This project deals with the defamiliarization of conventional tectonics made possible through composite materials. The focus was to create strange scalar effects and mysterious joinery and seaming techniques, which create a sense of surprise and mystery not possible with mineral materials. The project explores how seams and components can begin to exhibit autonomy and avoid generalizing conditions often associated with construction systems by focusing on an exceptionally high degree of discreteness of components.

An integral part of this investigation was looking at ways of moving away from the homogenizing panelization promoted by parametric design. To achieve this, the possibilities of joints and seams to become jagged, near-figural, and even fake were examined. Joints and seams are no longer understood as the site of hardware, but rather of interlocking, friction-fitting, keying, and gluing.

The project challenges the idea of perceived enclosures vs. true enclosures. The idea of 3 dimensionality is questioned by reverse engineering an object through lines and grids. Through the translation of the grid and the augmentation of its nodes, new surfaces and forms are developed, leading towards a new underlying grid.

Mies’s Mansion House is taken as the object of experimentation for this process. Through a series of offset and rotational operations, lines achieved via grids of the Mandrel House are translated to create an augmented grid. The physical offset and rotation allows a parallel to escape 2D and enter 2 ½D. By virtue of mimicking an analog effect robotically, the physicality of an object in the form of a pen is then added to the new augmented grid. By adding the qualities of the pen, an analog implication is fed forward and superimposed with the digital process. All these effects blur the purity of the 3D form and decrease its legibility.

Material effects, through the analog processes create a physical rendering of the perception of the augmented grid, which then forms the enclosure

The project investigates coding/scripting as means of generating complex and articulate form. Python and grasshopper scripts are used to manipulate surface geometries to derive new articulations. These forms are further corrupted and divided into multiple geometries to produce new forms.

Various iterations that are produced in the process are then combined to generate a hybrid assemblage having different qualities.

The project recasts the role of nature and, more specifically, landscape in the context of contemporary architecture. In considering the possibilities of weird nature and weird landscape, the seminar posits that the imaging of landscape is a generative, rather than a representational tool. Using notions of fusion and fission, complex terrain defined by the interference between nature and artificiality was examined.

The process involves manipulation of the documentation of sites, objects, and spaces to engender multiple authenticities. Photographic and cinematographic techniques were combined with digital and analog modeling to produce a fusion between architectural form and forms germane to constructed natures. The design seeks to amplify latent environmental and atmospheric interactions in the interest of producing a landscape that has the capacity to integrate multiple concepts of nature.

The final proposal consists of discrete landscape objects, which act as constituents of an urban parkscape. The site was siutated on a portion of the LA River.

The project investigates the use of color as not only an aesthetic addition to the object but also as a physical and material entity that is inextricable from the object. Digital data is used as a starting point for the aesthetic approach, which is later translated into analog. Color is used as a material agency for translating the digital information onto the object by continuously registering data, resulting in a hybrid tectonic assemblage. Robotic precision is combined with the inherent entropic agency of the material to allow for both controlled and uncontrolled results. The generative processes discovered in this investigation allow for the production of new complex and ambivalent objects.

This project uses agent-based computational design as means of deriving various operations and functions that can help to create and mimic slime mold.

Processing is used as the core software for the design. Various functions are then scripted through a research-based analysis of the naturally occurring slime mold.

Through imitation of the natural phenomenon, an artificial environment is created where the slime mold can grow, find food, feed on it, avoid obstructions, and establish a network of connections based on the food source.

The project not only tries to mimic the slime mold, but also tries to create an artificial landscape having surreal qualities of an alien space.

The traditional role of skins in architecture has changed from being just practical folding devices for buildings to being more interactive binding instruments for producing improvements in urban life. The envelope now challenges the idea of what is inside/outside, natural/artificial, and public/private.

The envelope enables a multi-directional approach towards architecture specifically in the form of spherical buildings. Spherical envelopes are able to incorporate a wide variety of programs under a single roof. Moreover, they also challenge the concept of what is the facade, ground, or roof.

Owing to the shift in the politics of the envelope, this project focuses on challenging the edge condition in buildings. It manipulates the edge to examine the idea of what is inside vs. outside and what is real vs. virtual. The project does this by using simple linear patterns and playing with gradients in order to explore depths of surfaces. The result of the project reveals a structure that creates illusion of depth through manipulations of the facade and questions the boundary of the envelope.

In addition to the above, the building also serves as the new headquarters for the WHO in Geneva, Switzerland.