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NYIT SoAD Design Venice Biennale Installation "Informed Interscalar Fluidity”

NYIT SoAD Venice Biennale Installation
ARCH 502 THESIS STUDIO “Informed Interscalar Fluidity”
Assoc. Prof. Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa @pablo.lorenzo_eiroa, NYIT SoAD with 
STUDENTS: Andres Carcamo, Brianna Lopez, Peter Leonardi, Alex Pannichela, Ari Begun, Yemi Oluwayemi Oyewole, Karina Pena, Isaiah Miller, Ben Sather

 

The thesis studio is working on a full-scale interactive architecture installation for the “Time-Space-Existence” exhibition at the 2021 Venice Biennale curated by the Global Arts Foundation and the European Cultural Centre, to be hosted at Palazzo Bembo, Venice, Italy. The School of Architecture and Design at New York Institute of Technology is participating with an exhibition and installation entitled “Inter-scalar Fluidity” co-curated by Associate Professors Marcella Del Signore @marcelladelsi and Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa @pablo.lorenzo_eiroa.The exhibition and installation supported by Dean Maria R. Perbellini contribute to the Dean’s development of progressive design thinking and cross-disciplinary computational technologies and is made possible by the S-Lab Grant funding. This is an experimental Thesis studio focused on analyzing, displacing, and designing computational technologies as a pilot studio for the upcoming Master of Science in Architecture Computational Technologies co-developed by Dean Maria Perbellini, Associate Professor Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa, who will be its director, and Professor Tom Verebes. The architecture of the installation proposes cultural projects that engage with histories and theories of the discipline, from illusionistic perspective to universal computation. In this experimental studio, computational design was extended to robotic fabrication and interactivity, working through diverse computational technologies through non-linear feedback the physical actualizations, expanding dimensions between digital programming and physical actualizations. The studio extended computational design to include robotic automated simulations, robotic fabrication, and robotic interactivity in a fully immersive interactive space-environment.

Installation Credits: Associate Professor Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa with NYIT SoAD Thesis Students: Benjamin Sather, Brianna Lopez, Andres Carcamo, Alexandra Panichella, Isaiah Miller, Ari Begun, Oluwayemi Oyewole, Karina Pena, Peter Leonardi. 

Exhibition Credits: Associate Professor Marcella Del Signore and Visiting Professor Sergio Elizondo with NYIT SoAD Thesis Students: Bersibeth Pfel, Chenfei Cao, Stefan Eitnier, Harold Ramirez, Jairo Aguilar, Jimi Adeseun, Robert Nafie, Devora Schwartz, Zhuan Liang. Exhibition and Installation are supported by Dean Maria R. Perbellini and contribute to the Dean’s development of progressive design thinking and cross-disciplinary computational technologies. 

To learn more about the New York Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Design, visit their profile page or follow them on Instagram, @NYIT Architecture.

 

NYIT Grad, Daniel Horn, The Extreme-Weather Architect

(via QZ)

Daniel Horn, a fresh New York architecture graduate, has launched a global competition around a tricky design question—what is the most aesthetic way to raise the elevation of an entire neighborhood block by eight to 10 feet?

Call it extreme weather architecture. Horn, a 23-year-old graduate of the New York Institute of Technology (more on him below), is part of a boom in design competitions and urban reconstruction initiatives built around climate change. A rash of storms, drought and fires in recent years has ignited this contemplation of a new school of design cutting across cities and shorelines, homes and commercial buildings.

The emerging class of architecture suggests the onset of a global design-and-construction industry worth tens of billions of dollars in the coming years. Places such as the Netherlands have had to build around environmental- and weather-related challenges for years. But to the degree that extreme-weather architecture and construction moves to the mainstream, it would become one of the biggest infrastructure businesses on the planet, straddling US, Europe, Asia and Latin America. The cost of one recent set of recommendations alone, by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, responding to the ravages of Hurricane Sandy in October 2012, is estimated at $20 billion. Studies of the spending to come around the world range well into the hundreds of billions of dollars.

Already, there are signs of a big trend. In addition to Bloomberg’s initiative, Shaun Donovan, the US secretary of housing and urban development, on June 20 unveiled a competition called Rebuild By Design, whose winning concept will be built using public and private funds. On June 13, the American Institute of Architects and three other groups announced the Designing Recovery competition, which seeks new housing designs for storm-prone areas.

Horn’s contest is called the 3C Competition (for Comprehensive Coastal Communities). At college, Horn had a mind to carve out a career in environmentally minded architecture—as his undergraduate thesis, Horn did a redesign of Newtown Creek, an industrial hub between Brooklyn and Queens near the East River.

But when Hurricane Sandy struck, the industrial businesses lining the creek were hit hard by flooding, and Horn re-conceived his thesis. Now he incorporated the risk of massive flooding. In order to absorb a Category 3 storm surge (the level that Sandy reached at its peak), Horn equipped the building around which his thesis centered with walls resembling a canal lock. Floodwaters entering the lock would be channeled into adjacent wetlands.

Horn thinks that the idea would scale up. There could be “an entire connected system of these ‘bulkhead buildings,’ as I call them, working together as a public space system and a storm water filter system which would also alleviate the area in a strong storm surge,” Horn told Quartz.

As it happened, Mayor Bloomberg’s group looked at Newtown as well in his $20 billion plan for redesigning the city.

Bloomberg’s idea (Office of the New York Mayor)

Horn’s Newtown model (Courtesy of Daniel M. Horn)

Horn and a few college classmates also wondered why the New York area was generally unprepared for such weather. Extreme architecture clearly needed to move beyond conceptualized theses to a fundamental reshaping of the construction along the region’s shorelines.

But how? A single homeowner could elevate his own house on a high foundation, but that would do nothing to save the neighborhood, not to mention that it would look strange next to everything else around it. Horn’s group decided that a holistic approach was needed. That led to the competition.

The 3C Competition invites architects to select any community along the US northeast coast, and suggest a design for elevated homes in the context of the surrounding landscape and topography. The top three winners are to be announced in New York in October.

More than 210 teams from about 30 countries have entered so far, says Horn.

The field is young—Horn as yet has not found registered architects specializing in extreme weather work, but it is the talk of fresh graduates and architecture students. And it is they who will lead the way.


Follow Daniel Horn on Twitter and visit the NYIT profile page for more info on their programs.