JWA and NADAAA‘s new architecture building at the University of Melbourne was selected as 1 of 10 projects for this year’s Progressive Architecture Awards. It is an incredible honor to be recognized among talent of such high caliber.
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Unable to find suitable stands for our architectural models, we commissioned ourselves to build a custom set of steel tables.
Each table has a simple frame of 1″ square tube. The steel is cut to length with double-bevels (yay for our new lubricated band saw), jigged square, and tacked together.
Resolving the corners of the implied box is the key detail of the design. The cleanly-executed welds are left unground and exposed.
The frames are topped with a raw 3/16″ plate and fitted with leveling/locking casters.
Our models, in the NADAAA gallery space.
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Ferran Adria and his crew of el Bulli were at MIT last week. Working with the master plan developed by Enric Ruiz Geli, the MIT team comprised of Anton Garcia Abril (our coordinator) and myself, along with Cristina Parreno, Lorena Bello, Kent Larson, Meejin Yoon, Neri Oxman, we developed a series of interventions on the el Bulli site, on the coast of southern Spain, in Cala Montjoi.
The Spanish government has approved plans for the development of the site, and the MIT team has contributed a series of installations, protocols, and spaces that speak to the ethos of el Bulli– framing the relationship between experimentation, art and the senses.
After the MIT charrette, Adria opened his exhibit at the Museum of Science with an extraordinary feast of gastronomical experiments.
The next steps are still to be developed. Stay tuned!
Top image: Ferran Adria En Construcion. El Palais Semanal. February 2014. p32-43.
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The Tongxian Gatehouse was built over ten years ago, some 30 minutes outside of Beijing. With the speed of expansion, the project now sits within the expanding footprint of the city, and what was a rural small town has become densified. With this advent, the rural roads have had to be widened. Given its heritage status, the Tongxian Gatehouse was moved back from the existing street about 60 ft.
This project is less than 2,000 square feet in size, but remains an important one in our work. It is maybe the most comprehensive proposal where we align the interest of geometry, program, form and tectonic unit into binding reciprocity, such that there emerges a more critical relationship between part and whole. Most notably, the main complex was never built. Another structure was built in its stead by Ai Wei Wei, who also served as our local expediter for the gatehouse.
For construction photos by Nathan Willock, click here.
Photos by Nathan Willock.
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Last week, we posted on the off-site fabrication of the panels for the coffered roof above the studio hall at the University of Melbourne. The first bay has been assembled and craned in place! Stay tuned for the full reveal.
JWA in collaboration with NADAAA. Photo credit: JWA
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Last Friday, NADAAA joined the rest of the Boston architecture community in celebrating the 3rd Annual BSA Design Awards. NADAAA won an Unbuilt Architecture Award for University of Toronto DFALD, Unbuilt Architecture Honorable Mention for New Hampshire Retreat and the People’s Choice Award for Macallen Building. Thank you to everyone that voted! More photos here.
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Archinect’s Working out of the Box series previously featured Moneta Ho, a classic MIT grad, who has taken her architectural knowledge base as a platform for other parallel practices beyond the realm of buildings. Along with other peers, such as Matthew Trimble (Radlab founder), Axel Kilian and Carl Lostritto, MIT continues to imagine alternative futures for architectural applications. Read more on Archinect!
Image via Archinect
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