Hasta La Ideas

American studio Qastic has created an inflatable pavilion with a floating roof held down by fabric veils (+ slideshow).

Called Floatastic, the structure was designed by Connecticut firm Qastic for a wedding ceremony. They intended to create a temporary shelter without imposing any loads on the ground.

A giant horizontal white balloon is filled with helium. As it rises upwards, a series of fixed fabric veils keep the inflatable overhead and appear to dangle like jellyfish tentacles. “Buoyancy is achieved through the efficient harnessing of a noble gas,” said Qastic.

The designers said that the floating pavillion is the result of research into buoyancy and structures that are made by reversing the position of the load.

“Since the surrounding environment and microclimate fluctuate in every 24-hour cycle, our studies found that the floating pavilion will experience many buoyant conditions which are unique but steady,” said the firm.

Here’s a film featuring the structure floating in the wind:

We’ve featured other stories about inflatable structures recently, including a pop-up pavilion that looks like a soap bubble and a twisted tubular inflatable pavilion installed in east London.

See more inflatable architecture and design »
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Photographs are by Net Martin Studio.

Here’s more from Qastic Lab:

Floatastic

Balance Through Buoyancy is a research base pavilion called “Floatastic” by QASTIC Lab, which was designed and built for a private client to serve as a temporary shade pavilion for a wedding ceremony in Edgerton Park, in New Haven Connecticut – an Olmsted planned landscape.

This deployable structure aims to create a floated shelter which avoids imposing any loads to the ground, which traditional structures require. Instead it proposes a well-fabricated balloon, which is filled with Helium to raise the imposed loads of fabric veils and any possible dynamic environmental loads toward the sky.

Buoyancy is achieved through the efficient harnessing of a noble gas. The idea of ‘flesh’ is explored through the pavilions possible functions and effects, by which an abstracted mass can impose on fabric surfaces in both relaxation and tension.

It is within this dialogue of the helium container and the loads that we can test possible architectural and spatial effects, with articulation between Balloon edges and fabric veils exploring the possibilities in which the complex surface veils are relaxed or in tension in double curvature configurations.

Making use of the method of reversing load bearing systems, the form of the pavilion is defined by geometrically precise formwork that is then fabricated with randomly varying edges both for the horizontal balloon and the PVC pipes on the ground to allow for varied functions at different heights, climates and locations.

Since the surrounding environment and microclimate fluctuate in every 24 hours cycle, our studies found that the floating pavilion will experience many buoyant conditions which are unique however steady.

Metaphorically, Floatastic envisioned to be a surrealistic and breathtaking imitation of the Jellyfish that appear alive and tries to swim against the external forces in the water. However, rather than being in the water, Floatastic questions its audiences to unconsciously know if they are floating in the sea or on the ground.

Architects: QASTIC Lab
Location: Edgerton Park, New Haven, Connecticut. USA
Constructor: QASTIC Lab
Client: Jahangir Mohamadzadeh
Designer & Team Leader: Mahdi Alibakhshian
Design and fabrication Team: Ali Sadeghian, Reza Zia, Ahmad Jamei, Carlos Bugatti, Delara Zarrinabadi, Lili Saliani
Design & Fabrication Consultant: Nathaniel Hadley, Mohamad Reza Mojahedi
Conceptual & Visualization Consultant: Gregory Hurcomb
Exhibition Period: July 2013

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by Qastic appeared first on Dezeen.

An austere concrete pavilion in Lisbon with a staggered corridor and a hidden courtyard will host events and exhibitions during the Lisbon Architecture Triennale, which kicks off next month (+ slideshow).

Designed by Portuguese architect João Quintela and German architect Tim Simon, the Kairos Pavilion is a permanent structure built from prefabricated concrete blocks that slot together without any adhesives or fixings.

A single large window punctures every elevation of the rectilinear structure, each leading into a corridor that lines the perimeter. This walkway steps both up and down, transforming from a sunken shelter into a raised viewpoint.

The highest points of the walkway offer views down into the centre of the pavilion, where a square courtyard functions as a stage for exhibitions, speakers or musical performances.

The floor of this space is also set down by 20 centimetres to accommodate a shallow pool of water, forming a mirror that reflects an image of the sky above.

The architects describe the project as an experiment with scale, light and time. “It’s an investigation about proportions and the relationship between the small scale of the isolated module and the large scale of the whole building itself in relation with the context,” they said.

Named Kairos, the building first opened in 2012 and has been used to host projects and talks by architects such as Alberto Campo Baeza, Aires Mateus and Pezo von Ellrichshausen. It will also feature in the Lisbon Architecture Triennale 2013, which runs from 12 September to 15 December – more details in our earlier story.

Other concrete pavilions featured on Dezeen include a ribbed structure at the University of Porto and a playground pavilion in Dallas, Texas.

See more pavilions on Dezeen »
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Photography is by Diana Quintela.

Read on for more information from the design team:

KAIROS Pavilion, Lisbon, Portugal

Synopsis

KAIROS is a project created in 2012 by the architects João Quintela and Tim Simon in partnership with the company’s prefab concrete Gracifer and with the Lisbon Architecture Triennale’s support as an answer to an inhibitor and unsustainable social and economic context, with the aim of encouraging, generating and presenting exhibitions in which Space appears as the central theme.

It’s a pavilion – non-profit project – that intends to receive site-specific installations proposed by architects and artists. These projects should be created as an original work developed for this space exploiting its characteristics and dialoguing with the ambiences through their own and personal research.

Following this concept, and moving away from the institutional circuit of museums and galleries, the space is intended to be public, free and open to all the participants and proposals that want to integrate the exhibition’s calendar and by this generate the meeting and interaction between different and multidisciplinary projects.

The invitation to participate and submit proposals in KAIROS Pavilion is open to architecture, fine arts, performance, theatre, music and other artistic languages in which the participants feel that fits inside this concept contributing to approach creators and public.

Project

To the linear and chronological time ‘CHRONOS’ opposes ‘KAIROS’, an undefined and symbolic time which cannot be measured except by its quality.

The building wants to put two apparently irreconcilable times in dialogue. Since the very ancient periods buildings aspire to the idea of the ‘eternal’ through a spatiality and materiality able to resist time. The great temples and cathedrals, completely made out of natural stone, continue to coexist with the contemporaneity. Concrete constructions represent undoubtedly the legacy of modernity and they recover as well this symbolic idea of eternity.

This confront between the temporary and the eternal is something worth researching through a general view to the possibilities that our time can offer us. This prefab solution is capable to deal simultaneously with these two aspects as it allows us working with a durable and resistant material dialoguing with continuous Time, through a modular construction and an easy assembly or disassembly.

KAIROS, created by João Quintela and Tim Simon, appears as a result of a spatial research referenced in history through the use of Matter, Light and Time. The Matter of the Concrete, the Light of the Sun and the Time built from both. It’s an investigation about proportions and the relationship between the small scale of the isolated module and the large scale of the whole building itself in relation with the context.

The space is built by a very easy and primitive constructive system of overlapping and joining pieces, taking advantage of their own weight without using any glue or screws. It’s a square plan building with an inside square patio. Thus, there exists a perimeter all around that consists in a path developed both on the lower and upper level, generating two similar spaces with completely antagonistic ambiences. One is covered and black while the other is exterior and bright.

The inner patio is defined by the mirror created through the water inside which reflects the sky and duplicates the space. This becomes the central element, inaccessible and contemplative, able to freeze time and build an intimate moment, a dialogue with the past. Becomes the most significant space and acquires symbolism due to his impossible conquer.

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and Tim Simon appeared first on Dezeen.

News: California studio Smith|Allen has completed the world’s first architectural structure using standard 3D printers (+ movie + interview).

Called Echoviren, the 10 x 10 x 8 foot pavilion was completed last weekend. It consists of 585 individually printed components produced on seven Series 1 desktop printers made by Type A Machines.

It took the printers two months and 10,800 hours to print the components, but just four days to assemble them on site.

The components, each measuring up to 10 x 10 inches, were snapped together to create a perforated structure resembling an igloo with an opening at the top.

Each component is made of a plant-based PLA bio-plastic, meaning the structure will decompose over time, disappearing within 30-50 years. “As it weathers it will become a micro-habitat for insects, moss, and birds,” the architects write.

Artist Stephanie Smith and architect Bryan Allen of Smith|Allen built the structure in a redwood forest at Project 387, an arts residency programme in Mendocino County north of San Francisco.

“The texture [of the structure] is based on a study of the cellular forms of sequoia cells,” Allen told Dezeen (see full interview below). “Their structure allows the trees to maintain huge amounts of strength with a minimum volume.”

Allen added: “The overall form is driven by the structural requirements of building in PLA. The section is pyramidal so each of the walls is self supporting. As the structure is completed it becomes a compression structure with the top most layer forming a compression ring.”

Architects have this year been racing to complete the first 3D-printed house, as we reported earlier this year. Projects in the pipeline include a looping two-storey dwelling by Dutch architects Universe Architecture and a fibrous single-story dwelling by UK studio Softkill. Meanwhile Amsterdam studio DUS Architects plan to create a canal-side house room by room.

However Italian engineer Enrico Dini is credited with creating the first 3D-printed inhabitable structure using a D-Shape printer – a huge machine he invented himself that prints using a type of synthetic stone.

In 2009 Dini teamed up with designer Andrea Morgante to print a 3 metre-high prototype structure and the following year he worked with architect Marco Ferreri to print a single-room house modelled on a mountain dwelling. See our feature about 3D-printed architecture for more details.

We conducted an email interview with Bryan Allen of Smith|Allen about the project:

Marcus Fairs: Tell us about the type of printers you used.

Bryan Allen: We used 7 of the Type A Machines Series 1 printers. We’ve been working with some other types for a few years. I worked with Ron Rael at Emerging Objects and at Berkeley where we used ZCorp printers to develop new materials. The idea to make something huge has been around for a while but despite our efforts to use the ZCorp, the BFBs, or the Makerbots, it just wasn’t possible or it was prohibitively expensive. The Series 1 made it possible to build large prints reliably and with the price drop in PLA, building something big became a reality.

Marcus Fairs: What does Echoviren mean?

Bryan Allen: The name Echoviren comes from a reference to the coastal redwood, it’s Latin name is sequoia sempervirens. Translated roughly that’s ‘always alive’ or ‘always growing’. The Echoviren is a technological echo, a reflection, and specter of life and of the forest. It evokes the essence of its site in the forest and mirrors it in a deliberately artificial method. Although we consider this forest primeval and natural, in reality its a highly controlled and modified environment, the forest has been logged and even before recorded history it was cultivated. Echoviren highlights that palimpsest, a forest landscape that has been written over many times, continually changed and grafted onto.

Marcus Fairs: What are the form and texture of the structure based on?

Bryan Allen: The texture is based on a study of the cellular forms of sequoia cells. Their structure allows the trees to maintain huge amounts of strength with a minimum volume.  This form also naturally works well on FDM-style printers. Their ability to print cellular infill structures on the interior of parts fits in with a macro scale cellular tessellation scheme. The perforations form a gradient of size drawing the viewers vision up and through the occulus.

The overall form is driven by the structural requirements of building in PLA. The section is pyramidal so each of the walls is self supporting. As the structure is completed it becomes a compression structure with the top most layer forming a compression ring. The PLA components are strong in compression and the pyramidal section coupled with a compression ring makes the structure tend towards stability. In the XY the components are connected via a dovetail joint, in the Z the layers fit together with a pin and socket.

Marcus Fairs: How did you get started with 3D printing?

Bryan Allen: When my partner and I graduated from School we lost our access to the tools that had allowed us to make,design, and to create things. We were faced with a choice: go into an office and slave over CAD drawings for a couple years working on someone else’s projects until I could get licensed, or to go it on our own. Getting the printers made it possible for us to actually make a go of doing what we really wanted to do: creating large scale installations, sculpture, and architecture.

We first attempted to make a small scale aggregation called Xylem at the end of 2012. That piece was 4x4x3′ and after we completed it we thought well, what if we go bigger? We bought more printers, put them in our studio and got to work. We applied to Project 387 for funding and for the site, after we were accepted we began construction.

Marcus Fairs: What’s new about this project that hasn’t been done before?

Bryan Allen: I think the fundamental breakthrough in this project is that of aggregation as a construction system. So many of the 3D printed architecture projects that have been proposed are based on building large scale printers which is a huge barrier in and of itself. By utilizing Rhino and grasshopper with consumer-grade, easily available desktop 3D printers we were able to make this thing in (relatively) small, precise, individual components. After all architecture is about assemblage, it’s about how to organize connections, details, and joints. To design a 3D printed architecture requires a fundamental rethinking of how we design: there are new details, systems, and processes that open the door to the huge potential of 3D printed architectures.

Marcus Fairs: What will you work on next?

Bryan Allen: So next we are going to be working on a retail interior in Oakland California. We are hoping to build a large scale urban intervention in San Francisco at the beginning of next year. We are also closely involved with Type A Machines and hope to be designing pavilions and other structures for their office and events in the future. We want to continue to grow the scale and scope of our projects. We want to find the limit of what is possible within the disruption 3D printers have created. We want to incorporate more intensive systems into 3D printed constructions like HVAC, lighting, etc, as well as make spaces for more permanent dwelling.

Marcus Fairs: What’s next for 3D printing?

Bryan Allen: There are some new printers and materials coming out that allow designers who don’t have the resources of a huge institution to begin to realize their creations and push the envelope of architecture in general. To us the 3D printer is right on the cusp of transitioning from a toy to a tool, it can make real things, real design, and real architecture.

Marcus Fairs: What is Project 387?

Bryan Allen: Project 387 (www.project387.com) is a multidisciplinary residency program in its inaugural season. Located in rural Mendocino Country, California Project 387 has offered six artists an opportunity to develop their proposed projects in the quiet of giant redwoods. This year’s selected residents are: Smith|Allen Studio [Bryan Allen and Stephanie Smith] (Oakland CA), Rich Benjamin (Brooklyn NY), Claudia Bicen (San Francisco CA), Sean McFarland (San Francisco CA), and Robert Wechsler (Glendale CA).

Project 387 provides community-based living and working experience to artists in all career stages. The residency is a unique opportunity to dive into the creative process in a focused, exploratory and rigorous manner while removed from the clamor of urban distractions.

Here’s some more info about the project from Smith|Allen:

Echoviren, the worlds first piece of full scale 3D printed inhabitable architecture

Smith|Allen participated in the Project 387 Residency, located in Mendocino County from August 4-18, 2013. In the heart of a 150-acre redwood forest, Smith|Allen has created a site responsive, 3D printed architectural installation (the largest of its kind): Echoviren. The project merges architecture, art and technology to explore the dialectic between man, machine and nature. The Project 387 open house and reception was Saturday, August 17.

Spanning 10 x 10 x 8 feet, Echoviren is a translucent white enclosure, stark and artificial against the natural palette of reds and greens of the forest. Walking around and within the structure, the viewer is immediately consumed by the juxtaposition, as well as uncanny similarity, of natural and unnatural: the large oculus, open floor, and porous surface framing the surrounding coastal landscape.

This artificial frame draws the viewer up from the plane of the forest, through a forced perspective into the canopy.

Echoviren was fabricated, printed, and assembled on site by the designers. Through the use of parametric architectural technologies and a battery of consumer grade Type A Machines desktop 3D printers, Smith|Allen has constructed the world’s first 3D printed, full-scale architectural installation.  Made of over 500 unique individually printed parts, 7 3D Printers ran constantly for 2 months for a total of 10800 hours of machine time.

The structure was assembled though a paneled snap-fit connection, merging individual components into a monolithic aggregation. From breaking ground to finish the prefab 3D printed construction technique required for only 4 days of on site building time.

Entirely composed of 3D printed plant based PLA bio-plastic, the space will decompose naturally back into the forest in 30 to 50 years.   As it weathers it will become a micro-habitat for insects, moss, and birds.

A graft within the space of the forest, Echoviren is a space for contemplation of the landscape, of the natural, and our relationship with these constructs. It focuses on the essence of the forest not as a natural system, but as a palimpsest. The hybridized experience within the piece highlights the accumulated iterations of a site, hidden within contemporary landscapes.

Echoviren exposes an ecosystem of dynamic natural and unnatural interventions: the interplay of man and nature moderated by technology.

Location: Project 387 Gualala, California

Manufactured by: Smith|Allen

Involved companies: Type A Machines

Commissioned by: Project 387

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3D-printed architecture” appeared first on Dezeen.

Faceted aluminium panels rise from the ground to form this pipe-shaped pavilion at the FRAC Centre in Orléans, France by architects Jakob + MacFarlane (+ slideshow).

Jakob + MacFarlane created the geometry of The Turbulences by extruding grids created across FRAC art centre‘s courtyard by the existing buildings in the public. The faceted surfaces form tubes topped with glass panels and entrances are inserted under raised parts of the undulations.

The new pavilion was designed as a reception area to funnel visitors towards the exhibitions housed in the main buildings. A tubular metal structure supports the secondary system of panels that cover the building.

Pre-fabricated concrete slabs clad the lower portion as a continuation of the courtyard surface. These are replaced by aluminium panels higher up, some of which are perforated and light up with LEDs at night.

More museum extensions on Dezeen include Zaha Hadid’s addition to the Messner Mountain Museum in the Dolomites and a new aquarium dedicated to codfish at the Ílhavo Maritime Museum in Portugal.

Photographs are by Nicolas Borel.

See more pavilion design »
See more architecture by Jakob + MacFarlane »
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The FRAC Centre sent us the following information:

Jakob + MacFarlane have brought to the fore an emerging dynamic form based on the parametric deformation and the extrusion of the grids of the existing buildings. As a strong architectural signal interacting with its context, this fluid, hybrid structure develop likes three glass and metal excrescences in the inner courtyard, in the very heart of the Subsistances.

The principle of emergence is extended to the immediate surroundings: the courtyard is treated like a public place, a topographical surface which forms the link between all the buildings and accommodate the Frac Centre programme. This surface goes hand in hand with the natural differences in level of the site towards the building’s entrance, reinforces the visual dynamics of the Turbulences and stretches away towards the city in a movement of organic expansion.

The destruction of a main building and the surrounding wall on Boulevard Rocheplatte has made it possible to greatly open up the new architectural complex to the city. Thanks to its new urban façade, the Frac Centre is connected to the cultural urban network of Orléans, and the inner courtyard has been turned into nothing less than a square. The new architectural presence has become the point of gravity of the Subsistances site, a new structure, and a new geometry. The architectural extension comes powerfully across through its prototypical dimension, which echoes the identity of the Frac Centre and its collection.

The glass and steel excrescences of the Turbulences house a public reception area and organize the flow of visitors towards the exhibition areas, situated in the existing main buildings.

The critical dimension of the work, conveyed by its structural complexity, is transcribed on all the project’s scales. The tubular metal structure, reinforced by a secondary structure supporting the exterior covering panels (aluminium panels, either solid or perforated) and the interior panels (made of wood), is formed by unusual and unique elements. The lower parts of the Turbulences are clad with prefabricated concrete panels, which provide the continuity of the building with the courtyard. The apparent disjunction between the two architectural orders is offset by the impression of emergence given by the Turbulences.

The light, prefabricated structure of the Turbulences has been entirely designed using digital tools. All the building trades involved worked on the basis of one and the same modelling file. The structures were subject to a trial assembly in the factory where the tubes were welded, before the permanent on-site assembly.

In this project, the at once conceptual and surgical approach to the urban fabric developed by Jakob + MacFarlane redefines the site in order to incorporate in it new points of equilibrium, “shifting” the architecture and offering contemporary art a dynamic and evolving image.

The architectural intervention, with its complex, facetted geometry, stands out against the symmetry and sobriety of the Subsistances site whose period structures and materials are left visible.

As “living” architecture permeable to urban ebbs and flows, the Turbulences – Frac Centre thus becomes the emblem of a place devoted to experimentation in all its forms, to the hybridization of disciplines, and to architectural changes occurring in the digital age.

The Jakob + MacFarlane extension, conceived like a graft on the existing buildings, introduces a principle of interaction with the urban environment activated by a “skin of light” on the Turbulences, designed by the artists’ duo Electronic Shadow (Niziha Mestaoui and Yacine Aït Kaci), the associate artist and joint winner of the competition.

Their proposal consists in covering a part of the Turbulences, giving onto the boulevard, with several hundred diodes, thus introducing a “media façade”, a dynamic interface between the building and the urban space. Using the construction lines of the Turbulences, the points of light become denser, passing from point to line, line to surface, surface to volume, and volume to image. This interactive skin of light, integrated in the building like a lattice-work moucharaby, will function in real time and develop a state of “resonance” with its environment, based on information coming, for example, from climatic data (daylight, wind, etc.) as well as animated image scenarios devised by the artists.

The building’s surface will thus be informed by flows of information, transcribing them as light-images. These luminous signs, the result of a computer programme, implement the merger of image and matter, turning The Turbulencess into “immaterial architecture”.

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at the FRAC Centre appeared first on Dezeen.

Students from London’s Architectural Association have suspended a giant wooden cocoon between the trees of Hooke Park in Dorset, England (+ slideshow).

The wooden structure, designed and built by four students on the AA Design & Make programme, was envisioned as a quiet woodland retreat where an inhabitant can sit and watch the sun set beneath the surrounding tree canopy.

“The Cocoon represents a journey through the forest, inviting and challenging the visitor to anticipate, imagine, explore and discover the natural beauty of the forest from a completely different perspective,” says the design team.

Using four untreated sheets of plywood and one locally milled cedar tree, the students constructed a temporary frame and then used a bandaging technique to build up a facade of thin and flexible layers inside it.

Once the structure was stiff enough, it was suspended around three trees so that it appears to weave between them.

To enter the structure, a step ladder leads in through a hole at one end, while a smaller hole on the opposite side forms the window. Light also penetrates the interior though small gaps in the walls.

The Architectural Association owns the 140-hectare Hooke Park and runs a number of workshops and courses at its workshop and studio facilities there. Last year, students built an assembly and prototyping workshop at the park, while in projects in 2011 included a pod-shaped hideaway.

Other pavilions built by AA students include a 2009 structure referencing driftwood and a shell-like shelter from 2008. See more stories about the Architectural Association.

Photographs are by Hugo G. Urrutia, one of the design students.

Here’s some extra information from the design team:

AA Hooke Park – Cocoon

Shelter was prefabricated, transported and successfully installed, hanging and weaving over three selected trees in Hooke Park, Dorset, UK.

The Cocoon is a design derived from the experience of walking through the forest of Hooke Park in Dorset. Its design explores the relationship between natural light, material and occupational space. The Cocoon represents a journey through the forest, inviting and challenging the visitor to anticipate, imagine, explore and discover the natural beauty of the forest from a completely different perspective. Even though it uses the trees as vertical support, the design is site specific as it weaves through 3 selected trees in the forest.

The structure emerged through a process of ‘bandaging’ until it was stiff enough to hang it from the trees. This process provided a unique spatial transformation of the interior spaces through articulation and penetration of natural light, and a strong tectonic language, achieved by the imperfection but novel materials and form.

An inhabitable suspended ‘cocoon’, that takes its form from a precise weaving through three trees at the fringe of a forest clearing, becomes Hooke Park’s premiere vantage spot to view the winter sunset.

The Cocoon, provides a unique visual and tactile experience through its undulated canyon-like forms created by the form-finding cladding.

The selection of materials for the project was based on the team’s design ambition to maximise the use of material from Hooke Park. Four sheets of plywood and one western red wood cedar tree was milled to create this unique ergonomically design shelter with interior spaces that provide areas for relaxation and enjoyment of the amazing framed views of the winter sunset. An important characteristic and advantage of the green and untreated timber is the high flexibility achieved after milling into thin strips, permitting the cladding strips to bend and take new form.

The interior spaces of The Cocoon enable the visitor to have a unique visual and tactile experience through its undulated canyon-like forms created with the cedar cladding, the fresh smell of the wood and the articulation of the light, bringing the visitor closer to the canopy of the trees and surrounding environment. Architecturally, the team’s ambition was accomplished thanks to the unique material characteristics, the spatial transformation of the interior spaces through articulation and penetration of the natural light, and a strong tectonic language, achieved by the imperfection but novel materials and form.

Designed and made by: Hugo G. Urrutia, Abdullah Omar, Ashgar Khan, Karjvit Rirermvanich
Designed for: Architectural Association/ M.Arch Design & Make programme 2013

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AA Design & Make appeared first on Dezeen.