Category: Workshops

AA Visiting School, Patras

I taught at the Architectural Association’s Visiting School in Patras, Greece, this year. Working with Alexandros Kallegias, Stella Dourtme, Omar Ibraz, Maria Brewster and a fantastic team of keen students from the Architecture Department at the University of Patras, we constructed an 8m x 4m inflatable structure to adorn the main lecture hall.

The installation is sited in a mixed-use university building; the ground floor is a lecture hall, often used for social events, and the floor above is the architecture library. Consequently the space goes from empty to full, quiet to loud, in a matter of minutes. The students conceoved an installation which is a ‘lonely cloud’, becoming more excitable when there are more people in the hall. When it is quiet, the cloud amuses itself dreaming of people.

I taught electronics and coding in Arduino to enable this proejct to come together.

Here is a video that Maria and some of the students put together of the workshop. (Please note, not my video!)

I was very impressed with the efforts of the electronics team. Day after day, they worked together to solve problems, design and build systems and components, and learn about the world of interactive architecture late into the evening (and sometimes mornings!) – all the time whilst smiling. Well done, team!

Thank you to the AA for inviting me to teach, and thank you to the excellent teaching team and highly motivated students for helping make the project happen!

The Architectural Association has a more in-depth article on the project on their Conversations website. There is also a gallery of images here.

Animating Environments

I recently taught on the Bartlett School of Architecture UCL’s joint workshop for the Graduate Architectural Design and Advanced Architectural Computing courses. The workshop ran for one week, and had around 30 students. The focus was on non-verbal aspects of human-architecture interaction. This was many of the students’ first experience of physical computing.

Here are the videos the students made of their projects.

(I)-yclops

By Norraniti Prougestaporn, Ami Kito, Young Jin Sunwoo, Ryan Mehanna, Hiromi Mikuriya, Martin Traunmueller, Ana Moutinho

No Strings Attached

By Hussnein Amin, Sicong Wang, Xun Zhou, Eleni Georgiadou, David Belzinger, Anna-Klara Veltsista, Dane Virk

Re_Acting Bins

By Maria Hadjivasili, Wei Chang, Nikola Kovacevic, Seungchul Jang, Chrysanthi Karagkouni, Petros Koutsolampros, Stefanos Gkougkoustamos

A Toast to Observation

Students: Norraniti Prougestaporn, Ami Kito, Young Jin Sunwoo, Ryan Mehanna, Hiromi Mikuriya, Martin Traunmueller, Ana Moutinho

Kinetic Leaves

By Gennaro Senatore, Sahar Navabakhsh, Christos Chondros, Lida Theodorou, Theodoros Themistocleous

Workshop details

Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London
9-16 January 2012
Organised by Ruairi Glynn

Tutors:
Ruairi Glynn
John Nussey
Ollie Palmer

with support from:
– Ciriaco Castro Diez
– Chiachi Yeh
– Huajing Liu

Plymouth University

Along with my friends Ian Laurance and Cristiana Camisotti, I ran a workshop for 50 Plymouth University Masters Architectural students, including rapid prototyping of devices to enable a non-visual mapping of a series of spaces.

The workshop was called “Mapping space with augmented perception”, and involved students designing and building devices to augment their perception, then using these new prostheses to map spaces they already knew – e.g. areas of the university campus. The point of the workshop was to explore the subjective nature of perceiving space.

Video by Ollie Palmer | Music by Lucky Dragons| CC BY-SA 3.0 License

Credits

Run by Ian Laurence and Ollie Palmer with Cristiana Camisotti
Invited by Krzysztof Nawratek
Plymouth University Architecture Programme, Masters level
5-6 November 2010