Location: Atlanta, Georgia
Year: 2015
Stealth:
n.
1. The act of moving, proceeding, or acting in a covert way.
2. The quality or characteristic of being furtive or covert.
3. Archaic The act of stealing.
adj.
1. Not disclosing one's true ideology, affiliations, or positions: a stealth candidate.
2. Having or providing the ability to prevent detection by radar: a stealth bomber; stealth technology.
Stealth is a spatial work of cognition, illusion, and transformation. The sculpture acts as an urban instrument binding neighboring spaces through visual corridors. The continuously folded form creates an urban portal connecting specific locations in the neighboring environment through a series of interlocking anamorphic projections of pure geometric figures. The double cube and the elongated hexagon are perceptible as pure figures only from The Rich Plaza (Woodruff Arts Center) and from the Peachtree Street approach via 15th Street. The sculpture subtly transforms itself, expanding and collapsing in-between two dimensional figure and three dimensional form as viewers move toward, around and through the work. Materially the piece is alchemical, rendering reinforced concrete as an indistinguishable gray matter of light, shadow, and sensually smooth fluid mass.
Project Team:
Tristan Al-Haddad
Graham Carswell
Carlos Castillo
Nick Cusimano
Rachel Dickey
Helena Kang
James Keane
Zeynep Keskin
Anh Luc
Lindsay Reyna
Jaemoon Rhee
Miriam Robinson
Sky Rockit
Jungchan Yee
Shaowen Zhang
Client: Cousins Properties
Structural Engineer: Jim Case | Uzun+Case
Concrete Contractor: Jason Adams | Sinclair Group
Concrete Supplier: Thomas Concrete
Special Thanks to CRSI, NOVA Commercial Interiors, DEX Industries, Montagne Design/Build, and Clarke Color
Location: Valparaiso, Chile
Year: 2009
Body Park is an experimental prototype created with a group of graduate students during a Fulbright Fellowship at the Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria in Valparraiso, Chile. The structure explores weaving and lamination techniques in thin wood veneers. The material characteristics of wood [tension, compression, torsion, flexure] were explored and exploited in the development of a flexible structural module which was used in the design of a 'Body-Land-Scape' were ground and body are symbiotically bound.
Project Team: Fernanda Gutierrez & Alejandro Munoz
Location: Valparaiso, Chile
Year: 2009
Botterfold is an experimental prototype created with a group of graduate students during a Fulbright Fellowship at the Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria in Valparraiso, Chile. The structure explores deployment of catenary vaults created through the aggregation of a variable aperture module which were designed and fabricated through techniques of folding and pinning. The structure is a lightweight freestanding catenary vault at the edge of the Pacific Ocean over the main stair entry into the University. Bathed in the late oceanic sunsets the optical characteristics of the structure create an ephemeral effect of sparkle evoques its neighbor, the sea.
Project Team: Inaki Vega, Carlos Castro Gonzalez, & Fernanda Gutierrez
Year: 2008
Material study into alchemical transformations of hard matter into a visually soft medium in suspended concrete and steel.
Location: Boston, Massachusetts
Year: 2011
Ruptures in Running Bond transforms the existing apertures in the brick walls of the Mills Gallery at the Boston Center for the Arts into a serious of modulated penetrations which transform the ‘southern exposure’ of the building into a series of ‘light vectors’, pulling the natural light through the wall and into the space during the day and drawing artificial light out of the gallery and into the city at night.
Project Team: Allison Isaacs & Asa Martin
Location: Atlanta, Georgia
Year: 2011
Working with a group of graduate and undergraduate students in the School of Architecture at Georgia Tech, The Geometer is an urban intervention directly on the Atlanta Beltline which promotes both physical and visual relationships as a through conditions for users of the corridor and as a visual link, or stitch, between the Beltline and the adjacent neighborhoods of Ansley Park and Ansley Mall. The structure transforms the humblest of materials, stud grade 2x4's, into an inticately woven self-supporting lattice-work through the use of parametric modeling and 5-Axis CNC technology. The multi-order twisting hexagonal geometry modulates light and view for users while creating a visual landmark on the Beltline from key points in the environment.
Project Team: Wade Nolan, Alexandra Barletta, Steve Cochoff, & Paul Judin
Location: Atlanta, Georgia
Date: 2006
Space Index is a manifold project dealing simultaneously with conceptual and perceptual issues while also exploring question of medium and operations. It is through explorations in materials and techniques that issue of perception, interpretation, and interaction are developed and refined from the bottom up.
As a perceptual piece the work is about the active interaction between the user and the work [cause/effect and user agency]. The original piece was created as a temporary installation at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia. Visitors to the museum were allowed, in fact encouraged, to engage the piece directly and physically; at once challenging notions of art as precious, art as static, art as exclusive while simultaneously molding the spatial cognition of the users/players in the space, ie interactive spatial art [sculpture]. The piece is dynamic and reactive. As users [or environments] touch the piece the forces create a loose dance and pulsation within the piece, thus creating a direct cause and effect context of interaction.
Project Team: Dan Nemec & Russell Gentry
Location: Atlanta, Georgia
Year: 2011
Working with a group of graduate and undergraduate students in the School of Architecture at Georgia Tech, HYPARail is an urban inter vention directly on the Atlanta Beltline which promotes both physical and visual relationships as a through conditions for users of the corridor and as a visual link between the Beltline and the adjacent neighborhoods in the West End. The project uses a simple material, Southern Yellow Pine, in combination with parametric modeling technologies and 5-Axis CNC machining to transform site, material, form, and experience on the Beltline. The Hyperbolic Paraboloidal morphology used in the design allows for ground to peel away into surface and reveal a trace of the unlaying order of rail ties below.
Project Team: Taylor Pitelka & Jessica Hardin-Steele
Location: Atlanta, Georgia
Year: 2012
Möbius is a material-morphological experimental construct investigating concepts of continuity and transformation in the landscape. The structure acts as a spatial threshold, or portal of passage in the environment while also producing a sensuous formal experience both in terms of haptic and visual aesthetics. The structure was designed and engineered using advanced parametric modeling technology allowing for study of continuous variation in form with real-time material feedback loops informing aesthetic decisions, the rules of the game as active design collaborators so to speak. The internal plywood structure was fabricated using a Computer Numerically Controlled (CNC) 5-Axis router allowing for efficiency and complexity to converge at protocol. The Corian skin was also CNC fabricated and thermoformed to the internal plywood frame.
Project Team: Gavin Johns, Luke Wilkinson, Rachel Dickey, & Valerie Bolen
Location: Dallas, Texas
Year: 2013
Allotrope Exi is fundamentally about movement, change, transformation and flux; and in this way it is an analog to the city itself. It is understood to be an essential element that exists in various allotropic configurations that react to and engage the formal gestures of the building and initiate a dialog with various works of art and architecture throughout the arts district such as the Wyly Theater, sculptures by Di Suvero and Serra, and the Perot Museum by Thom Mayne. It sets up a series of interior and exterior spaces and carefully frames perspectival views that weave the public space of the city to the public space of the building almost as it if were a cinematic construct. For me, the piece is about creating a sculpture that engages both the Dallas arts district and the building and creates a bond and interplay between the two. The banded formal language of the work splits and conjoins, folds and twists, opens and closes as it is woven throughout the lobbies and the exterior plazas. The piece moves and transforms itself visually as viewers change their spatial relationship t o it.
Project Team: Rachel Dickey
Location: Atlanta, Georgia
Year: 2009
Many contemporary artist and architects are rethinking how to conceive and construct space in new [or perhaps old] ways in order to produce new readings of space and matter. iCave is an in-situ exploration into the perception of other formative constructs; spaces of movement, flux, life, and discovery. First spaces of the womb, the cave, the termite nest, the ant colony, the bee hive, or many other such structures are all spaces which create a very different type of spatial cognition for the inhabitant than that of contemporary avoided Euclide an space.
Project Team: Allison Isaacs, Asa Martin, & Sharon Al-Haddad
Location: Atlanta, Georgia
Year: 2009
MRISP )(Prism inflected)( is a spatial installation of light, air, and crystalline matter that attempts to materialize the immaterial and construct, or reconstruct, an immersive experiential space of emergent light-matter within which the body can exist. In this way the piece attempts to be both figure and field, seen as figural composition from without and dynamic experiential field from within. The project is both generic and specific, dealing with issues of physics, perception, cognition and habitation simultaneously. The generic condition of the electrical color grid is transformed into a situated condition through the transformation of the platonic square into a deformed trapezoid through a topological remapping of points and lines based on the four dominate trees of the front yard at the Robinson-Rhodes mansion, in this way responding to the site and embodying global ideas through a local intervention.
Project Team: Spencer Hudson
Location: Atlanta, Georgia
Year: 2012
Pucker Up is a playful wall relief in Corian exploring the effect of slight variation in anthropomorphic form on perception and affect.
Project Team: Rachel Dickey & Valerie Bolen
Location: Atlanta, Georgia
Year: 2006
Topological Deformations was a collaborative research project with Nader Tehrani and a group of graduate students at Georgia Tech exploring the potential of lowmodulus, high-strength polymeric materials combined with digital design and fabrication technologies in order to develop a topologically defined flexible structural system.
Project Team: Brandon Clifford, Lorraine Ong, Mohammed Mohsen, & Nadir Tehrani
Year: 2007
ThickNest is fundamentally a study on spatial scale, perception and the transformation of light and matter. Simply consider the cognition of ants, termites, and beavers. How does it differ from that of humans?
Project Team: Tim Frank
Location: Savannah, Georgia
Year: 2012
Location: San Antonio, Texas
Year: 2010
Digital technologies are nearly ubiquitous in today’s AEC industry however they have had little transformative impact on masonry design or construction. Although masonry has one of the oldest and richest histories of application in the built environment it is too often seen as a conventional material with limited possibilities in today’s design world of ever increasing complexity. The reality is, however, that with the development of proper methodologies and protocols masonry is one of the most exciting materials to be considered through the lens of digital technologies in design and construction.
This research broadly considers the question of new modes of linking the representation of a structure to the actual process of physical making through advanced parametric CAD and digital construction technologies. This approach implies the refinement of the traditionally understood idea of CAD/CAM, or digital manufacturing, and begins to formulate a new direction of Digitally Augmented Making [DAM] paradigms, or in this case Digitally Augmented Masonry, where anthropological design and fabrication activities are enhanced through digital means.
Project Team: Russell Gentry & Andres Cavieres
Location: Valparaiso, Chile
Year: 2009
In order to rethink how a New Minaret might be understood within contemporary Chilean society one must consider the cultural function of such a typology within the contemporary paradigm. Today digital technologies have fundamentally changed the way in which people live and communicate. These numeric infrastructures have also changed the way in which space operates as a cultural phenomenon. It has been argued that physical space is no longer relevant as the world becomes fully virtualized via digital networks. In this argument the web is the new Suk, Agora, and Plaza. This proposal argues that a new type of Minaret would in fact challenge this assumption by acting again as a social ‘collector ’. In this instance the space works as a social collector capable of operating both locally as a physical collector of people, and globally as a virtual collector of information; in this way cr eating a ne w type of h ybrid public space, both physical and virtual. The space will act as a gift from the Arab community in Valparaiso to create a new space for the production of diverse future communities.
Project Team: Pablo Silva
Location: Atlanta, Georgia
Year: 2011
The Hypostyle hall as an ancient spatial typology blurs the bounds between solid and void, between figure and ground. This spatial typology found in the ancient world of both the occident and orient is fundamentally decadent, luxurious, hedonistic; exhibiting an exuberance of material and form at the service of phenomenal experience and perceptive pleasures. The Hypostyle installation plays off the historical typology creating an immersive environment of light, body, and matter. The piece is composed of 16 unique translucent columns lit from within. The geometry of each column is produced from a single conic morphology used to generate 32 elliptical sections hung in space. Thus producing difference from sameness as an anthropomorphic analog to the bodies that occupy the space created by the columnar configuration.
Project Team: Scott Kittle & Allison Isaacs
Location: Atlanta, Georgia
Year: 2005
The Patterns + Profiles project is an exercise in system design that allows for high degrees of design variability through both local surface geometry created by thermoforming and through global modular configurations generated through folding. In other words, by designing a formal fabrication vocabulary many variations can be produced as unique modules that can be aggragated to create a customized self-supporting curtain wall system that is both unitized and structural.
Project Team: Maita Rivas, Marco Nicotera, & Monica Ponce de Leon
Location: Atlanta, Georgia
Year: 2010
Mediated Infrastructure is a proposal for a new type of integrated public space and landscape art working from the found condition of the Atlanta Beltline towards a project which is understood as an art infrastructure meant to serve as a catalytic provocateur for future generations of artist and citizens to actively create and engage society in the public realm. The proposal is considered to be field, figure, and framework functioning simultaneously as a new public space, a figural reference to the powerful history of the site, and acting as an infrastructural system within which future artist will be encouraged to propose ephemeral interventions as a means of constantly rethinking and reactivating the space. Public space and public art are fused into a singular living construct. Art is to be fully engaged, experienced, and lived in rather than being passively viewed as object, left to be removed by the next generation.
Project Team: Perkins + Will
Location: Atlanta, Georgia
Year: 2011
Working with a group of graduate and undergraduate students in the School of Architecture at Georgia Tech, Vaulted Voronoi is an urban intervention directly on the Atlanta Beltline which creates a threshold condition for users of the corridor and acts as a visual link between the Beltline and the adjacent neighborhoods and high usage transportation corridors of Dekalb Avenue and the East/West rail line of MARTA. Using projective geometry and irregular tessalations the project creates a variable structural module to be economically produced in 1/2" CDX plywood. This variability produces a range of lighting conditions, shadow plays, and visual effects as one passes from Dekalb Avenue onto the Beltline through this temporal passage.
Project Team: Lena Klein, Scott Kittle, Chuck Smith, & Taylor Walters
Location: New York, New York
Year: 2010
The Liquid Wall project is an advanced prototype completed in colloboration with RFR Engineers in Paris and Lafarge in the production of custom unitized cladding systems in Ultra-High Performance Concrete. Conceived as a panelized system, the frame is made of two forms of Ductal, an ultra-highperformance concrete. Digital modeling and CNC milling at Georgia Tech created undulating flexible molds in which the concrete was set. Triple glazing reduces acoustic transmission while providing high thermal performance, natural day lighting , and transparency. The glazing , designed as replaceable, repairable panels, is installed directly into the concrete frame. Within spandrel cassette panels, nonfreezing liquids flow and capture solar energy that is transmitted for use as radiant heat, domestic hot water production, and dehumidification of ventilation systems. The heat recovery systems are optimized to function in both winter and summer. Thermal performance is considered exceptional for this unified curtain wall system due to the elimination of metal units bridging the exterior and interior.
Project Team: Peter Arbour, Kelly Henry, Andres Cavieres, Rob del Vento, Clemente Duroselle, & Minh Nguyen
Location: Atlanta, Georgia
Year: 2008
Virtual Doubling attempts to create a mapping of virtual ruptures onto and into physical space by creating spatial ‘doublings’ of the physical-material space and the metaspace of virtuality and perception through a strategically positioned incision. After studying the site and finding existing physical conditions that lent themselves to being transformed into spaces of virtual doubling; spaces of contemplation, cognition, and identity, the piece was designed and constructed to act as a neighborhood temple for local residents and other users through the city. This spatial montage is meant to produce an awareness of the simultaneous schizophrenic schism and co-dependency between the physical and the virtual; the social and the personal.
Project Team: Curtis Aimes, Wes Graham, Stuart Keller, & Asa Martin
Location: Atlanta, Georgia
Year: 2011
Point Cloud is an emersive one night installation of light, body, and ephemeral space.
Project Team: Allison Isaacs
Year; 2006
The objective of this research is to develop a method, from the designer’s point of view, for using the embodied specialized knowledge of Finite Element Analysis [FEA] software to study the behavior of materials, geometries, and configurations in order to create an iterative design feedback loop that uses structural performance as a primary evaluation criteria and point of departure for generating and refining complex formo-techtonic configurations of form-active surfaces while ensuring constructability, improved structural performance, and syntactic consistency. Instead of the 2-dimensional [planar] technology which drove modernist analysis towards the structural hyper-rationality of the trabeated system, this new process should compile and synthesize computational speed, mathematic principles, mechanical knowledge, and material logics within a digital 3-dimensional [spatial] analytical environment in order to realize a new paradigm of constructible complex surface structures. The research focuses on the development of structural performance criteria for form-active structures and interoperability techniques/protocols between advanced CAD systems and advanced structural analysis systems in order to create a fluid design + analysis process of generating and engineering complex form-active designs. In other words, the research focuses on the development of intricately designed, geometrically complex, and materially sophisticated structural skins.
Location: New York, New York
Date: 2007
The research into custom precast concrete is based on an invariant topological model that can be directly translated to an equivalent ‘topological mold’. conceptually, the systems would allow for the production of continuous geometric variations from a single reconfigurable mold, thus reducing the amount of material and energy consumption required to produce unique objects… not to mention cost. The internal logic of each system gives way to the final design through a kind of bottom up approach t o design…i.e., ‘what does the module want to be’, and in how many ways can it be deployed in order to ‘commodiously ’ adapt to its context, both physical, social, and psychological. Ultra-High Performance Steel Fiber Reinforced Concrete was selected as a material for investigation due to its ability to be easily cast into complex molds without traditional steel reinforcing. This material has the potential to form very thin structural sections of both synclastic and anticlastic doubly curved surfaces in a very economical mode leading the way to the ubiquitous production of geometric complexity without high material/energy costs.
Project Team: Ted Urich, Vishwadeep Deo, Chad Stacy, Lorraine Ong
Location: Atlanta, Georgia
Year: 2013
Year: 2012
Location: Atlanta, Georgia
Year: 2012
Project Team: Open Ended Group, Gil Weinberg, Scott Kittle, Racel Williams, Jay Clark
Year: 2012
Location: Atlanta, Georgia
Year: 2012
Location: Atlanta, Georgia
Year: 2010
Location: Atlanta, Georgia
Year: 2008
Location: Memphis, Tennessee
Year: 2005
Location: Chattanooga, Tennessee
Year: 2004
Location: Chattanooga, Tennessee
Year: 2004
Year: 2003
Year: 2011
Year: 2003
Year: 2002
Year: 2003
Location: Genova, Italy
Year: 2003
Location: Atlanta, Georgia
Year: 2002
Conceptual hotel for midtown Atlanta design specifically to amplify the phenomena of dreaming. Chance and choice become concepts which inform the circulation circuitry of the building.
Location: Rouen, France
Year: 2001
Location: Paris, France
Year: 2000
Location: Paris, France
Year: 2000
Location: Atlanta, Georgia
Year: 1999
Location: Atlanta, Georgia
Year; 1998
Year: 2003
Location: Atlanta, Georgia
Date: 2012
