Arch Tracker

The Serpentine Gallery is delighted to reveal the plans for the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2011 by world-renowned Swiss architect Peter Zumthor. This year’s Pavilion is the 11th commission in the Gallery’s annual series, the world’s first and most ambitious architectural programme of its kind. It will be the architect’s first completed building in the UK and will include a specially created garden by the influential Dutch designer Piet Oudolf. [More info and images after the break]

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The next big event in China after the Beijing Olympics and Shanghai Expo with a projected 12 Mio visitors for the coming 6 months, Xi’an International Horticultural Expo has officially opened last Thursday and already received more than 200,000 visitors over the first weekend. The ancient city of Xi’an- home to the Terracotta Army and many buildings of unique historical significance- is using this opportunity to focus on the current challenges from its recent growth and transformation. [More images and project description after the break]
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Title: International Conference; BioDigital architecture and genetics
Location: ESARQ (UIC), Barcelona
Link out: Click here
Description: In the twenties and thirties of the 20th century, when some architects were disposed systematically to configure modern world, they did it stimulated for a cultural pressure, for a correct adaptation to new times, and fighting for minimum conditions of human existence. On the other hand, today the urgency is bigger. It is about the entire planetary subsistence. The question is not any more a simple caprice, neither an intellectual necessity, neither sensibility for losing less favoured people. Now, the necessity is global, without reservations of classes, races or religions. The whole planet is in front of danger of no-sustainability for all mankind.

By chance, now in this crucial moment, are offered new techniques of an enormous potential: biological techniques and digital techniques. And even fusion of both, in something that can be named biodigital architecture. One that has incorporated the advantages proportioned by the understanding of genetics in both ways, the biological and the digital way, that permit to face with hope some continuity also worthy, but this time a dignity for all The Earth.

Then, as the ones that made efforts to break with the ancient classical tradition to found the new modern tradition, we are in front of the challenge of creating the future tradition of biodigital and genetics. For this is necessary that people work on three key elements: research, teaching and profession. This is exactly what we have been doing in Barcelona from 2000, with the Genetic Architecture Research Group and Ph.D. Programme, with the Biodigital Architecture Master’s Degree and with the Genetic Architectures Office. There we learn & teach, we make research and we design: Knowing that there are sufficient differential parameters to predict a complete age’s change. Today, after the first decade of our new Century, it is time to explain, to check, to discuss, fascinations, inspirations, experiences, that the graduates of these Research Group, Master’s Degree and Architecture Office have done in the developing of this biodigital architecture and genetics, up to now.

Alberto T. Estévez
Conference Chair
Start Date: 2011-05-30
End Date: 2011-06-05

Project: Living Nature
Architect: Héctor Ruiz-Velazquez
Location: Valencia, Spain
Time: September – October 2010
Photography: Pedro Martinez

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The World Architecture Festival took place in Barcelona, Spain last week. Part of the annual festival program is the announcement of the WAF Award Winners. This year the title of World Building of the Year went to the MAXXI Museun in Rome, Zaha Hadid, which also won the 2010 Stirling Prize this year. After the break all the 2010 award winners.

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Last thursday, August 26, NYC studio SOFTlab opened and installation at the bridegallery in New York City. The installation was made with over 4,600 panels each one with a unique color. The project was crowd-financed via kickstarter and for everyone who pledged for the projet their name was laser atached in one of the panels, which will be sent to the donator once the installation comes down. [More images after the break]

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The Guggenheim is celebrating its 50th Anniversary and they have done so many things to celebrate, back in April we wrote abouth the competition “RE: Contemplating the Void: Intervention in the Guggenheim” where the museum invited participants to reimagine the museum´s iconic rotunda and submit their ideas via Flickr. At midnight on May 14, 2010 the competition was closed and the museum recived over 200 submissions. After careful review, Contemplating the Void curators Nancy Spector, Deputy Director and Chief Curator, and David Van Der Leer, Assistant Curator for Architecture and Design, have selected five winning submissions which are shown after the break. All submissions are available in the flickr pool.

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During a 4 week workshop program called: Social Technologies 2010 at the Department of Architecture and Design of the Aalborg University, the students researched the link between CNC fabrication techinques and digital tools. The students worked together with Dolle Trapper and the result were 7 architectural models and the Pavilion Art615, more images and videos after the break.

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To celebrate the close of the Guggenheim’s 50th Anniversary year, the Guggenheim Museum invites you to create your own dream intervention of the Guggenheim Museum. Now you can take on the same challenge that 200 artists, designers, and architects took on for the exhibition Contemplating the Void: Interventions in the Guggenheim Museum. More info after the break.

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There is more to modernist architecture in Mexico than just the work of Luis Barragán, its most renowned representative. The detailed plans and impressive enlarged photographs in this exhibition offer a broad overview of architectural production in post-war Mexico. In addition, a unique series of documentary films and contemporary documents helps to flesh out this fascination evocation of the refined lines and raw functionalism of Mexican modernism.

At Bozar, the Fine Arts Centre in Brussels, the exhibition ‘Mexican Modernisms’ will open its doors to the general public the forthcoming 11th of February as part of the festival ¡MEXICO! The exhibition is a co-production between BOZAR (BE), A+ (BE) and CONACULTA (MEX) and presents a series of impressive enlarged photographs of 40 canonical architectural pieces build between 1930 and 1985. In addition, newly produced audiovisual documents review these buildings in their actual context. The curatorial work was realized by José Castillo and PRODUCTORA with additional research by Fernanda Canales and Alejandro Hernández. PRODUCTORA was in charge of the exhibition design. More info after the break.

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The Architectural Association School is showcasing the work of eight award-winning architectural projects which demonstrate the most innovative integration of design and fabrication processes through digitally driven design systems in a new exhibition Designing Fabrication at Village Underground Art Space from September 21 – 26 as part of London Design Festival. The show will be open daily from 12-8 pm. A symposium exploring themes and issues raised by the awards and exhibition is taking place on Friday, September 25 from 2 – 6 pm. More info after the break.

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FLUX: Architecture in a Parametric Landscape by CCA Architecture/MEDIAlab is an exhibition that focuses on the emerging field of advanced digital design. In the last two decades of architectural practice, new digital technologies have evolved from being simply representational tools invested in the depiction of existing models of architectural space to becoming significant performative machines that have transformed the ways in which we both conceive and configure space and material. These tools for design, simulation, and fabrication, have enabled the emergence of new digital diagrams and parametric landscapes—often emulating genetic and iterative dynamic evolutionary processes—that are not only radically changing the ways in which we integrate disparate types of information into the design process, but are also significantly altering the methodological strategies that we use for design, fabrication and construction. After the early digital explosion of the 1990’s, new forms of rigor and production have entered into the field of architecture, supporting the emergence of parametric and building information modeling and the enhanced use of computational geometry and scripting that together represent the second critical wave of digital design practices. That our current models of space are far more continuous, variant and complex, is specifically a result of the tools we are using to produce them, an inevitable byproduct of the ever-expanding capacities of digital computation and related fabrication technologies as these intersect with theoretical trajectories that long ago dismantled the social, functional and technological truths of the early part of this century.

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