disciplinary conventions, Metabot Zoo replaces the architect’s hand (or mouse) with animal-like robots with pen legs that sketch. Collectively, the projects of Future Cities Lab strategically employ interactive technology to produce architectural objects and spaces full of conceptual and phenomenal appeal.

Jimenez Lai
University of Illinois at Chicago
Bureau Spectacular

Through drawn illustration and physical modeling, Jimenez Lai constructs fantastical narratives that reinvent architecture’s core principles. While Lai adopts conventions from related fields, such as cartoons and comic books, his subject matter stays deeply rooted in architecture. Plan V. Section captures the spirit of paper architecture from the early seventies (John Hejduk’s contributions to The New York Five’s “Five Architects”) and eighties (Bernard Tschumi ‘s Manhattan Transcripts). In addition to reimaging architecture’s history, Lai’s cartoonish worlds adapt conventions of drawing through expressive narrative-based formatting (storyboards and composition) and a liberal deployment of orthographic projection (point of view/orientation and plan/section mix-ups). More recent work, such as Three Little Worlds, jumps the page into built installations, evoking emotive spatial qualities by materializing the frames from his cartoons. Transcending the limitations of architectural installation, Lai takes up residence in his cartoonish construction, maintaining a live action feed that broadcasts Three Little Worlds to the world at large.

Justin Diles
The Ohio State University

Justin Diles develops architectural assemblies with integral thickness to recalibrate relationships between volume, mass and structural tectonic elements. Decisively countering obvious relationships between structure and form, his work seeks to defy gravity while redefining enclosure. Eigenforms, an interlocking volumetric wall built of lightweight composites explores the architectural implications of complex structural behavior, particularly failure through vibration and buckling. Lenticular Fields employs another curious structural assembly–lightweight, aggregated tensegrity modules–to make a dematerialized mass capable of dramatic shifts in scale, coloration and relationships with the ground. Investing an abundance of design capital in poche and the space in-between, MOCCA, a competition entry for a Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art, uses curvilinear structural volumes to subdivide space and support illuminated acrylic surfaces that animate both interior and exterior. By directly engaging tectonics and architectural thickness in their multiple contemporary instantiations, Diles’ work continues to expand the operative potential of structural assemblies and volumetric poche.

Kelly Bair
University of Illinois at Chicago
Central Standard Office of Design

Kelly Bair’s work explores the distortional effects of physical behavior on architectural host bodies—both primitive and iconic. Since the figural has long been associated with shape, ultimately negating material effects in favor of monolithic legibility, the introduction of physical behavior (human, environmental, material) opens new formal and theoretical terrain. In Thick Air, primitives are treated as sensory receptors that mutate and adapt based on external phenomenon, producing an architectural object that is simultaneously indexical and performative. Specifically, environmental changes of temperature inflect the plumpness of stacked pink tubes, producing a direct link between intensive atmospheric gradients and architectural form. Nimbus Clouds uses the material behavior of water to produce strange, bodily “spouts” that trickle water down a bulbous wall. In Rustication Never Sleeps phase states (liquid, semi-solid, and solid casts) are rendered frozen in a grid of plaster tiles that reflect the material misbehavior of the medium itself. In dynamic plays of technical exactitude and material incongruity, Bair’s work mixes the precision of digital fabrication with the nuanced difference of craft.

Kristy Balliet
Ohio State University

Kristy Balliet amplifies volume through rigorous relations of thickness, depth and spatial sequencing. Focused on the interior figure and its accomplice poche, she weaves together overlapping geometries that delineate enclosure and entice with the allure of space beyond. Balliet’s Inverted Icon devises a voluminous curvilinear urban room embedded in a mass the size of a city block. Not content to be contained, the room pushes to the perimeter, amplifying and blurring thresholds to the city, while generating deep internal vistas to connect disparate internal programs and strategically located outdoor rooms. Truncated Mounds, her custom display tables for the “Archizines” exhibition, are a twist on the traditional reading room table, an oscillating system of intersecting and tilted display surfaces. When assembled with magazines, each with a unique color, sheen, paper type, and format, the table creates a subtly kaleidoscopic floating field of contemporary discourse. In insisting that volume is a medium, not simply the leftover space within or around mass, Balliet celebrates volumetric depth and strategic interior-exterior distinctions.

Kyle Miller
Syracuse University
Eighty-Eight West

The design work of Kyle Miller ranges from interactive virtual patterns that reimagine architectural ornamentation to static physical constructs that operate in-between object and field. Deeply rooted in the discipline, Miller’s architectural investigations rethink issues of scale, part-to-whole relationships, and form making through clever applications of the latest technologies. What started with an interest in the pure aesthetic and experiential potential of ornament in the Pushkinsky Cinema Façade, becomes responsive in Organized Crime. The latter, enacts a double agenda where both affect and performance are addressed through an interactive façade that enables environmental adaptation and urban imageability. The Active Models research project drops in scale, considering the intricate connections of physical computing and specialized architectural components. These systems create direct experiential links between vision and touch through interactivity and kinetics. Through each of his projects, Miller demonstrates the potential of cross breeding ornamentation, kinetics, and responsivity to create new forms of visual and spatial attraction, which exist in the here-and-now of immediate experience.

Mariana Ibañez
Harvard University
IK Studio

Mariana Ibañez and Simon Kim present optimistic and engaging scenarios for the synthesis of architecture, engineering, and interactive technology. They refuse to accept that architecture is static and inert, instead proposing kinetic surfaces, objects, and structures that change the way humans interact with their built environment. Their research into adaptive architecture and engineering embeds robotics, interactivity, and intelligence into environments, buildings, and cities. In Science Per Forms human dancers interacted with robots programmed by IK Studio, producing a range of human-machine exchanges beyond the bounds of common technological interface. Cloud Cloak is a wearable technological armature that emits a haze of fog, which deters aggressive onlookers and cloaks urban actors in rare moments of solitude. Sensor Wall animates static architectural partitions by bringing together digital technologies and human movement, implanting interactivity into social space. Ultimately, the work of IK Studio portends that architectural form and space can transcend the static relationships of subjects and objects to engage humans in a truly interactive way.

Michael Loverich
University of Penn
Bittertang

Michael Loverich and Antonio Torres animate architectural objects through a signature style of bodily topologies and fleshy colors. With a mysterious, yet sophisticated, sensibility, they amputate, fatten, or deform architectural extremities in ways that both comfort and estrange. Burble Bup amasses custom balloons in a colorful pile with dangling limbs that entice visitors into a range of playful activities, while enclosing a thick figural ground of sausage-like tubes stuffed with wood chips. The exterior of Blo Puff is made from a bronze lobed inflatable held together by bending bamboo. Inside, a plush vegetal interior is outfitted with body-sized pillows designed liked fat bodies that entice occupants to literally embrace architecture. Romulus & Remus and Animate Sensate reflect their recurrent extra-disciplinary excursions, activities they engage in to invigorate their own form making while extending architecture’s capacities to produce allure. From plush toys to pavilions, Bittertang evokes strange associations and exotic passions often absent from architectural form. When confronting their work, laughing, gagging, licking, and cringing are all likely (and welcome) outcomes.

Michael Young
Cooper Union
Young & Ayata

The work of Michael Young evokes visual sensations of movement and speed through thickened surfaces and superabundant vectors. From building proposals to standalone drawings, Young infuses architecture with an amplified depth that creates intense optical effects. His painterly drawing series, Involutes & Atmospheres, illusively captures volume in dense, colorful vector fields that fluidly drift across deep space. Hive Lamp, a lattice shell pendant, modulates cellular apertures to erode legible repetition, rigidify for structural rigidity, and thicken to imply depth through the shifting of inner and outer space. These techniques effortlessly scale up in Busan Opera House, a sinuous lobed structure that wraps back on itself, trapping volume both inside and outside the building proper. In this project, volumetric excess becomes an active back drop for the social theatrically of operatic events. Replacing the paramatrecist ethos of optimization with personal sensibilities grounded in aesthetic judgment, Young overhauls the typical values associated with computational design. Pervasive throughout his work are refined modes of representation that evidence his honed expertise in volumetric control.

Simon Kim
University of Penn
IK Studio

Mariana Ibañez and Simon Kim present optimistic and engaging scenarios for the synthesis of architecture, engineering, and interactive technology. They refuse to accept that architecture is static and inert, instead proposing kinetic surfaces, objects, and structures that change the way humans interact with their built environment. Their research into adaptive architecture and engineering embeds robotics, interactivity, and intelligence into environments, buildings, and cities. In Science Per Forms human dancers interacted with robots programmed by IK Studio, producing a range of human-machine exchanges beyond the bounds of common technological interface. Cloud Cloak is a wearable technological armature that emits a haze of fog, which deters aggressive onlookers and cloaks urban actors in rare moments of solitude. Sensor Wall animates static architectural partitions by bringing together digital technologies and human movement, implanting interactivity into social space. Ultimately, the work of IK Studio portends that architectural form and space can transcend the static relationships of subjects and objects to engage humans in a truly interactive way.

Thomas Kelley
University of Illinois at Chicago
Norman Kelley

Thomas Kelley intentionally misuses the medium of drawing, namely projective geometry, as a means of exploring perceptual fidelity and visual deception. Kelley’s cunning comes from combining a play-by-the-rules approach (orthographic conventions of plan and section remain intact and viewpoints respect perspectival principles) with deliberate trickery (subtle geometric transformations, illusory devices, and literary riddles). In Shape Shape Evolution, flat surfaces and primitive shapes slyly unfold in 3-dimensional relief and figural icons of animals and starbursts. Coupling the iconic geometry of a single balloon and the ambiguous field of multiple balloons, NAWT Balloons produces new, yet familiar collections of iconicity. Pairing known references, often the drawing convention itself, with reversed architectural principles, such as small-scale objects rendered as big-scale environments, produces the equivalent of an architectural sleight of hand. While magicians hide their techniques behind the illusion of their tricks, Kelley allows partial access into his narrative and literary fables, to provide insight into the project’s disciplinary context and insight into where the illusion of the project lies.