Christian J. Lange will deliver a lecture at the University of St. Joseph in Macao. The talk will discuss Rocker-Lange’s specific design approach through a set of projects that have been developed in their design and research practice in recent years.
Wednesday, March 20th 2013
6.30pm
Venue:
Speaker’s Hall
University of Saint Joseph, Macao
For more information please go to: www.usj.edu.mo
Rocker-Lange Architects will present part of their research work at the encodingarchitecture conference at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. The conference is meant to synthesize new trajectories for the profession in a cybernetic context of tectonics, cultural philosophy, architectural theory and geopolitics.
For more information please visit: www.encodingarchitecture.org
Ingeborg M. Rocker to deliver lecture at “Digital Geometries,”
with Ingeborg Rocker, Michael Young & Kutan Ayata, Pablo Lorenzo Eiroa, Branden Hookway, & Yusuke Obuchi
Wednesday, 11/28 2012
6.00pm / Betts Auditorium
Princeton SOA
Princeton, New Jersey 08544
Rocker-Lange Architects are participating in this year’s Hong Kong & Shenzhen Biennale with their research project entitled “Density & Openness Revisited: Recoding Building Bulk in Hong Kong”. The project will be on display until April 24th and is located in the Hong Kong Pavilion of the show.
Hong Kong’s cityscape is primarily shaped by the typology of the tower. While specifically in Hong Kong the tower is utilized as an extension of the urban programmatic user surface, the question of public space within this vertical urban fabric remains unaddressed.
The research project “Density & Openness Revisited: Recoding Building Bulk in Hong Kong” is the search for an alternative approach to think about open and public spaces in the context of the city. Instead of extruding the maximum boundary condition of a given site to determine the building mass, this model incorporates a ratio of open space in the design process.
At its core is a computational logic that calculates the amount of open space for each city plot. The rule-based model can adapt to different site and programmatic conditions and produces varying spaces and varying densities This approach offers the capacity to generate new forms of public space, semi public and private exterior and interior spaces.
Ingeborg M. Rocker to deliver a keynote lecture at the ACSA 100th Annual Meeting, Boston, Massachusetts. The title of the lecture is “Digital Aptitudes Eco-logics: The role of Computation in Rethinking human Nature and Habitat”.
Digital Aptitudes
ACSA 100th Annual Meeting
March 1-4, 2012 in Boston, MA
Host School:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Co-chairs:
Mark Goulthorpe, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Amy Murphy, University of Southern California
Digital Aptitudes: Opening Panel & Reception:
Sanford Kwinter, Jeffrey Kipnis, Ingeborg Rocker, Kathryn Gustafson, Mark Burry
Thurday, 03/01
6.00–8.30 pm / Boston Park Plaza
50 Park Plaza at Arlington Street
Boston, MA 02116
Theme Overview:
This Annual Meeting culminates the events associated with ACSA 100. The Boston conference will mark the centennial year that educators from diverse institutions have gathered to share ideas with the goal of advancing architectural education. It will be hosted by the first school of architecture in America, MIT, whose department of architecture was founded in 1865. To mark such an occasion, the conference will critically examine the ground covered by the discipline since its inception, as well as speculate on its future trajectory, the central theme of the conference being the profound impact of digital technologies’ computational and communication capacities on architecture.
For more information please go to: www.acsa-arch.org
Ingeborg M. Rocker to deliver a lecture at the symposium “Design Technologies as Agents of Change” at the GSD.
Thursday, February 23
06:30pm – 08:00pm
Piper Auditorium, Gund Hall, 48 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA
As digital design media and digital fabrication technologies emerge as foci of design process, the relationship between architects and engineers is undergoing rapid change in collaborative practices. The development of digital technologies is enabling new processes of design practice and collaboration, allows unprecedented design speculation, and enables human-machine interaction in pursuit of newly hybridized spatial environments. Established hierarchies between tools and problems are increasingly reversed. Among other areas of influence, growing environmental awareness is exploiting new shifts from analytical to generative models of design. These evolutionary forms of technology – design relationships are becoming characteristic in complex projects integrating interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary agents in multi-scalar design problems, where the growing inter-relationship between technology and design is acting as an empowering agent.
Beyond simply exemplifying these emerging phenomena, the event seeks to explore and explicate the implications of these considerations upon knowledge, theory, praxis, research, and education.
Host:
Martin Bechthold, GSD
Speakers:
Thomas Bock, TU Munich
Paul Seletsky, ArcSphere New York
Rivka Oxman, Technion Haifa
Ingeborg Rocker, GSD
Organized by the Master in Design Studies Program, GSD
Ingeborg M. Rocker was invited to give a presentation at this years International Architectural Education Summit in Segovia, Spain.
On June 24-26, IE School of Architecture hosted the second edition of the International Architectural Education Summit, a bi-annual meeting of deans and directors of the world´s top architecture schools. The summit was first held two years ago in Tokyo by UCLA’s Director of Architecture and Urban Design, Hitoshi Abe.
The 2011 Summit brought together top educators from around the world to debate pressing issues facing architectural education, with a special focus on Innovation in Architectural Education, and to explore ways to assure excellence within the changing academic, professional and global arenas.
Participating schools included UCLA, Harvard, AA, Bartlett School of Architecture, Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture (Paris), IIT College of Architecture, Berlage Institute, University of Calgary, ANCB, University of Michigan, Delft University of Technology, Princeton, China Academy of Art, CEPT University (Ahmedabad), Waseda University (Tokyo), Columbia and IE School of Architecture – IE University.
Students at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University under the guidance of Professor Ingeborg M. Rocker of Rocker-Lange Architects , have built a wall structure out of chipboard bricks.
The research seminar On the Bri(n)ck II: Architectural Envelope traces the historical development of a debate about the architectural envelope that began at the end of the 19th century. It was a critical period in the industrial revolution when new materials and technologies became available and started to inform architectural design and debate. Architects began to question the role that mass-production should play in architecture, and also questioned the influence that new notation and construction-techniques had on the architects’ work. Today these and similar questions are resurfacing as the digital medium literally informs the conceptualization and production of architecture.
In the beginning of the 20th century brick became the dominant local material, embodying the socially and politically motivated expansions of rapidly growing European cities. Brick was particularly favored in the urban centers of the Netherlands, Germany and Austria. Today the role of brick has evolved, though solid and capable of bearing great loads, it is now mostly used as cladding. On the Bri(n)ck II focused consequently on the changing role and materiality of brick today.
The project engaged several teams to develop architectural envelopes that were constituted from either mass-produced or mass-customized load bearing brick units, or alternatively mass-produced or mass-customized non-structural brick cladding. In addition to the research on different discretization techniques and structural properties of surfaces, the research-seminar also sought to identify alternative brick materials that were widely available, sustainable, light and inexpensive. On the Bri(n)ck II (1:1) project employed several hundred cardboard brick units to form the geometry of a Limaçon surface. This is a continuous geometry that inscribes an interior space with a single surface. The openings of the brick-units along with the units adapt in size, geometry and width to the surface’s geometry. At the same time the overall surface geometry is challenged through the discretization techniques generating the bricks. Using a 2-dimensional material to create a 3-dimensional brick unit was challenging. Research had to overcome obstacles such as the geometric construction of the unit, its ability to unfold and resourceful use of the material. Working with chipboard also required a very precise study of the units’ geometry in relation to their structural stability. Much attention was paid to the units, their seams and the ease in which one was able to assemble and disassemble them. A chipboard rib further stabilized the unit connections.
The project was designed and built using the CAD/CAM facilities at the GSD. Overall the design and building process brought up questions regarding mass-production and mass-customization. The project explored the limits of a mass-customization process; examining how the same procedure can lead to an array of possible results.
Credits:
Instructor:
Ingeborg M. Rocker, Ph.D.
Research Collaborator:
Hiroshi Jacobs (MDES)
Core Team: Mais Al Azab, William Choi, Hernan Garcia, Casey Hughes, John Jakubiec, Lesley McTague, Marta Nowak, and Mark Pomarico
Team: Harvard GSD Students
Drawings: Hiroshi Jacobs + Casey Hughes
Renderings: Will Choi
Funding: Junior Faculty Grant from the Department of Architecture, Harvard University, GSD
Christian J. Lange of Rocker-Lange Architects and Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture at the University of Hong Kong is co- coordinating for the second time an International Summer School at The University of Hong Kong, Faculty of Architecture Study Centre in Shanghai, China.
Architecture Studio Shanghai is a three-week program held at The University of Hong Kong Faculty of Architecture Study Centre in Shanghai. Taught by professors from The University of Hong Kong, as well as architects and scholars from Shanghai, the course offers participants a design studio experience within Asia’s most vibrant and fastest growing city. A fundamental element of the course is to introduce students to architectural issues and design practices, in contemporary China. The studio topic is embedded in the context of Shanghai and addresses contemporary issues in architecture and urbanism.
The structure of the studio course is coordinated around a design project accompanied by short lecture courses covering issues in Chinese architectural history, architectural theory and computational technology. The program is taught in English. The HKU Study Centre provides state-of-the-art studio space in the heart of Shanghai. Field trips to significant architectural sites and visits to local and international design firms will provide participants with a broad view of contemporary Chinese culture, architecture and urbanism. Students work closely with the teaching staff, using the dynamic city of Shanghai as a context for understanding architecture’s role in the built environment.
Dates:
The program will take place at the Shanghai Study Centre from June 12 to July 1, 2011. Students should arrive no later than June 11.
Enrollment:
Applicants who are interested to enroll should have completed at least two undergraduate or graduate level design studios in, or be a recent graduate of, an accredited school of architecture. Enrollment is limited. The comprehensive course is designed to augment participants’ architectural studies at home with a rigorous international experience.
Fees:
The registration fee for the summer program is US$2,950. The early registration fee is US$2,700. Fees cover the cost of the program in Shanghai (field trips, admissions, etc). Fees do not include flights or accommodation. Accommodation can be arranged at a reasonably priced hotel adjacent to the Shanghai Study Centre.
Registration:
Deadline for registration and payment is June 1, 2011. The early registration payment deadline is May 1, 2011. Online registration is required.
Please go to http://fac.arch.hku.hk/summer/sh/as for details and forms.
Questions may be sent via email to: asprog@arch.hku.hk
“The Eclipse of Beauty: Parametric Beauty” a Harvard GSD Symposia organized by Ingeborg M. Rocker and Pierre Belanger
What has happened to architectural beauty? It used to be the fundamental value of architectural theory and practice, the touchstone of every conceivable achievement for a discipline that considered itself primarily as an art. Today, the word is seldom pronounced by theorists and professionals, at least in public. Even critics and historians tend to avoid the loaded term.
Its eclipse is all the more surprising given that architectural aesthetics is everywhere. The architectural star-system is to a large extent based on signature forms that herald the originality of their authors. The so-called “Guggenheim effect” has fundamentally to do with the visual seduction exerted by Frank Gehry’s project on a large public, from connoisseurs to simple passers-by. It has paved the way for all sorts of prestigious architectural commissions, often linked to the cultural sector, museums, libraries, opera houses requiring visually striking answers that can be appreciated by a broad audience. Usually entrusted to a relatively small cohort of elite architects, these commissions nevertheless contribute to define the tone of contemporary architectural debate. Even if the term beauty is rarely invoked to characterize their power of seduction, the aesthetic dimension plays a determining role.
Conference
» 12:00 PM – 04:00 PM 03/28/2011
Rm 112 (Stubbins), Gund Hall
This event is free and open to the public.
The GSD Technology Platform is a transdisciplinary initiative that fosters discussions about the interface of digital technologies and design. The aim is to uncover and explore how the digital medium is transforming the agency of design through contemporary technological innovation, project experimentation, social media and interdisciplinary collaboration. The Technology Platform provides a forum for transdisciplinary discussions and will host colloquia on a regular basis. The first colloquium “Visualizations : Realizations” focuses on the role data management and data visualization play in our daily material and perceptual realizations.
With the further advancement of digital technologies during the past two decades, new methods of design and realization have begun to emerge involving the selection, management and visualization of data, in order to map, analyze, construct and reconstruct reality’s complexities and dynamics. Instrumental for this development are advanced forms of data imaging, open systems and information exchanges that transcend disciplinary boundaries and open new forms of collaboration and practice.
The first colloquium will offer a forum to present current research on selected topics in 20-minute lectures, followed by a panel discussion with the invited guests and the audience. Questions regarding the selection, generation, evaluation, motivation, visualization of data and the repercussions thereof for the comprehension of nature and culture will be discussed.
The sessions will be moderated by Ingeborg M. Rocker and Pierre Belanger.
Schedule:
12:00 / Welcome Martin Bechthold
12:10 / Introduction 1: Ingeborg M. Rocker
12:20 – 12:40 / Hans-Peter Pfister & Mirah Meyer, “Visualizing Biology”
12:40 – 12:50 / Q|A
12:50 – 01:10 / R Gerard Pietrusko, “Ground-Truthing: Visualization as Narrative”
01:10 – 01:20 / Q|A
01:30 – 01:50 / Panagiotis Michalatos, “Intuition / Rigour: Architect as Users”
01:50 – 02:00 / Q|A
02:00 – 02:20 / Panel 1 discussion
2:30 – 2:40 / Introduction 2: Pierre Belanger
2:40 – 3:00 / Eduardo Rico & Enriqueta Llabres, “Territorialism: Relational Urban Strategies for the Design of Cities”
3:00 – 3:10 / Q|A
3:10 – 3:30 / David Mah & Leire Asensio Villoria, “BAKED GOODS”
3:30 – 3:40 / Q|A
3:40 – 4:00 / Panel 2 discussion with all participants