PROFILE> Skylar Tibbits
Skylar Tibbits
What can NURBS do for you?
Find out on February 17, when SKYLAR TIBBITS will lead Scripted Design, a workshop focused on exploring the potentials of RhinoScript, as part of DAY 2 of the upcoming COLLABORATION conference on fabrication and facades in NYC.
A trained architect, designer, and computer scientist, Tibbits’ research currently focuses on developing self-assembly technologies for large-scale structures in our physical environments. He was recently awarded a 2011 TED Fellowship, a 2012 TED Senior Fellowship, and was named a Revolutionary Mind in SEED Magazine’s 2008 Design Issue.
Tibbits currently resides in Boston and is the founder and principal of a multidisciplinary research-based practice, SJET LLC, and an instructor for MIT’s Architecture Department. Previously, he has worked at a number of design offices including: Zaha Hadid Architects, Asymptote Architecture, SKIII Space Variations, and Point b Design. He has designed, collaborated, and built large-scale installations around the world and his work has been exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum and the Beijing Biennale. He has lectured widely, including at MoMA and SEED Media Group’s MIND08 Conference.
Scripted Design, Tibbits’ COLLABORATION workshop, will provide an introduction to Python for Rhino. Topics covered will include: Running Scripts, Syntax, Data Types, Variables, Flow Control, Tuples/Lists/Dictionaries, Points/Vectors, Functions, Paneling and Recursion. The training will concentrate on IronPython within Rhino.
The workshop has a limited number of spots; register here!
After roaring into New York last year, BIG is reaping rewards from the American Institute of Architects who bestowed an Honor Award on the firm’s aptly-named “8 House” in Copenhagen (it looks like a figure-8 in plan). The AIA jury lavished praise: “people really ‘live’ in this newly created neighborhood,” which “provides an invigorating sculptural form while creating the ramped ‘pedestrian’ street system.” Ramps around 8 House make it bikable—from the street up to its 10th level penthouses—and two sloping green roofs total over 18,000 SF where the building reaches down to the ground.
Unveiled> BIG Hits the Slopes Again with New Resort in Finland
Plaza (Courtesy BIG)
It’s no mystery that Bjarke Ingels is a fan of mountains, but building craggy edifices hasn’t been enough for the Danish leader of BIG. Now Bjarke has unveiled his firm’s latest plans to incorporate “rooftop-skiing.” He previously proposed the Hafjell Mountain Hotel in Norway in 2007 and more recently an imperiled Waste-to-Energy Plant in Denmark that appears to have stalled. The Danish firm’s latest competition-winner is a 500,000-square-foot resort called Koutalaki Ski Village in the Lapland region of Finland, consisting of four landscaped buildings that double as ski slopes.
Artist Creates a Colorful Mosaic of 1,000 Doors in Seoul
South Korean artist Choi Jeong-Hwa's "Doors" installation. (Courtesy Choi Jeong-Hwa)
This surreal construct is one of the many public art projects by South Korean artist Choi Jeong-Hwa, whose love of found objects and anti-institutional approach to art is known internationally (he once hung strings of sparkling garbage around Seoul Olympic Stadium). The 10-story tall installation called Doors is comprised of 1,000 reused, brightly colored doors transformed into a rustic and visually indulgent object evoking a pixelated and painterly effect from afar, perhaps reminiscent of an abstract Klimt painting. Alternatively, the installation can also be read less glamorously as a mirror to Seoul’s increasingly ad-dominated cityscape where Doors resembles a jarring collection of ads to the point of irony. (Via Colossal.)
Unveiled> UNStudio Creates a Neighborhood in the Sky for Singapore
UNStudio's Scotts Tower proposed for Singapore. (Courtesy UNStudio)
Singapore’s largest private property developer, the Far East Organisation, is the latest client of the Amsterdam-based architect UNStudio. The project in question is The Scotts Tower, a high-end residential building with the ambition to achieve “vertical city planning”–a concept perhaps inevitable in evermore crowded Asian cities. According to Ben van Berkel, UNStudio principal, the project is to “create neighborhoods in the sky; a vertical city where each zone has its own distinct identity.”
Unveiled> Seoul Cloud by MVRDV
Rendering of the Cloud at night. (Courtesy MVRDV)
Seoul’s Yongsan International Business District, a new district designed to lift the city’s architectural appeal as an international business destination, is filled with wild promises: the world’s second tallest tower (‘Dream Tower’) to be completed by 2016, the Libeskind-designed, 28-trillion-won ($22.6-billion) ’Dreamhub’ project, and now MVRDV’s The Cloud.
Detroit Still Awaiting Its Very Own RoboCop
Earlier this year, over 2,700 people ponied up cash through the online crowd-funding platform Kickstarter to erect a statue of the 1980s icon RoboCop in Detroit, Michigan. Plenty has been said—both good and bad—about this quest to “uphold the awesome,” whether the statue will be a good or bad thing for the city struggling to regain a solid footing. Curbed Detroit recently checked in with Brandon Walley of Detroit Needs RoboCop and learned the statue could be ready to install as early as the summer of 2012. While a site for the statue must still be secured, organizers are currently awaiting the original RoboCop model to be shipped from Hollywood before the statue can be dipped in bronze. Considering that the 1987 American sci-fi action film was literally set in a near-future (you could say present-day) Detroit, and given the themes of resurrection, memories, and conflicted policies with logical fallacies, the statue likely holds more than just a nugget of nostalgia to the supporters.
Researchers Develop Robot-Powered Flight Assembled Architecture
A robot placing a brick. (Courtesy Gramazio & Kohler and Raffaello D’Andrea with ETH Zurich)
Finally, one of our classic futurist expectations (something you might see in Futurama) is about to be fulfilled: architecture assembled by a swarm of flying robots. With robots apparently planning a takeover of the construction industry, how long until the iconic yet dangerous “Lunch atop a Skyscraper” (from the 1930s) is a thing of the past?
AIA Chicago’s 2011 Design Excellence Awards
James I Swenson Civil Engineering Building (Courtesy Kate Joyce, Kate Joyce Studios)
On October 28, over 800 architects, designers, contractors, and their clients gathered together at Navy Pier in Chicago to celebrate the architecture firms recognized with 2011 Design Excellence Awards. Firms were honored for achievements in the following four categories: Distinguished Building, Interior Architecture, Regional & Urban Design, and Unbuilt Design. Out of 357 entries, there were 42 awards total– 10 Honor Awards (the highest distinction), 24 Citation of Merits, and 8 Special Recognitions. Half of these awards were for designs in Chicago and the surrounding suburbs, while the remaining awards were for designs in other cities, states, and countries. Read More
Quick Clicks> Domed City, Guggenheim on hold, Google’s Secret Project, No-bin experiment
An architectural rendering of Umka (Via the Daily Mail)
City of Scientists. Russian Prime Minister Putin has recently reviewed plans for a potential $6.4 billion project that could build a 5,000-person—scientists and researchers, specifically—domed village in the Arctic called Umka, about 1,000 miles from the North Pole. Plans call for an isolated artificial climate inspired by “an imaginary Moon city or a completely isolated space station.” More on the Daily Mail and Foreign Policy Blogs.
Abu Dhabi Adjourned. The new 450,000-square-foot Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim museum planned in Abu Dhabi has been put on hold pending contract review. A similar fate awaits Jean Nouvel’s Louvre satellite previously scheduled to open near Gehry’s site next year. More at Mediabistro.
Sergey’s Secret. Due to his prolific work ethic, the insider joke at Google is that co-founder Sergey Brin is really Batman. More believable, the latest Google rumor is that one of Brin’s secret pet-projects may very well be architectural, with blueprints and all. Business Insider has details.
No bin, no trash. The NY Times reports on the MTA’s seemingly counter-intuitive enviro-social experiment to remove trash cans from subway platforms. The idea: no garbage bin might be the way to achieve no litter. A trial run in Queens and Greenwich Village left some people very unhappy.
Pictorial> Virgin goes Galactic
The Virgin Galactic Spaceport by Foster + Partners. (Nigel Young / Foster+Partners)
A quick flashback: Back in 2005, Virgin Group’s latest venture, Virgin Galactic, and the State of New Mexico had announced that they had reached an “historic agreement”—that they would build a state-funded $200 million spaceport in New Mexico. Virgin planned to provide sub-orbital space flights to the paying public, along with sub-orbital space science missions and orbital launches of small satellites (and much later, even orbital human space-flights). The facility was to be designed by Foster + Partners, who won Virgin Galactic’s international architectural competition.
Now, the Virgin Galactic Spaceport America—the world’s first commercial spaceport—has officially launched. Aimed to “articulate the thrill of space travel for the first space tourists while making a minimal impact on the environment,” the spaceport is designed to resemble, when viewed from space, Virgin Galactic’s brand logo of the eye, with an elongated pupil–the elevated apron completes the iris. Check out the photos after the jump.
Quick Clicks> Brooklyn Bucket, Rebuilding Libya, House Cycle, Abandoned City
Courtesy Civic Center and Caroline Oh
Brooklyn’s Bucket. An unsightly construction fence along Brooklyn’s Fulton Street has recently been transformed into NYC’s own giant chalkboard installation “Before I Die…,” a public participation project originally started in New Orleans by artist and TED fellow Candy Chang. Locals have been writing up their bucket lists, some as simple as “get paid,” some as serious as “to forget.” More on Artlog and Candy Chang’s blog.
G-oahead-afi. Gaddafi’s death last week was a historic event for Libya, but it also ushers in an era of uncertainty. Among the challenges that the new Libya must face is development, or rather the potential for uncontrolled overdevelopment. Concerned British architects are warning Libyans not to give way to “untrammelled development” during this “dangerous moment,” reported bdonline.
Cyclical Home. A new Philips’ design project called “the Microbial Home” is all about cycles, specifically how one function’s output can be another’s input. For instance, a bio-digestor island converts waste into methane gas that in turn powers a light made of bio-luminescent bacteria fed with methane. Check out the images on psfk.
Modern Ruins. Strange Harvest featured images of the abandoned architectural ruins of Pruit Igoe in St. Louis, which has now become a forest that “grows out of all that socio-political debris.” One image of a lone lamp post protruding from a complete forest is a surreal reminder of the relationship between architecture, politics, and time.
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