Thesis Presentation

We would like to invite everyone to attend our final thesis presentation this Thursday April 15th at 1:45 – 4:00pm in the College of Architecture and Planning’s first floor gallery. The presentation will cover our entire body of thesis work / research, and will be followed by an open discussion. The exhibit of our work will remain on display in the gallery until May 10th.

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What is PROJECTiONE: We are a collective of four designers/fabricators/students pursuing a common question. Our project is based on a shared love of making, a pull towards new understandings of technology and a unique and uncommon design aesthetic.

We have reached outside of the University through our website PROJECTiONE.com creating a network of readers who have followed our project as it has developed. The website has helped to brand PROJECTiONE as its own entity. PROJECTiONE.com is a reflection of our process. We take pride in highlighting our details, methods and finished work. We feel that our design is strengthened through the bold and strong communication of its history.

Logistics: We work as a collective. Our design/fabrication/branding decisions are based on argumentation and compromise as any good partnership must be. However we have narrowed down our decision-making to three types: logical argumentation, passionate pursuit, and collective gut reaction. There are times when a reasoned argument is necessary to establish why a certain decision should be made and it takes a reasoned ear to hear it. At other times a member of the collective will pursue a course on his/her own to a point which the collective may latch on to or pull against. And finally but most infrequently a member will make a suggestion which is immediately agreed upon by all members of PROJECTiONE. There is no one way to document all the decisions that go into any one project and we therefore share all credit for each design detail and interactive experience. Though we have various strengths approaches to design, we are partners in the pursuit of our common goal.

Status: There is a failure in modern theory and practice to address the increasing availability of digital tools. The current theory of digital fabrication is focused predominantly on the new tools of making, CNC machines, rapid prototyping technology and BIM and parametric modeling software. We believe that these tools allow for a shift in the methods of an informed practice but do not and cannot exist without a tangible relation to the human aspect of design and making, what we call the analog. Secondly there is a growing recognition by schools and theorists that interactive architecture is inevitable and though slow to adapt, architecture will need to address the proliferation of augmented reality and reactive systems. These have become accepted across our society and the expectation is clear that our buildings must respond to environmental (background/ambient) and human (foreground/direct) stimuli.

Many projects highlighted in periodicals and in academic journals are based on intangible software tools rather than the tangible constraints of making. It has been argued that CNC equipment has allowed for the development of unique components such as contoured blobs and therefore these projects do consider the realities of fabrication. We feel that such an approach is limited and forces the irrelevant digital form into a wasteful object, and is ignorant to the details which are essential to architecture’s success.

Our project is engaged in the question of how digital and analog methods reinforce one another in support of a practice constrained by the realities of making.

Arc: Through a series of projects, explorations and interventions PROJECTiONE investigated this question. This broad spectrum of approaches enabled a varied and diverse understanding. We started the year with an intervention in an exhibition space, performed a series of interviews with top designers and fabricators in New York City, developed product scale designs and pursued full-scale client based products. Each project can be viewed uniquely but collectively it defines the arc of our searching.

Our first project Projection was an opportunity to reflect on how we worked with the digital and analog tools at our disposal. This was an introspective process allowing us to focus very specifically on how and why we made design decisions using a laser cut, three-axis CNC mill and steel fabrication equipment. In order to gain a broader perspective of how practitioners address these issues we met with a group of designers and fabricators in New York City. The interviews that we undertook during that trip reinforced our understanding of how small digitally savvy practices address making. In reflection it became clear that our approach required us to be serious fabricators and serious designers, a feat few of the firms have achieved.

We discovered that a practice grounded in making must straddle the threshold between design and fabrication but also between analog and digital. Based on internal reflection and an understanding of our contemporaries’ position, we moved forward with several small-scale products. Each of these projects highlights a unique understanding of the boundaries between analog and digital and was also an exploration into how our practice can and must embrace material explorations and research.

Finally we moved into the realm of large scale client based projects. This set of projects gave us some insight into the challenges of adapting our methods and practices to the needs and requirements created by a client. Again each project addresses our question on multiple scales. How can a large scale project become aesthetically unique using the analog and digital tools available? How can a client’s design and performance requirements align with our own interests in the conversation between analog and digital? And how can this project become a serious attempt at creating a sustainable practice that addresses these pressing issues?

In educating our clients we were able to reflect on these questions. We have learned the value of clearly conveying our ideals to the clients through these projects. The evidence of our success and failure in answering these questions is in the documentation of our process through video, images, models, and contracts.

Reflect: This project has been most valuable not because we have seen these projects in their completion but we see ourselves in each detail. We committed ourselves to each decision and process from design to fabrication and understand that our value does not lie in the sum of our projects but the sum of our experiences.

This is PROJECTiONE.

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A special thanks to our thesis studio professor Josh Coggeshall for his enthusiasm and support throughout this process, and the Institute of Digital Fabrication for providing us access to the tools and space required to accomplish these types of projects. We would also like to thank our advisors, Bob Koester – Director of Center for Energy Research, Education and Service, Sonne Palmer – Professor of Architecture, Paul Puzzello – Instructor of Architecture, Donna Sink – Instructor of Architecture, Mahesh Senagala – Chairperson of the Department of Architecture, and Dr. Carol Tiernan.