MIT is a very different kind of institute instead of becoming the

recipients of building industry culture. We can now change

building industry by the kinds of experiments we're doing in

school. MIT has a variety of departments that are so powerful

that they have the potential of radicalizing what we do in

design and in the architecture department, even the way that

we structured our curriculum around workshops and other

kinds of collaborations. In a way, foster and encourage this kind

of cross disciplinary platform. So we are situated perfectly for

the kinds of things that only mit can do.

The invention of human artifacts of any kind always consists of

three elements. The geometry, the process and the material

that constitute that artifact. It's very clear that new materials

engender new forms, and architectural design benefits from

addressing, applying new materials in an informed way.

The emerging materials group and the urban metabolism

group share a central interest in materials for the built

environment. Lately we've been working a great deal in the

area of foamed materials, especially foamed cements and

concretes.
“So typically, beam embedding is going to have the greatest

amount of stresses on the top and bottom so we can reduce

the amount of material on the interior of a beam. “

The work really tries to address that there's two main

paradigms throughout almost every industry. One paradigm is

what can you design. What can you compute or analyze? And

the other paradigm is what can you physically construct or

what can you build.

The work really tries to traverse all scale lengths. It tries to work

from the nano scale, which is traditionally where we see self

assembly in biological examples, chemical examples. And it

tries to bridge that and say, can we use this phenomenon a self

assembly as a new paradigm for building things at large scale.

We work with any type of material, synthetic or natural

materials and really try to design specific geometries that have

materials in mind, and when you design those two together,

they can respond to energy. And the energy sources can be

heat, shaking, gravity, pneumatics, electronics, so you can use

any type of energy and when you mix that with the geometry

and material properties and they can respond and they can
change state.

Primarily it will it will first be applied in extreme environments,

scenarios where it's difficult to build. The research and the

practice is really about cross disciplinary collaborations

between designers, scientists, Engineers, working on this

phenomenon of self assembly discovering where we find it

naturally, where we can use it synthetically and, trying to apply

that at all different scaling.

The focus of our work, at least at the smaller scale, at the scale

of art installations or retail. We leverage CNC fabrication

methods, but not as a way to exude their prowess necessarily,

but more as a way to help us get at a particular formal agenda.

We have installation called totems, which in a way is a kind of a

proto-architecture. Not quite architectural. Not quite

sculptural. But I think it offers a kind of proposition to each of

those discipline.

We do a lot of testing via 3d prints, a lot of formal

investigations for totem specifically happened in 3d prints. We

did maybe 30 to 50 3d prints of the totems as a way to

understand how the light and shadows were working. And how
best the anamorphic effects were working before we went to

the large format wire company.

In terms of collaborations, some of those happen here at mit.

And show the mirror, developing an installation now which is

an anecdote chamber, and the antique chamber uses industrial

felt, both on its exterior, and as a way to absorb sound on the

interior.

“I'm bringing a kind of disciplinary or formal or geometric

interest on the one hand, also a certain set of specialized

understandings of the behavior of these sheet materials on the

other.

So my architectural interest are really broad, but in terms of my

current research preoccupation, it's about material geometry,

specifically sheet shapes or sheet material geometries: how

they bend, stretched, stack, fold.

But obviously understanding sheet materials is really critical to

architecture. This is sort of a longstanding discourse on sheet

materials and architecture. In part because it's so ubiquitous in

conventional construction, so everything including plywood,

sheet metal, steel, aluminum, plastics, all of these have to deal

with the developable surface geometries, which is to say sheet

shapes generally. And so expanding the the total set of

understandings about sheet shapes is a totally and kind of

obviously worthwhile architectural undertaking.

These installations attempt to go jump from the scale of the

paper model to the scale of the architectural space at the very

least. “

Well, over the past 20 years, first as office star now is nada.

We've identified two or three areas of focus. The the first has

been to look at materials and their behavior, as a point of

departure for many of the architectural experiments we do. The

second area is to recognize that materials don't have an

endless limit. Everything comes in modules and sheets, in

blocks, in bricks, and that without aggregation, there's no way

of beginning to figure out how construction works in general.

So the detail of bringing things together as a point of

departure has been another central focus.

So this has been a kind of point of revolution for a range of

projects that we've researched and undertaken, some of which

are at the scale of a piece of furniture. Others that are at the

scale of a building. And others that are really at the scale of

urbanism.
One of the agendas of the studio is to create interactive

architectures for public space through design and technology.

And these projects can range and scale from the scale of the

body, such as the defensible dress project, which is a wearable

architecture which uses a micro controller and shape memory

alloys to defend your personal spaces. To very public scale

infrastructural projects such as our proposal for the audi urban

features initiative where we're speculating on high speed

regional infrastructure and transformations in the city around

issues of mobility for the year 2030.

It seems now more and more necessary that our environments

have to become smarter, more responsive and more flexible.

The way in which architecture is made needs to be completely

rethought if we're to go beyond bricks and mortar to engage

the challenges of the next century.

My work is an architect focuses on designing architecture and

urban scale interventions that engage the emerging

infrastructure of our time, were interested in how design

engages that mutability between energy and matter. When

materials generate energy or store, when materials are

dynamic and change state, exchange heat, produce light or

communicate information.

The challenge I think for the discipline of architecture today

isn't in digital fabrication, it's in material fabrication, in thinking

about what it means to be material today when we move

fluidly between digital and physical realms, how we use

materials and not waste them and how we form materials and

how we transport them.

If we're going to change the building industry and regenerate

an innovation based manufacturing segment in the United

States, then I think we need to do this from within practice

from working with the norms of the building industry, but not

settling for those norms, instead innovating to both accept and

transform those standard conditions.

I think we're pursuing several initiatives relating with

computational material.

Several different areas, dynamic interactivity is one of the type

of surface and we're driving that forward, imagining actively

allow plastic environments, if you like, it's a demonstration of

the power of computation come real time.

Then in the robotic manufacturing work, we are looking for,

power, information and material all coming together, with

control directly at the architects workplace. So we're

developing tools that allow architects within their native

software like rhino to pilot a powerful production machine like

cooker robot demonstrating I think what will be the the future

of manufacturing, which is sophisticated algorithms are

modeling the link directly to sophisticated manufacturing

machines, and allow both new efficiencies with new versatility,

new formal complexities.

I'm also frustrated by the slowness of the building industry to

innovate materially as fantastically, a fantastic amount of

research in material science that's better. And it's just dying to

to come, at a period where the sort of environmental concerns

becoming so enormous and the challenge of building, the

developing world, so extraordinary that turn, it necessary. Cad

cam meets material science like composites, I think is gonna

breathe on you. New life into the architectural and building

industries.