Horace Hou: Looking out week 1

This is a pavilion project located in Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo designed by Studio Gang. The project is part of a larger plan that tries to rehabilitate a pond area in the zoo. This pavilion creates an area for people to congregate and allow for a space for educational programs. The design is based upon a tortoise shell and is covered by fiberglass pods which allow light in and protect the users from the weather. 

I find this project really interesting in that although wood is a very solid material and can seem very rigid, this project shows that wood can also be very versatile and bend and twist into such a curve. 

Designing wood supports for large ceilings poses challenges for two reasons, first the simple fact that the requisite thickness of wood rapidly produces an extremely large structural member as the span increases, and second that it can be challenging to express any unique idea with an art so old without resorting to extremely complicated systems.

This ceiling by Alvar Aalto in Saynatsalo, Finland, appears almost ethereal as the heavy structural member, supported at the middle by wood members in tension, hangs low and far away from the roof, which it supports with a forest of thinner wooden struts.  The result is a strong, unique, but conceptually simple and beautiful structure which in brighter images appears spectacular and in darker images disappears into the blackness above, a mysterious and amazing piece of design work.

Looking Out - Charmaine Y.

This pavilion was first designed and built by students of the Tampere University of Technology.  The "scales" on the pavilion are meant to symbolize the scales of a dragon's body, a great cultural symbol to where the pavilion was displayed.  The curved forms of the wood contradicts the common perception of what wood is supposed to look like.  The scales were pre heated and bent with the aid of the CNC router and use of computer algorithms.  

Making forms such as this would have been much more difficult before the age of CNC routers and mechanized timber treatment.  Because of the precision of the fabrication techniques, the artists are able to create slot joints for the pieces to come together perfectly and have the final form look exactly like how it is modeled in the digital world.  This project is intriguing to me because it uses wood in a way that would be considered unconventional and defies the usually hard, flat material quality of wood.

Garrett Rauck: Looking Out | Week One

Author: Renovo Bicycles
Location: Manufactured in Portland, OR; sold worldwide

Renovo Bicycles consists of a close-knit group of dedicated individuals with no prior training in woodworking. Instead, they are engineers and designers with a passion for bicycling who chose to use wood for their products because of its excellent properties.

Prior to modern technologies for wood fabrication, a hardwood bike would have been inconceivable due to the excessive weight it would carry. However, digital fabrication tools have allowed Renovo to create hollow wooden frames, resulting in bikes in the same weight class as aluminum, steel, and titanium bikes and just as durable. Wood also provides for a superior ride since it absorbs vibrations better than steel, aluminum, or carbon, giving a smoother ride. Finally, wood is sustainable. The fatigue life of wood exceeds steel or aluminum, and it ultimately approaches carbon.

It is amazing how we left a seemingly obsolete material behind by advancing our technology, only to return to that material once again with a greater ability to manipulate it. Technology continues to redefine what is the full potential.

Cheers.
Garrett Rauck

Daniel Gomez: Looking Out Week 1

The Jardin Botanico Orquideorama in Medellin, Colombia was done by a group of mostly Hispanic architects, known as Plan:B Arquitectos. They did this project when Medellin was trying to revitalize the look of the city, and so Plan:B Arquitectos was brought in to create a compelling structure for this newly thought out Botanical Gardens. The structure is beautiful because of what it is able to do with light, especially in the contrast of the night sky. It is as well compelling to me, because it is in my native city, and it makes me proud to say that I am from a city that encourages architects like these to come and rethink what our city wants to share with outsiders, and people who really don't understand Colombia.

Liz Dolinar: Looking Out Week 1

This is a community library in Bangkok by TYIN Tegnestue. All of the wooden structural members came from a local reuse store, while the wood "cladding" is made of old and decaying wood debris found at the site. I really like this project because it uses materials resourcefully and in a way that connects with the urban poor in the immediate area it services (not to mention the awesome variety in texture, color, and look of all the repurposed wood).

Danielle Lehmann: Looking Out Week 1

This is the Pallet Hous. This house is 60 square meters and was able to recycle 800 pallets that would have been dumped in landfills. This building was actually built by two students and won many awards since its development in 2008. The building has a very low energy demand and actually collects rainwater from the roof to recycle. It is on its way to being produced in developing countries because of those reasons and because shipping pallets are so common and inexpensive. (In US dollars its about $108,000.)

Daniel Ha: Looking Out Week 1

Parametric Wood Architecture, Germany.
The Institute for Computational Design, The Institute of Building Structures, and students from the University of Stuttgart.

     Although it is based off a sea urchins plate skeleton, I thought it resembles a giant turtle shell. The night view of this project was very compelling. I enjoy the thought of being encased in a glowing sea urchin/turtle shell. It seems like it would be a very calm and relaxing experience.

Jenny Wong: Looking Out Week 1

There are skating shelters located in Winnipeg, Canada designed by Patkau Architects. Winnipeg is coldest city out of Siberia. Patkau Architects took their chance to create shelters along river skating trails. These shelters are formed from two layers of thin, flexible plywood only at 3/16th inch thick. These forms are created after experimenting on the stresses of bending. They're resulted from stressing/deforming and then releasing stress. Stress points were relieved by cuts and openings on the structure.

Alyssa Hamilton: Looking Out Week 1

Bart Prince "Seymour House"
So, Bart Prince is one of my all time favorite architects and as you can see, his favorite material is wood! A lot of his project look like space ships or strange anomalies from the outside but in almost all of them he explores the power of shaping wood in interesting ways. Prince focuses on the tectonic connections as a primarily source of beauty within his buildings and lets the detailing influence the built form. He believes in creating architecture from the inside out; from the smallest detail of a piece of wood to the overall, final product.
He's awesome. Love it. Live it.

Ana Mernik: Looking Out Week 1

Pieta-Linda Auttila, an interior architect, designed this WISA Wooden Design Hotel in Finland in 2009. In it, she challenged the material qualities of wood, seen in the twisted form, and the play of light. As she herself put it: "That which is solid turns partly transparent, that which is strictly geometrical, organic."
Fun fact: The building is not used as a hotel, although it can potentially accommodate five to ten people.

Yasmeen Almuhanna: Looking Out (week 1)

Probably the coolest furniture I've come across in a while, these stools/benches are made of whole trunks of wood incorporated with melted aluminum. The texture of the wood is retained during the process of first burning its surface when pouring molten aluminum on it. Then the trunks are sectioned into square forms, which in turn are connected to whatever size frame one would please. The result is a beautiful line of coffee tables, night stands, benches...ext. 

Fah Kanjanavanit: Looking Out 1

This is an Ecological Children Activity and Education Center in Koh Kood, Thailand by dutch firm 24H architecture. The project is made entirely out of bamboo because the client/designers wanted to put an emphasis on environmental education. I found the usage of the material interesting because it created an interesting pattern and form.

Aileena Gray: Looking Out Week 1

David Esterly began this line of work when he was asked to recreate a Gibbons carving, which had been burned in a hotel fire (1980’s). He not only recreated the piece but also curated an exhibit based on all of Gibbons woodwork. Esterly now draws from Gibbon for most of his wood carvings as he tries to test and push the limits of limewood (linden wood) for himself and his clients.

 

 I’m obsessed with Esterly’s work. The material and subject mater create one of the coolest visual juxtapositions.(Click to see more of his work)

Kelsey Simpson: Looking Out Week 1

Japanese architect, Kengo Kuma just recently came out with this interior renovation in Osaka, Japan for a company specializing in food brochures and information. The place functions as a workplace and as a cafe.
Kengo layered plywood to create a topographic experience and easily create shelving, table tops, steps, and seating in a massive interior landscape.  This is the most recent project of Kengo Kuma Associates, but many of his previous works  demonstrate the awesome variety of ways to manipulate wood.


http://kkaa.co.jp/works/architecture-8256/