Best in Show- UCLA

Alberti, Sandro; 20 January, 2003 [text27]

Once again, UCLA’s formalized student exhibitions treat the public to representative student work. This time, from Fall 2002. Some of the work I had already written about, in my ‘hallway’ series (primarily, in this case, modular structure studies and landscape generations). Fresh and new (I’ll leave best for last):

Reconstituted Domino frame.

1. A delamination diagram of failure in coated steel serves to inform a ‘blob within classical building’ program. Includes initial failure openings, blistering, and ruptures at weak points. By Ramiro Díaz-Granados in the Erdman-Karlsson studio [this is where I point out that David Erdman has managed to revamp a lot of energy in ‘academia’ at UCLA; now he is joined by one of his Servo collaborators, Ulrika Karlsson, who seems both ‘modern’ and charming]

Díaz-Granados melts the building within.

2. In the Gow + Lee + Lee + Payne studio, Michelle Frankel reconstitutes Le Corbusier’s Domino frame, to create an adaptive-flexible envelope.

Image board for the adaptive-flexible neo-Domino.

3. Also in the Gow + Lee + Lee + Payne studio, students present an urban analysis in unison. The result, a back-lit plastic box filled with layers of color and transparency. And finally, the project that eschews our contemporary ‘state’ (or actually manages to touch and push upon the ‘envelope’). I still don’t quite know how-what it is (and thus assume it is ‘avant’ all):

4. Alex Lehnerer and Louise Griffin (in the Erdman-Karlsson studio) show what seems to be yet-another interior application of ‘fluid form’. But there is ‘more’ here. The form is both blob as fluid envelope AND sliced volumetric representation. It is essentially a form with ‘finned’ walls, and, with it, these designers manage, further, to deal with issues of opacity, privacy, and the in-between. It has qualities of the Fog Building, solidified. Very nice.

Lehnerer-Griffin ‘fill’.

The finned blobs.

Interstitial flows thanks to ‘finning’.