Van Alen Institute Fellowship Program
Last year, the Van Alen Institute introduced a fellowship program, meant to support emerging architectural practitioners and scholars. As a result, the institute has become an architectural alchemist, putting together wide-ranging research interests to get at the notion of public architecture.
Image courtesy Van Alen Institute
B+U: Envisioning a city of sound
Talk about frozen music. Herwig Baumgartner and Scott Uriu, partners in the nine-year-old, Los Angeles-based architecture firm B+U, have found a way to turn actual sound into buildings.
Photo courtesy B+U
SCI-Arc’s CHUB table
It's not often—or ever—that a boardroom table causes a sensation. At least not until architects Ramiro Diaz-Granados and Heather Flood created the CHUB table, one of the most original pieces of furniture ever for the board of directors of the Southern California Institute of Architecture.
Photo courtesy SCI-Arc
DesignBuildBLUFF: Drawing on two-by-fours
In 2000, University of Utah architecture professor Hank Louis started DesignBuildBLUFF, a lab that gives students the opportunity to create functional and beautiful houses on the Navajo Nation Indian Reservation.
Photo courtesy SCI-Arc
Situ Studio: Finding connections without limits
Situ Studio is a self-described “research, design, and fabrication firm,” and its five partners, who met while studying architecture at Cooper Union in New York City, emphasize the variety of their work. This approach allows the firm to work on diverse projects, such as analyzing the topography of a crater in India while fabricating a lobby installation for Kohn Pedersen Fox.
Photo courtesy Situ Studio
Teaming with larger firms serves opportunities
Eight-and-a-half days is barely enough time for most people to get over jet lag when traveling, but for a group of nine students from Catholic University in Washington, D.C., it's a period of intense work in far-flung locations such as Nepal, Machu Pichu, or Ireland.
Photo courtesy DDA
Spirit of Place: Students go global
Eight-and-a-half days is barely enough time for most people to get over jet lag when traveling, but for a group of nine students from Catholic University in Washington, D.C., it's a period of intense work in far-flung locations such as Nepal, Machu Pichu, or Ireland.
Photography courtesy Spirit of Place
Mapping Venice: Students take on the city of water
One of the biggest frustrations of architectural-history professors is that the material they teach and the students to whom they’re teaching it are often separated by thousands of miles. Ask any of them what they’d do for their students with a million bucks, and most would say, charter a private jet and let their students visit and experience first-hand the great monuments of the world.
Photo courtesy Columbia University
Associated Fabrication: Heavy metal/light touch
The four partners of Associated Fabrication operate a design firm under the name 4-pli, and mobilize Associated's services within different projects.
Photo courtesy Associated Fabrication
Mountain Pine Beetles: Epidemic or opportunity?
Abdel Munem Amin and David Yi-Jen Tseng created the only architectural response to the competition—a modular stair titled Six Steps: Blue Modular. In line with the competition’s call for mass-market applications, the stair can be reconfigured to accommodate any orientation or distance between floors.
Photo courtesy Abdel Munem Amin and David Yi-Jen Tseng
URBANbuild: Students bring hope to New Orleans
Even before Hurricane Katrina decimated New Orleans, housing in the city was a problem. Tulane University’s School of Architecture, under an umbrella program of the school called Tulane City Center, had been working to help since the summer of 2005, with a design-build studio called URBANbuild.
Photo courtesy of URBANbuild
Mafoombey: Explores the acoustics of cardboard
Martti Kalliala and Esa Ruskeepää were college roommates while attending the architecture school at Helsinki University of Technology. The two students began to experiment with cut corrugated cardboard when they entered the open-to-all Habitare design contest at the University of Art and Design in Helsinki in 2005. The competition asked for a small space for listening to and experiencing music within the set dimensions of 2.5 cubic meters. Thus was born Mafoombey, a space for music.
Darfur/Darfur:
An architect uses her design training
to bring awareness to a crisis
Leslie Thomas, partner with the Chicago-based firms Larc Inc. and Larc Studio, wasn’t one to jump on causes and preach about them. However, when the architect, mother, and Emmy-winning art director (for art direction of the 1999 HBO movie Introducing Dorothy Dandridge) saw a photo of a victimized child in a March 2006 New York Times article about the genocide in Darfur, she was changed.
Idea becomes business: For
two British designers
Experimenting with concrete in school paved the way for British industrial designers Will Crawford and Peter Brewin to enter the business of helping disaster relief workers.
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Pecha Kucha Night:
6.6 minutes of fame
Young designers don’t have to relegate their work to portfolios or as decor for their apartment walls: Pecha Kucha Night (PKN), as profiled in November’s Record News, provides a forum in which everyone from architects to students and recent graduates is welcome to present their work (in 20 seconds per slide with a 20-slide limit).
Christian Wassman: Mentors and guts keep a young architect flying solo
Christian Wassmann is wondering whether or not to sign a new lease. In Manhattan, with its breathtaking rents, this is no small decision. While getting the extra office space would give him more room (Wassmann and his project-basis employees are used to working in an office carved out of his apartment), it could also force him to take on some work he’d otherwise have the luxury of passing up.
The word architect: A question of title
Many unlicensed architecture-school graduates have a difficult time describing their jobs to family, friends, and others outside of the profession. Though classified by the profession as interns, their work is remarkably similar to the kind of work they would be doing if they were licensed. Yet the title of architect is restricted by state licensing boards to refer only to currently licensed practitioners.
