Digital Architecture

Name: Joris Laarman
Occupation : Experimental Laboratory in industrial design,
Design field: Product design.
Most prominent style : 3D printed experimental industrial designs.
Years active : 2006 - present.
Location : Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

"Endlessly trying, refining, improving until slowly, something begins to emerge that is so inge- nious that it looks like magic if you don’t know what went on before: that’s what evolution does. In our work, we try to capture some of that magic. Using emerging technology to work on objects and a visual language of the future, we make small leaps in that evolutionary process. This sometimes results in science fiction-like work that stimulates the imagination, and some- times in very practical suggestions that can be applied immediately. Experienced welding experts watched the development of our 3D metal printer in disbelief. What we did wasn’t sup- posed to be possible. All the settings were wrong for a proper welding process, but we needed those wrong settings to 3D print with a welding machine on a robot. A great example of how we like things to be."
- From their website, on their work philosophy

Bone Chair 2006

For the aluminum Bone Chair, the computer-generated result had to be refined for the specifications of aluminum. This resulted in a much more slender shape. We did face yet another challenge, however, for it wasn’t going to be easy to produce such a complex organic shape. Especially because assembling it from cast components would leave visible welding stains. Preferably, it would have to be cast in one piece in such a way that no bubbles would show on the surface. Virtually every company we approached refused to take up the challenge, until we appealed to Phil Verdult, who had a small workshop somewhere in the small town of Heerhugowaard. Phil had years of experience with casting processes and had conducted many experiments with new techniques in his workshop, for instance with casting metal in 3D printed ceramic molds. The complex mold could be assembled from such mold parts, and the actual object cast in one go. This resulted in the first aluminum Bone Chair.

Branch 2010

For the exhibition at Friedman Benda in 2010, I really wanted to complete the Bone Furniture series with larger interior objects. The series had never been on show in its entirety before, so this was an excellent opportunity to do so for the very first time. I remember how we worked against the clock and how the huge difference between the projects (from living lamp to folding robots) in particular didn’t make our work any easier. After we’d finished the design, a positive model with a light-weight structure was 3D printed. The model was subsequently cast in bronze.

Dragon 2014

The Dragon Bench is the first sculptural piece created with the MX3D metal printer that we developed in-house. By combining our industrial robot (developed for our MX3D resin printer) with an advanced welding machine, we were able to print with metals such as steel, stainless steel, aluminum, bronze or copper, without the need of supporting structures. By adding small amounts of molten metal at a time, we can print double curved lines in midair. The combination robot/welding machine is driven by different types of software that work together closely. This will eventually have to end up in a user-friendly interface that allows the user to print directly from CAD. We are developing printing strategies for different kinds of 3D-printable ‘lines.’ Vertical, horizontal and spiraling lines, for instance, require different settings, such as pulse time, pause-time, layer height or tool orientation. The possibilities are mind-blowing. For the first time we can 3D print large-scale objects using high-quality, strong, self-supporting materials. 3D printing like this is still unexplored territory and leads to a new form language that is not bound by additive layers. The sculptural Dragon Bench explores this. Lines can be printed that intersect in order to create a self-supporting structure.

Strange attractor lamp 2016

We created an algorithm that generates seemingly random curves in three dimensions in space using attractors. These curves can be transformed into functional volumes that resulted into the Strange Attractor Lamp.

This is like sculpting with chaotic information. As the lines move around within a given boundary, they can be tamed and tweaked into something like a pendant lamp or a more horizontally oriented lamp. Since all geometry is parametric it was possible to include all technical necessities for a LED lighting system that was 3-D printed in aluminum and assembled and finished by hand.

Gradient Lounge

The Gradient Lounge is an exploration of cellular based structures in the combination with digitally fabricated upholstery. The chair is composed out of hexagonal cells that morph to address different functional areas in the chair. The mixed textile upholstery was knitted on a computer controlled knitting machine exactly fitting the hexagonal pattern of the structure.
Credits :
http://www.jorislaarman.com/

Name: Loop.pH Studio
Occupation : Experimental Laboratory in design, architecture and science.
Design field: Architecture, Installations and Product design.
Most prominent style : Responsive and light emmitting surfaces and structures for the built environment.
Years active : 2003 - present.
Location : London, UK.

London based spatial laboratory experimenting across the fields of design, architecture and the sciences, set up in 2003 by Mathias Gmachl and Rachel Wingfield.

The lab explores electronically responsive and light-emitting surfaces and structures for the built environment, their work reflects the background of Wingfield as a textile designer and Gmachl's interest in geometry.

"As a studio we create visionary experiences and environments that allow people to dream and re-imagine new visions for our future. We explore the role of art and design in public space by working outside of the gallery, museum and laboratory.

Our work speculates on near and far future scenarios as a way to probe at the social and environmental impact of emerging biological and technological futures. The environments we create often synthesise living materials with digital tools, whilst exploring a new role for designers working at an urban scale.

We work with a range of clients on a commission basis, to create brand experiences, public engagement initiatives and deliver talks and workshops Internationally."

- From their about page, read more : http://loop.ph/studio/

Projects by Loop.ph

The SOL Dome
Location : Saginaw, Great Lakes Bay Region, Michigan, USA
Date : 28 September - 31 October 2013
CLIENT: Fall In… Art and Sol

Fall In…Art and Sol is a celebration of art, culture and science throughout Michigan’s Great Lakes Bay Region featuring the world’s first major solar art exhibition with International artists in October 2013.

"The SOL Dome is a lightweight dome structure, 8 metre in diameter, 4 metre high and weighing only 40 kg. Its fabricated onsite over 3 days from thousands of individually woven circles of composite fibre. The structure is animated and part of a responsive lighting system, lit by a circular matrix of solar powered LED floodlights. The rotational breathing rhythm of the light is driven by an onsite CO2 sensor and is part of our studios ongoing research into creating environments that allow people to experience cycles of environmental data in public space. The underlying geometry and construction technique of the dome is based on chemical, molecular bonds between carbon atoms. When each fibre is bent into a circle it is like charging a battery, creating a taut energetic structure."
-http://loop.ph/portfolio/sol-dome/

Projects by Loop.ph

VelO2

Location : Dadaocheng Waterfront, Taipei
Date: 26 Feb – 6 Mar 2016
CLIENT: Shin Kong Life

"Vel02 is a spectacular installation of light that celebrates the link between active and healthy cities, launched in Taipei in 2016.

A dynamic light commission activated at speed by participants and staged during Velo-City Global 2016, the world’s most important cycling conference hosted in Taipei.

VelO2 by Loop.pH, draws attention to the importance of active lifestyles and air quality in building sustainable smart cities.

Fleeting trails of light are created as participants physically interact with the installation through cycling at speed. The light visually communicates local air quality with dynamic branching structures reminiscent of trees and the tubular networks in our lungs. The installation uses an advanced air quality sensor provided by Change London to collect the fluctuating live data that measures six different air pollutants from three gasses and three different particle sizes. It then translated the live data from the sensor into seven different breathing rhythms and colours of light, passing from green to a dark red for dangerous levels of pollutants and creating a kind of warning system based on the international standard Air Quality Index.

VelO2 draws on the field of aerodynamics, the study of air in motion, to communicate the dynamic and borderless nature of our planet’s fragile atmosphere. On top of the tree like structure is a network of ephemeral tunnels that move gently with the breeze.

Visitors to the installation are provided with bikes to try out the tracks as we hoped that encouraging citizens to take up cycling in a fun and social environment could help Taiwan tackle its air pollution issues."
-http://loop.ph/portfolio/velo2/

Name: Xefirotarch | Hernan Diaz Alonso
Occupation : Architect
Design field: Architecture, Installations and Product design.
Most prominent style : Uncanny designs with an alien-seeming inspired aesthetic from biological mutilation.
Years active : 2001 - present.
Location : Los Angeles, US.

"Xefirotarch’s design obsessions are based in an appreciation for the perversity of mutant form, a taste learned from the movies and the set to work on architecture. That said perhaps Xefirotarch’s architecture is itself “mutant/genetic,” and perhaps it is, perhaps it is the emergent condition –horrific. Perhaps when the projected figure is frozen in a sufficiently dense, opulent articulation it does achieve a resonant state of topological affect. But if so that achievement is derived as much from the act of designing that figure as it is from the intensity of the extant form. It is produced in the act of design, less through special techniques or processes (though also through these) than in the focused sensation of pointing and clicking. Here that sensation is more like painting than engineering: driven by personal, idiosyncratic gesture more than an application of systematic procedure to material condition. the genesis of this is internally driven but not intuitive. Having watched hours, weeks, months of bad Hitchcockian cinema. Xefirotarch’s micro techniques for combing the thresholds of the horrific-becoming beautiful and the beautiful-becoming horrific/ grotesque have imprinted themselves as visual-temporal cues on his design retina. These codes (cut here, blend there, match on action, shot-reverse-shot, false POV, staccato violins, scripting topologies etc.) are processed, mashed-up, and re-projected back onto the screens pace of animation software. There image-forms are densely layered and then pulled back from themselves, balanced and unbalanced, such that their formal architecture within the frame always competes with the structure of the edit -the latent seam- for the organization of the screen-event. In the course of such moments, Xefirotarch is the director, editor and audience all at once, watching the form materialize and interacting with that emergence. His decisions to speed up and slow down, slice and blend fuse and separate are repetitions of scenic rhythms he has learned from a lifetime of being awed by cinematic affect. This is visceral. Like the filmgoer engrossed into the cinematic apparatus of yore (see Bawdry Delouse, Penney) this well-immersed designer sweats and squirms and grunts over what he watches before him. This is an exacting processing behavior, like the subconscious mind during dream state, cycling through the raw data of everyday life’s input, cutting and pasting, iterating toward multiple provisional renders on the mind’s eye. The design settles into the liminal consciousness of productive concentration, into an unfolding practice that is also kind of techniques cinemas / computational; played out on the cameras obscura of his glowing monitors. Any sensibility you read within the final render is an index of a precision of this processing."
- Xefirotarch's Website