MIT Architecture

well MIT is a very different kind of Institute instead of becoming the recipients of building industry culture we can now change building industry by the kinds of experiments we're doing in school mit has a variety of departments that are so powerful that they have the potential of radicalizing what we do in design and in the architecture department even the way that we've structured our curriculum around workshops and other kinds of collaborations that we foster and encourage this kind of cross-disciplinary platform so we are situated perfectly for the kinds of things that only MIT can do the invention of human artifacts of any kind always consists of three elements the geometry the process and the material about constitute artifacts it's very clear that new materials engender new forms and architectural design benefits from addressing applying new materials in an informed way the emergent materials group and the urban metabolism group share a central interest in materials for the built environment lately we've been working a great deal in the area of foam - materials especially film cements and concrete's so typically a beam and bending is going to have the greatest amount of stresses on the top and bottom so we can reduce the amount of material on the interior of a beam the work early tries to address that there's two main paradigms throughout almost every industry one paradigm is what can you design what can you compute or analyze and the other paradigm is what can you physically construct or what can you build the work really tries to traverse all scale lengths it tries to work from the nano scale which is traditionally where we see self-assembly in biological examples chemical examples and it tries to bridge that and say can't we use this phenomenon a self-assembly as a new paradigm for building things at large scale we work with any type of material synthetic or natural materials and really try to design specific geometries that have materials in mind and when you design those two together they can respond to energy and the energy sources can be heat shaking gravity pneumatics electronics so you can use any type of energy when you mix that with the geometry and material properties then they can respond and they can change state primarily it will first be applied in extreme environments scenarios where it's difficult to build the research and the practice is is really about cross-disciplinary collaborations between designers scientists engineers working on this phenomenon self-assembly discovering where we find it naturally where we can use it synthetically and trying to apply that at all different scale lines the focus of our work at least at this smaller scale of the at the scale of say art installations or retail we leverage CNC fabrication methods but not as a way to exude their prowess necessarily but more as a way to help us get at a particular formal agenda we have an installation called totems which in a way is a kind of proto architecture not quite architectural not quite sculptural but I think that it offers a kind of proposition to each of those disciplines we do a lot of testing via 3d prints a lot of the formal investigations for totems specifically happened in 3d prints we we did maybe 30 to 50 3d prints of the totems as a way to understand how the light and shadows were working how best the anamorphic effects were working before we went to the large-format wirecutter in terms of collaborations some of those happen here at MIT shoulde amir and i are developing an installation now which is an anechoic chamber and the anechoic chamber uses industrial felt both on its exterior and as a way to absorb sound on the interior I'm bringing a kind of disciplinary or formal or geometric interest on the one hand also a certain set of specialized understandings of the behavior of the sheet materials on the other so my architectural interests are really broad but in terms of my current research preoccupation it's about material geometry specifically sheet shapes or sheet material geometries how they Bend stretch stack fold but obviously understanding sheet materials is really critical to Architecture this is sort of a long-standing discourse on sheet materials in architecture in part because it's so ubiquitous in conventional constructions so everything including plywood sheet metal steel aluminum plastics all of these have to deal with the developable surface geometries which is to say sheet shapes generally and so expanding the the total set of understandings about sheet shades is a totally enough kind of obviously worthwhile architectural undertaking these installations attempt to go jump from the scale of the paper model to you know the scale of the architectural space at the very least well over the past 20 years first as office da now as nada we've identified two or three areas of focus the first has been to look at materials and their behavior as a point of departure for many of the architectural experiments we do the second area is to recognize that materials don't have an endless limit everything comes in modules and sheets in blocks in bricks and that without aggregation there's no way of beginning to figure out how construction works in general so the detail of bringing things together as a point of departure has been another central focus so this has been a kind of point of revolution for a range of projects that we researched and undertaken some of which are at the scale of a piece of furniture others that are at the scale of a building and others that are really at the scale of urbanism one of the agendas of the studio is to create interactive architectures for public space through design and technology and these projects can range in scale from the scale of the body such as the defensible dress project which is a wearable architecture which uses the microcontroller and shape memory alloys to defend your personal space to very public scale infrastructural projects such as our proposal for the Audi urban features initiative where we're speculating on high-speed regional infrastructure and transformations in the city around issues of mobility for the year 2030 it seems now more and more necessary that our environments have to become smarter more responsive and more flexible the way in which architecture is made needs to be completely rethought if we're to go beyond bricks and mortar to engage the challenges of the next century my work as an architect focuses on designing architecture and urban scale interventions that engage the emergent infrastructure of our time we're interested in how design engages that mutability between energy and matter when materials generate energy or store it when materials are dynamic and change state exchange heat produce light or communicate information the challenge I think for the discipline of architecture today isn't in digital fabrication it's in the material fabrication in thinking about what it means to be material today when we move fluidly between digital and physical realms how we use materials and not waste them and how we form materials and how we transport them if we're going to change the building industry and regenerate an innovation based manufacturing segment in the United States then I think we need to do this from within practice from working with the norms of the building industry but not settling for those norms instead innovating to both accept and transform those standard conditions I think we're pursuing several initiatives relating with computation material at several different areas dynamic interactivity is one of the focal surface and we're driving that forward imagining actively out of plastic environments if you like it's a demonstration of the power of computation come real-time then in the robotic manufacturing work we're looking for how information and material all coming together but with control directly at the architects workplace so we're developing tools that allow architects within their native software to pilot a powerful production machine I could cook the robot demonstrating I think what will be the future of manufacturing which is sophisticated algorithms and modeling that link directly to sophisticated manufacturing machines and allow both new efficiencies but new versatility is new formal complexities I'm also frustrated by the slowness of a building industry to innovate materially as it fantastically a fantastic amount of research in material science that pent up and it's just dying to become at a period where the sort of environmental concerns are becoming so enormous and they the challenge of building that so so extraordinary that it's necessary cad/cam meets material science like composites I think is going to breathe a whole new new life into it into the architectural and building in the streets

Channel: MIT Architecture

Views: 204,265

Rating: 4.951961 out of 5

Keywords: MIT School Of Architecture And Planning (Educational Institution), Architecture (Industry), Massachusetts Institute Of Technology (College/University)

Id: -UUM9YfOhXo

Length: 13min 15sec (795 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 22 2015