Category: pinkcomma

Amanda Reeser Lawrence, Ashley Schafer and Irina Verona

Challenging the singularity and finality of a cover image, this installation considers an(other) Praxis: the cover designs that were left on the drawing board. The exhibition offers a glimpse into the process—at the covers that might-have-been. Rather than a definitive display of runner-ups, the material displayed in this exhibition is a suggestion of infinite possibilities. What determines the final choice? Luck, intuition, labor, angst, refinement, conflict, budget and ultimately—a deadline.

PRAXIS 15: Bad Architectures
At a time when the precarity of the present is too often met with ironically predictable responses, this last PRAXIS, “Bad Architectures,” instead magnifies the wrinkles, ripples, disturbances, disruptions, and glitches within the field, framing them as opportunities and alternative ways of working or thinking. “Bad Architectures” is co-edited by Amanda Reeser Lawrence; Ashley Schafer; and Irina Verona.

Read the full press release on Archinect

About PRAXIS

Founded in 1999, PRAXIS: a journal of writing + building has established itself as a distinctive voice in international architectural culture. The journal addresses contemporary design issues in both depth and breadth, and has engendered an architectural discourse uniquely rooted in practice. Emphasizing the interdependence of technology, design, theory, and history, PRAXIS investigates these fields as parts of an integrated discipline, promoting connections between various aspects of architectural production. The journal has generated a forum that bridges the gap between theory and practice.

Published twice-yearly by an all-volunteer staff, PRAXIS has received critical acclaim as well as numerous awards and honors, including an ID award in 2004 and has twice been awarded design grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Viola Ago

Poppy Red employs a serial working methodology exhibited in drawings, experimental models, animation, and one large sculptural work. The series interrogates the medium of architectural drawing and modeling; compositions of line clusters and volumetric transformations.

Borrowing processes from graphic and industrial design (slick, high-finish, commercial processes like hydro-dipping films, flatbed printing, and vinyl applications), the line drawing component of Poppy Red takes on a graphic role which sometimes aligns with the formal transformations of the volumes in a coherent way, but at other moments challenges the sculptural qualities of those forms in favor of graphic figures.

At a time when the conventional architectural drawing stands on contested grounds, this form-graphic interplay attempts to forge new relationships between the aesthetic language of line drawings and three dimensional volumes. This new relationship exists in the very short and sudden moment when the drawing-as-graphic blankets its formal host.

Viola Ago directs MIRACLES Architecture. She is currently the Wortham Fellow at Rice University School of Architecture and was most recently serving as the Yessios Visiting Professor at the Knowlton School of Architecture, OSU. She has taught at Harvard’s GSD, RISD, SCI-Arc, and Taubman College where she was the 2016-2017 William Muschenheim Design Fellow. Viola’s work has been exhibited in Los Angeles, Ghent NY, San Francisco, Columbus IN, Columbus OH, Ann Arbor, and Cincinnati. Her written work has been published in Log, Wiley’s AD, Routledge, Acadia, TxA, JAE, etc.

Megan Panzano

Vision and cultural imagination are shaped by how we represent the world. Representations on repeat can perceptually trap us into seeing-only-conventionally. Architectural Artifacts critiques specific limits posed by conventional linear perspective, unlocking different information about the spaces described. The project experiments with the perspective view as an unusual point of origin with architecture as an artifact, or byproduct, of its close read. The exhibit displays three new representational artifacts and their accompanying fresh architectural forms created by pushing perspective’s limits through contemporary tools and new design methodologies. The three dimensionality of the revamped representations establishes new codes of engagement and offers curious perceptual content with real-time effects—their reading intentionally resides between representation and reality, image of a thing or ‘thingness’ itself. The project inverts the trope ‘a room with a view,’ instead designing new views, with rooms.

Project Team
Megan Panzano, Julia Mercedes Roberts, Adam Strobel

Exhibition Fabrication
Bill Bancroft

Megan Panzano studioPM
Instagram: @mpanzano
Twitter: @designstudiopm

Jonathan Hanahan

The 45th City explores ways of representing and occupying online news platforms in real space through the physicalization of its original source code. It suggests the latent website architecture as settings of re-framing the way we experience and inhabit digital information. In this work, architecture is extracted from the underlying code of a fake news website using an open-source tool called Tilt3d. This browser extension visuales the DOM tree-structure of the site as a series of nested boxes, building a vertical architecture from a formerly flat website. This new structure is then rendered as a real environment, mapping physical textures to digital information and speculating on what a material world of this artificial site might exist as.

Jonathan Hanahan is a designer whose speculative practice explores the cultural and social ramifications of experiences which transcend physical and digital occupations and the role technology plays in shaping, mediating, and disrupting our everyday realities. He develops Thick Interfaces—tools, devices, softwares, artifacts, websites, videos, etc. which agitate the digital facade and reveal the physical reality and complexity which exist underneath the thin veneer of our devices.

Hanahan received his BARCH from Virginia Tech and his MFA from The Rhode Island School of Design. In addition to his studio practice, Hanahan is an Assistant Professor in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis.

Shaped Places of Carrol County New Hampshire speculates on the complex relationship between who we are and the shape of where we live; between identities and the built environments that support them. The project culminates in the design of three cities in Carrol County New Hampshire, a state whose shape may hold a unique political resonance due to its perilously purple hue on November 8, 2016. Much like the gerrymandering that arguably produced the results of the latter, the project seeks to geometrically organize population at a geographic scale to carefully prescribed ends.

E X T E N T S is a design collaborative that operates across scales and disciplinary silos. We’re interested in architecture, urbanism, media, digital culture, and other instruments of life that can be impacted by design. The collaborative is led by McLain Clutter and Cyrus Peñarroyo, faculty at the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning.

A New Robotic Brutalism

The 3D printer – a Cartesian machine which has long been defined as characterless – is in fact highly distinctive: it is an apparatus with integrity, personality, limitations, and formal rigor. The Additive Architectural Elements project aims to reveal the 3D printer’s highly idiosyncratic architectural tectonics and narratives. Choosing common-place prototypical architectural motifs such as floors, columns, doors, windows, walls, and ceilings, HANNAH developed strategies as to how the layering of concrete, the relentless three-dimensional drawing of extruded lines of material, and the act of corbelling can suggest new strategies for building. The question is: what is the architecture of 3D printed concrete?
 

 

Credits

Additive Architectural Elements – A New Robotic Brutalism (2016–2017)
HANNAH w/ Cornell Robotic Construction Laboratory (RCL)
Ithaca, NY

HANNAH: Leslie Lok & Sasa Zivkovic (co-principals)

Project Team Christopher Battaglia, Jeremy Bilotti (photography co-lead), Reuben Chen (photography co-lead), Stephen Clond (fabrication co-lead), Ainslie Cullen, Gary Esposito, Justin Foo, Charisse Fu (PLA model co-lead), Jessica Jiang (drawing lead), Alexandre Mecattaf (fabrication co-lead), Hanxi Wang (PLA model co-lead)

Exhibition Design Team: Stephen Clond, Alexandre Mecattaf, Cait McCarthy

Cornell Robotic Construction Laboratory (RCL): Sasa Zivkovic (director)

This project and exhibition received generous support from the Cornell University College of Architecture, Art, and Planning (AAP) and the AAP Department of Architecture.

Special Thanks to: Dean Kent Kleinman, Department Chair Andrea Simitch, Mark Cruvellier, Frank Parish, Beth Sprankle, Villa Additiva option studio, the faculty and staff at College of Architecture, Art, and Planning, Cornell University

 

Curated by Chris Grimley, OverUnder

 
“Monstrosity” appears to be a favorite word for those who wish to bully and belittle architecture into obscurity and, in the more alarming cases, onto a demolition list. We need not look hard to remind ourselves that the term has been used by previous generations to describe Victorian architecture, French Second Empire buildings, and many other styles seen as outmoded within a half-generation of their heyday. Our contempt for the destruction that followed should give us pause in today’s rush to judge the concrete buildings of the mid-twentieth century.

Suspended between life and death, these buildings remind us of the power that architecture can possess upon its inception, but also of the forces that conspire against it once it is judged to have become old, out-of-shape, obsolete, or ugly. If there is a lesson in seeing concrete masterworks disfigured and demo- lished, we do not believe it lies in exposing the hubris of the generation that created them. Rather, the current wave of destruction says more about our own pessimism, the weakness of our potential building legacy, and our lack of patience in finding ways to superseded the cycle of ugliness and make these monstrosities our own.

 

Featured Photographers

Matthew Carbone Mechanic Theatre, Baltimore, MD [John Johansen, 1967]
Harlan Erskine Orange County Government Center, Goshen, NY [Paul Rudolph, 1971]
Jason Hood Birmingham Public Library, UK [John Madin, 1974]
Rey Lopez Third Church of Christ, Washington, D.C. [Araldo Cossutta, 1970]
David Schalliol Prentice Women’s Hospital, Chicago, IL [Bertrand Goldberg, 1975]
David Torke Shoreline Apartments, Buffalo, NY [Paul Rudolph, 1974]
Oliver Wainwright Robin Hood Gardens, UK [Alison and Peter smithson, 1972]

 
Select Press
Fast Company
Boston Magazine
Curbed
Greg Cookland
Architectural Digest
Dezeen

 
Credits
pinkcomma gallery: Chris Grimley, Michael Kubo and Mark Pasnik
Curatorial Assistant: Shannon McLean
Exhibit Assistant: Anna Driscoll

 

by Mark Lamster

 
For more than three centuries, Deer Island has been the place where Boston has put the things it would rather not think about. It has been a concentration camp for Native Americans, a women’s prison, and a fortress against invasion from the sea. Recently, it achieved notoriety when the body of a young murder victim, Bella Bond, washed up on its shores.Today, it is site of the Deer Island Wastewater Management Plant, a masterwork of infrastructural design that opened in 1995, after a federal court mandated the clean-up of Boston Harbor. On an average day, the Deer Island plant treats some 350 million gallons of sewage; in the event of a storm surge it can treat up to 1.3 billion gallons per day.

The plant is most recognizable for its twelve egg-shaped digesters, each 130 feet tall, which thickens sludge so that it can be converted into fertilizer. Contaminated water is purified over ten to fifteen days as it is fed through a series of “batteries,” or pools, where it is gradually aerated and cleansed before it is returned to Massachusetts Bay by a 9.5 mile, twenty-four-foot-wide, gravity-fed tunnel. Below the plant’s surface is a secret world of labyrinthine galleries, colorful machinery, and electric vehicles that looks like nothing so much as the lair of a James Bond villain. But nobody at Deer Island is trying to blow up the world. It is operated, instead, by a cadre of engineers and tradesman dedicated to keeping Boston’s water clean in times pleasant and severe.

Mark Lamster is the architecture critic of the Dallas Morning News and a professor at the University of Texas at Arlington School of Architecture. The photographs of Deer Island were taken over the last year while he was a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He is currently at work on a biography of the late architect Philip Johnson, to be published next fall by Little, Brown.

 

August 10th through October

Design Biennial Boston is a nationally recognized program that provides a public platform for New England’s early-career, independent professional design talent. 2017 is the fifth iteration. Conceived and curated by over,under, the event is sponsored by the Rose Kennedy Greenway Conservancy, Autodesk BUILD Space, the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, the Boston Art Commission, the Boston Society of Architects/AIA (BSA), the BSA Foundation, and pinkcomma gallery.

Following an open call for entries which included submissions from each of New England’s states, the jury selected four firms whose work provides ample evidence of the region’s vibrant pool of designers. Autodesk BUILD Space provided teams access to advanced fabrication equipment.

 

Blue Crow Media & over,under
August 1st, from 6-9pm

 

Brutalist Boston Map features more than forty leading examples of Brutalist architecture across the greater Boston area, including Boston City Hall (Kallmann, McKinnell and Knowles), Government Service Center (Paul Rudolph) and Madison Park High School (Marcel Breuer). Masterfully designed concrete structures such as Le Corbusier’s only North American building, the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, are included alongside lesser known, but equally important works like the Charlestown Branch Library (Eduardo Catalano) and the Josiah Quincy School (The Architects Collaborative).

Designed as both a reference guide and travel companion, the map includes an introduction to the architecture of the era, along with photographs and details for each building, including the address, build date, and the architects or practice responsible.

Maps will be available for purchase.