Play It Forward: A Temporary Interactive Installation
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Part of this year’s Digital Capital Week, the project turns games into donations for a charitable cause.
When Washington, D.C.-area designers Hiroshi Jacobs, Jonathan Grinham, and Kash Bennett were asked to create an installation for Digital Capital Week’s 24-Hour City Project, which seeks to improve urban environments with creative technology, they knew it had to be more than just something to look at. The team created Play It Forward, an interactive, motion-sensing display that donates a small amount of money to charity each time someone plays with it. Unveiled at the technology festival’s closing party at Arena Stage and now part of an exhibit at D.C.’s Project 4 Gallery, the installation demonstrates how advanced parametric design and digital fabrication methods can work together to encourage interaction and promote social change in the process.
Brooks + Scarpa’s Contemporary Art Museum Canopy in Raleigh
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The adaptive reuse highlights Raleigh's red-brick vernacular (Brooks + Scarpa)
A folded canopy reinvents a former loading dock in the city’s historic Depot District
Raleigh’s Contemporary Art Museum chose its new home in the city’s Depot District carefully. Located in a former produce warehouse, the project calls attention to the city’s history of railroad transportation and red brick architecture while emphasizing its commitment to sustainability and adaptive reuse. Led by Brooks + Scarpa Architects, the project included renovation of the existing 21,000-square-foot structure and the addition of a 900-square-foot entry pavilion. The glass-enclosed lobby reinterprets the location of the original building’s loading dock with an expanded and folded canopy that announces the building’s new purpose and balances the effect of daylight on its interiors.
BLOCK Research Group’s Freeform Catalan Thin-Tile Vault
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The freeform vaulted structure is BLOCK Research Group's first built prototype (BLOCK)
A research project explores techniques from the past to learn about building stronger structures in the future
Sometimes research involves destruction in the name of creation. Architects and engineers from Zurich-based BLOCK Research Group at science and technology university ETH Zurich recently teamed up to build, and destroy, a vaulted masonry structure that was designed with advanced digital fabrication methods but constructed with traditional timbrel, or Catalan, thin-tile vaulting techniques. Through its research of freeform shells, tiling patterns, building sequences, and formwork, the group hopes to construct increasingly radical forms without sacrificing efficiency.
LEAPfactory’s Gervasutti Refuge
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Installation of the Gervasutti Bivouac on the Mont Blanc range's Freboudze Glacier (LEAPfactory)
Built to withstand extreme weather conditions, the alpine pod explores new frontiers for prefabricated architecture
Climbers on the Freboudze glacier can now take refuge from the punishing terrain of the Italian Alps thanks to a new prefabricated shelter commissioned by Italian alpine club CAI Torino. The New Gervasutti Refuge, which cantilevers from the rocky landscape in front of the east face of the Mont Blanc Range’s Grandes Jorasses, was designed and fabricated by LEAPfactory, an Italian firm specializing in modular structures with low environmental impact.
Video> Grimanesa Amorós Lights Up Issey Miyake
Grimanesa Amorós, Uros, 2011, light sculpture installation
Last night, Peruvian artist Grimanesa Amorós presented her newest lighting sculpture at the Frank Gehry-designed flagship of Issey Miyake in Tribeca. Entitled Uros, the piece is one in a series inspired by the Uros Islands, a group of floating islets made by the pre-Incan Uros tribe using the tortora reeds native to Lake Titicaca.
Haresh Lalvani’s Morphing Fruit Platter 1D Series 300
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One of 1,000 patterns created as part of the Morphing Fruit Platter 1D Series 300 (Moss)
The designer’s most recent collaboration with Milgo/Bufkin explores mass customization
Architect-morphologist Haresh Lalvani is continuing his longtime relationship with Brooklyn-based fabricator Milgo/Bufkin with the Morphing Fruit Platter 1D Series 300, which was unveiled at this year’s Design Miami as part of the Moss exhibit, Mass Customization of Emergent Designs. The 100 platters presented at Moss represent the designer’s latest thoughts about the intersection of mathematics and manufacturing based on a process he calls Lautomation.
Buckminster Fuller’s Fly’s Eye Dome Restoration: Goetz Composites
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Assembly of the restored dome in Goetz's shop (Ian Garber)
Fabrication techniques honed for racing boats give the dome new life.
Racing boat builder Goetz Composites has crafted many icons of the sea, including ten America’s Cup boats. Now, the company is trying its hand at architectural icons. Several months ago, Goetz began the restoration of Buckminster Fuller’s Fly’s Eye Dome, one of only three existing prototypes of the prefabricated shelters that the designer patented in 1965. The piece, a 24-foot-wide fiberglass shell with Plexiglas eyes, had been neglected for years and arrived at Goetz’s Bristol, Rhode Island, headquarters with chipped corners, peeling paint, and a patina of mold.
a+i’s White Veil Wall: Ceilings Plus
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The screen spans the ceiling and the three-story atrium of a Midtown Manhattan office (Magda Biernat)
A custom-perforated screen balances lighting and privacy in a three-story New York office space.
Ceilings are not just for the ceiling anymore. “With architecture becoming more organic in shape, we are becoming the architecture, not just a ceiling or wall,” said Nancy Mercolino, the president of architectural ceiling, wall, and enclosure manufacturer Ceilings Plus. This fall, the company completed a 33-foot-tall painted aluminum feature wall at the Manhattan offices of a global investment management firm. Designed by New York-based a+i design corp, the project was a consolidation of the firm’s offices in the city, adding three floors to the company’s existing three-story office space in a Midtown building.
IMAGINiT Technologies announces November 29th launch of new ProductivityNOW Portal for Autodesk software users
Monday, November 21, 2011
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IMAGINiT Technologies, a Rand Worldwide company, provides Autodesk technology and solutions to architects, designers and engineers. Over the years we have grown from a few locations to more than 40 offices throughout North America, with the most Revit and Navisworks experts available anywhere. Our goal has always been to help our clients achieve more with their design technology—from installation and training to implementation and custom software, we’ve been there to help our clients take their projects to the next level.
Introducing the ProductivityNOW Portal
Providing our industry expertise is only the first step in helping our clients and the community at large. For the past year, we’ve been creating a community where IMAGINiT clients can gain information not just from us, but from other members of the community via discussion forums, blogs and polls. Our new ProductivityNOW Portal provides a wealth of information and includes video technical tips, whitepapers, archived webcasts, self-paced and video eLearning, blogs, and other helpful links all categorized by industry. Beyond that, clients will have complimentary access to exclusive personal productivity tools, like IMAGINiT Utilities for Revit which extend the capabilities of Revit. Add in the ability to manage Autodesk Subscription data, log, create, and track the status of support cases and view exclusive online content, the ProductivityNOW Portal will help you take your skills to the next level.
For more information
To learn more about the portal, visit portal.imaginit.com or just ask your IMAGINiT representative.
Brooklyn Navy Yard Gates: Ferra Designs
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Designers abstracted photography of manufacturing scenes to create the gate's pattern (Ferra)
The Building 92 museum’s new gates were inspired by a history of manufacturing
Last week, the Brooklyn Navy Yard threw open its doors to the public for the first time in more than two centuries. With the opening of its new BLDG 92, designed by Beyer Blinder Belle in collaboration with workshop/apd, the Yard welcomed community members to the new 24,000-square-foot exhibition space and visitors’ center. From their first view of the building’s south-facing forecourt, visitors will be inspired to learn about the area’s industrial past by an operable gate made by Ferra Designs, an architectural metal fabricator that calls the Navy Yard home.
AN About Town: Last night’s best openings and installations
The pop-up exhibition designed by Rockwell Group (Rockwell)
Thursday was a great night for New York showroom events. AN took advantage of the beautiful fall weather and made the rounds. Here are some highlights:
Moroso Traveling Show
Moroso celebrated the NYC launch of its traveling show commemorating 60 years of great furniture-making history. Designed by Rockwell Group, the pop-up exhibition will tour New York through November 26, then continue on to Chicago, Philadelphia, Miami, Dallas, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Seattle, and Vancouver. The show features 25 pieces from the Moroso oeuvre, many positioned on raw wood displays next to a timeline illustrated with images and drawings from the company’s archives.
Lawrence Argent’s Red Rabbit: Kreysler & Associates
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Lawrence Argent's 56-foot-long aluminum sculpture (Kreysler)
A 56-foot-long aluminum sculpture leaps into Sacramento’s new airport.
Whether they need a reminder that they’re late (for a very important gate!) or welcome a distraction from the hassle of modern travel, visitors to Sacramento’s International Airport will not miss Denver-based artist Lawrence Argent’s Leap sculpture. Completed last month in the new Corgan Associates-designed Terminal B, the 56-foot-long red rabbit is suspended mid-jump in the building’s three-story central atrium. An oversize “vortical suitcase” placed in the baggage claim below completes the piece. Argent worked with California-based Kreysler & Associates, a specialist in the design, engineering, and fabrication of large-scale sculptural and architectural objects, to build his vision while meeting the airport’s safety requirements.
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