Design Slam @ AU 2008

After walking away from a smoking mouse last Wednesday night, I find myself icing down my mousing arm and keyboard fingers, and still recovering, but that's right, I won the Design Slam! It was sure fun! Here's couple Renders of my design:

I have never been to Mies Van Der Rohe’s German Pavilion in Barcelona, but have a new appreciation for it after this awesome competition. The pavilion is very much about space, material and perception. It is a difficult challenge to respond to it with another pavilion while respecting its position in Architectural history. So instead of competing with it, I chose to deconstruct it in the neighboring landscape, providing opportunities to perceive its elements in a new way. This expression of the pavilion becomes more of a landscape than another pavilion, yet provides the same amenities of seating and shelter and vantage point, and also makes use of the existing reflecting pool at the opposite end. In looking at it now, the design almost reads as remnants of construction of the original pavilion, which is an unintentional bonus. The whole experience was a pleasure, albeit a little stressful, cranking out a design in the 20 minutes!

My presentations went well and the rest of the conference was fantastic. The Newport application was presented and should be showing up on Autodesk Labs soon. I can tell you that it is a cutting edge, real-time, visualization tool, that enables you to take your Revit models via FBX to new levels of experience. I'll talk more about this at the end of the month.

I've been toying with another thing, inspired by a project we are doing in Riyadh. A faceted design in Revit should be relatively easy correct? Well maybe not but what if you had a massing family that let you adjust the facets of your facade as you pleased?

These examples are a quick, proof of concept with the one on the left skinned with Generic wall and the one on the left partially skinned with a curtain system. The facets are adjustable in many ways but will always be cohesive. It is something that uses the void-hosting technique that Phil Read showed off a while back for curtain panels, but releasing it from the panel restrictions to be a more free-form or large scale building envelope that uses a portion of these facets to make up it's facade. This in combination with other masses could whip up a slew of design options for a faceted tower in Riyadh.

Cheers!