petebooth[iaac]

During the easter break i headed to Madrid for four days with gogo, and we had a blast. A selection of the photos are below, but you can see the entire set here.

Friday nightsaw IaaC host a guest lecture by Massimiliano Fuksas which was a pretty amazing 90 minutes of presntation. He spoke for almost 20 minutes about the human understanding of archtiecture, culture, life and the world, before he even showed a slide. The archtiectural component of the presentation was pretty dense, showing selected projects from the last 25 years. Highlights included the Ferrari Research Centre and the New Milan Fair.

As I was not familiar with a lot of his work, it was a great insight into a huge catalouge of buildings that seemed to prempt a sigificant number of current architects. He often stated that he had started doing diferent styles in the past and now they were definately not new, guiding us to create a new form and agenda for future architecture.

Over the weekend i had the chance to visit a few of the architectural highlights of Barcelona, as Ben had a friend over from Australia and it gave us an excuse to enjoy the sunshine. It was also a chance to give my spiffy new DSLR camera a whirl. It’s a Nikon D200 with a 18-200 VR lens, very nice and it take a mean photograph.

the forum, Hde&M

three of Hde&M’s lesser known buildings

forum auditorium park, FOA

barcelona pavilion, Mies Van der Rohe

barcelona pavilion, Mies Van der Rohe

torre agbar, jean nouvel

torre agbar, jean nouvel

our sub-group has uploaded our mapping work for this week.
view the post here

IaacC hosted an extremely interesting video conference lecture by Stephen Wolfram, of Wolfram Research and Mathematica fame. Unintentionally his lecture covered a huge range of examples about the underlining complexity in very simply systems, it wasn’t until the end that he was informed that our studio assignment was to design a tree.

The content posed many question as to how mathematical technology can be applied in everyday lif,e as well as an architectural scenario. I was quite inspired by the fact that, generally speaking, natural complexity is very simple. It give me hope that maybe I can develop completely complex system, based entirely on my simple life of sleeping, eating, speaking to people in Australia and iaac. I can only hope.

Find out more about Stephen Wolfram here, his profile on wikipedia here and wolfram research here.

The main newspaper in southern Tasmania, the mercury, is running a feature on the top houses in Tasmania that gets updated daily. There are four on the list at the moment, and all of them are great houses that I have visited.

check out the list here, and the photos here

The Guardian newspaper of England is running a series on ‘Great Modern Buildings’. It’s quite interesting and on Wednesday 10th October they had an article on Gaudi’s Casa Milar, rating it as number 4.
Check the article out here.

The buildings in order of ranking are as follows:
1. Empire State Building
2. Guggenheim Bilbao
3. Pompidou Centre
4. Casa Milar
5. Jewish Museum, Berlin
6. Eden Project
7. Swiss Re Building (The Gherkin)

Concierge.com has an interesting article about who it classes as the most visionary architects in the world, along with which of their buildings are their claim to fame and also on the horizon. It’s a bit of predictable coffee table list of names and buildings, but they make a few interesting comments on the work. It’s worth a quick read, but don’t loose any sleep over it. Check it out here.

Last night saw IaaC host the first lecture in the digital series, by Neil Leach. I will have to say that I was very looking forward to this lecture, as many of his books are among what i consider to be seminal architectural texts. One of them even convinced me that returning to utas to complete my professional degree was a good thing, so I guess that he has a lot to answer for.
He showed a heap of material from an exhibition that he recently curated, including professional work and student work that looked better than a lot of professional work! The main focus of the lecture was to define the term ‘Digital Tectonics’ where it came from, how it has changed and where it is going.
It was possible the best lecture that I’ve seen and I can hardly wait to put my name down for his seminar in third semester.

I also just found a great interview on archinect.com with Neil Denari, who apart from building the occasional building and writing lots, used to be the director at sci-arc. Interesting stuff.