Book Cover: Good Deeds Good DesignArchitecture for the other 99%

Bryan Bell is co-founder of Design Corps in Raleigh, N.C., As architect and activist, Bell is part of a growing movement of practitioners who bring a social mission to architecture by working with communities and populations that do not traditionally have access to architects. The goal of this movement is to make custom design both affordable and culturally expressive for these groups.

Bell’s projects have included innovative solutions and designs for migrant worker housing in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia. His work has been featured in The New York Times, Metropolis Magazine, Home and Garden Television, Biography and Hope magazine. Bell is the editor of Good Deeds, Good Design: Community Service through Architecture, a collection of essays by architects working in the non-profit sector that was released by the Princeton Architectural Press in 2003.

click to enlarge; image from buildingstudio.netRecent Work of the buildingstudio

buildingstudio was founded by Coleman Coker in 1999 after a thirteen year partnership with Samuel Mockbee as Mockbee/Coker Architects. He is a fellow of the American Academy in Rome and a Loeb Fellow in Advanced Environmental Studies at Harvard University Graduate School of Design. He received his MFA from the Memphis College of Art and currently serves on its Board of Trustees as the Academic Affairs Chair.

buildingstudio is a small collaborative firm focusing on inventive and imaginative work, regularly acknowledged for its design excellence. It was founded with two principles in mind: First, to blur the boundaries between architecture, art, craft and thinking. Rather than separate disciplines, buildingstudio treats each as essential to the larger realm of building. And coupled with this, buildingstudio’s work explores built presence grounded in the experience of the real world, building as realized through a process of critical reflection. As such, their goal is to develop an ongoing ontological investigation where the meaning of presence is fundamental. Acknowledging this is primary. The skill gained through building fuels innovation and discovery which enlivens the design process. With these in the forefront buildingstudio works to develop the kind of built environment that heightens one’s experience of being in the world.

buildingstudio has designed projects from the Gulf Coast of the United States to the Alaska’s Cook Inlet, as well as having developed projects in Russia and Singapore. Their work has been highlighted in large-scale exhibitions at locations such as the Wexner Center for the Visual Arts, MoMA in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Contemporary Art. Their work has also been shown at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C.

Coker is former director of the Memphis Center of Architecture, a collaborative program of design open to advanced architecture students in the region and sponsored by the University of Tennessee and the University of Arkansas. He has held the E. Fay Jones Chair in Architecture at the University of Arkansas and is the current Favrot Chair at Tulane University School of Architecture.

Digital Craft and 290 Mulberry St., Manhattan

SHoP Architects has established a reputation for progressive design that combines a novel approach to technology with innovative building delivery methods. Early projects, such as Dunescape for PS1 and the Camera Obscura for Mitchell Park, simultaneously employed high-tech (digital modeling and fabrication) and low-tech (full-scale templates) approaches to design and construction that stretched the limits of a small architectural practice.

These projects were executed quickly, cheaply, and by whatever means necessary. As the firm has grown and projects have increased in scale and complexity, their approach to technology, information management, and project execution has evolved along with the practice. The firm has transitioned from a representational to an informational approach to modeling and documentation, opening new opportunities and posing new challenges to the ways that projects are designed, staffed, managed, and built. Steven Sanderson has been instrumental in guiding this change. He will present 290 Mulberry Street, a residential project currently under construction in Manhattan, as an in-depth case study of how the office is currently managing this transition. By discussing both the successes and failures of this process, the presentation aims to create a venue for discussing issues concerning integrated design and construction technologies within creative environments and their impact upon the design and execution of exceptional architecture.

Imagining Architecture

excerpt from johnandersonstudio.com

Based in the Champlain Valley of Vermont, John Anderson Studio produces a variety of fine art, architectural murals and custom art tables, while also taking on creatively challenging residential architecture projects and product design work.

Please be our guest as Norwich University and the College of Architecture and Art gather in the Chaplin Hall Gallery to hear John Anderson speak to us on how we might imagine architecture.

A conceptual design from johnandersonstudio.com

click to enlarge

excerpt from Resonant Frequency:

We use them [drawings] to tell the story of our ideas. We are often trying to convince others that our ideas make sense, and will add value to a certain condition, or solve a relevant problem. We show active use of our ideas by people, in a place or setting. To do so, we need narrative, motion, exaggeration, etc., to make our potentially lifeless drawing vital — it’s got to ‘pop’ off the page.

Gravia is an LED-lit floorlamp energized by people. It has nothing whatsoever to do with this excerpt on drawing, but it was designed by Clay and it's cool looking. Click to enlarge, slightly.

What happens when our ideas need help in generation? What drawings do we use when our field is evolving, and our paradigms are changing? In this sense, the comic art methods of narrative, motion, etc., seem to fail in allowing study of an idea or concept as abstract as a paradigm shift. Perhaps we start to understand the ideas themselves as an exaggerated, in-your- face, slammed-to-the-walls 2-point perspective with maximum contrast and non-copy-blue pencil construction lines. Exaggeration, caricature, gesture, may not be necessary, and worse, may cloud the exploration of such abstract ideas.

Designers have many different ways of understanding and using the tool of graphic communication in various media. Isometric, axonometric, diagramatic, sections, plans, elevations, watercolor renderings... Some of these drawings are used to explain how an object is to be built, or how it was built. These drawings have actual physical outcomes in many cases. Usually, we give these drawings to other people that are in charge of making the molds for our plastic bits and pieces in the thousands and millions.

On the other hand, some of our drawings are used to explain how an object is conceived, or are used as tools within the process of conception. We usually give these to each other to create a dialogue about our ideas. We use them to solicit feedback. And they help our ideas get smarter.

Smart ideas must be queried, opened for dialogue, investigated — studied even. However, I think we may begin to confuse the utility of these different drawing methods. Is my good idea getting killed by my killer drawings? Are yours? Maybe some ways we draw will help us create a more powerful definition of the things we make. Maybe by investigating our ideas through drawing, rather than just trying to animate them, we can answer questions that bigger systems ask us. Design can solve big problems, and answer very difficult questions if we let it. So, are we just telling a story, or can we use drawings to investigate critical topics; to answer big questions?

click to enlargeNatural Building Systems in the Northeast

Ben Graham collaborates on projects that integrate nature and culture toward sustainable community living solutions. As founder of Natural Design / Build, Ben is devoted to provoking interest in low-impact construction techniques. One of the most accessible projects can be seen on RT. 14, east of Montpelier, Vermont. The Orchard Valley Waldorf School is a beautiful strawbale one-room school.

Ben is a Graduate of Architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design, earned his design certificate from the Permaculture Institute of Britaina, completed community studies at the Findhorn Foundation (the largest ecovillage and intentional community in the United Kingdom), and is currently a member of the Plainfield Planning Commission, as well as co-founder of the non-profit organization Spiral Works Center for Integration in Plainfield, VT.