print this article | 
e-mail this article
comment  |
AEDS: Life in plastic, it’s fantastic |
Lebanese-born architect Ammar Eloueini established Ammar Eloueini Digit-All Studio (AEDS) in Paris in 1997. Although the Museum of Modern Art owns Eloueini’s work and the New York Architectural League, AIA Chicago, and the French Ministry of Culture have showered him with accolades, this forward thinker admits it is taking time to fully realize his talents. “People came up to us and said, ‘You haven’t built anything, so we can [only] trust you for an exhibition design,’ ” Eloueini says. AEDS now totals four employees and is constructing its first freestanding structure in New Orleans, where Eloueini operates a second studio.
Nubi-Verdopolis, Steel Case building, New York City, 2005
To view projects by AEDS click here.
Based on what you have seen and read about this project, how would you grade it? Use the stars below to indicate your assessment, five stars being the highest rating.
Eloueini has made lemonade of limited opportunities. Besides earning a living from teaching, a long-term collaboration with Issey Miyake, and other types of work, he has tailored the numerous low-budget installations to his research. A series of designs completed in 2005 and 2006, for example, deepened Eloueini’s facility with polycarbonate. For an eight-week show at Grand Arts in Kansas City, Missouri, Eloueini created a ceiling-mounted installation, called Nubik. By suspending oversize crystal forms — comprising CNC-routed trapezium and quadrilateral planes of polycarbonate, zip-tied together — the piece diffused daylight from the gallery’s skylights and glowed at night thanks to embedded lamps. Nubi-Verdopolis, a 2-by-130-foot suspended ribbon of polycarbonate, served as a wayfinding device and projection surface in an Earth Pledge Foundation exhibition. And when the Norwegian Ministry of Petroleum asked Eloueini to evoke Norway’s natural landscape for an exhibition at the Offshore Northern Seas Foundation in Stavanger, Norway, the architect fashioned variously sized triangular surfaces into polycarbonate mountains and seas.
Eloueini’s romance with the material really began in 1997: Looking to transform a rogue structural beam into a giant table for his Paris office, he learned that polycarbonate could be purchased in 65-foot lengths, and ordered a slab for his tabletop. Using an Israeli product distinguished by its dense hexagonal substructure, Eloueini’s installations have since exploited polycarbonate’s ability to refract light, as well as its structural integrity and fire rating. Eloueini says he is using these installations to explore “the relationship between conceptual ideas, materiality, tectonics, and assembly.”
The expertise in polycarbonate has already borne fruit. The material played a key role in a 2003 set design for the John Jasperse dance company, for example. And this intense exploration of a single material has informed Eloueini’s design methodology in general: He has investigated three-dimensional printing at furniture and architectural scales with just as much focus. Eloueini also notes that this approach allows his forthcoming New Orleans project, a twisting steel-framed residence called J-House, to upend the shotgun typology. “I believe that the projects we work on are part of a larger discourse involving the changes in design and implementation of design in the electronic era,” he says.
del.icio.us
Reader Comments:
