Paul and Amelia are joined in-studio by the co-founders behind RotoLab, Michael Rotondi's new start-up. Along with Nels Long and M A Greenstein, Rotondi has ambitions to create uniquely VR-environments for architectural education and practice, and in the process, completely upend how we learn and work. Inspired by decades of experience in architecture and VR’s imminent future, Rotondi and his co-founders spoke about socializing in VR, gaming as education, and what this new frontier could mean for tomorrow’s architects.
You probably don’t recognize George Tsypin’s name, but you’re almost certainly familiar with his projects. After training as an architect in Moscow, Tsypin moved to New York to study theater design, and it’s now safe to say millions upon millions of people have seen his work. He’s designed stage sets for the MTV VMA’s, operas, Broadway plays, and the 2014 Winter Olympics’ Opening Ceremony at Sochi, among many others.
Tsypin's work is now captured in GEORGE TSYPIN OPERA FACTORY: Invisible City, released on October 18 by Princeton Architectural Press. We spoke about designing for theatrical and mass media performances, and how his architectural training grounds his practice.
Our interview begins with Tsypin's account of working in 5Pointz, the infamous graffiti building in Long Island City. Special thanks to Princeton Architectural Press for helping coordinate the interview.
Aside from their role as workshop co-chairs for the ACADIA conference, this week's One-to-One guests are both architects who work and teach at Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan. Their focus on fabrication led them to their roles at ACADIA, with McGee directing Taubman's FABLab and Newell serving as Director of the Master of Science in Material Systems and Digital Technologies.
ACADIA stands for the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture, and this year's conference, "Posthuman Frontiers: Data, Designers and Cognitive Machines" (October 27-29) attests to the extreme collaborative depths humans and machines have come to in architecture. I spoke with Catie and Wes about what they have planned for the conference workshops, taking place October 24-26, and just how close architects are to achieving the singularity.
The small town of Columbus, Indiana is packed with the works of famous modernist architects, but unlike cities like New York or Chicago, Columbus’s pedigree isn’t so often brought into the national architectural discourse. Exhibit Columbus, a new symposium and exhibition happening annually in the city, is hoping to change that.
Deborah Berke, architect and dean at Yale, has worked extensively in Indiana and was a keynote speaker at this year's inaugural Exhibit Columbus symposium. She joined me on the podcast to reflect on the local and regional influences of Columbus IN, and the impact they've had on her career.
Steven Holl is globally renowned for monumental works that specifically invoke light, color and porosity in both programmatic and aesthetic ways. Holl can also be thought of as an artist’s architect—his firm has done work for many arts institutions, he methodically sketches his projects in watercolors, and his style is heavily influenced by art practice and theory. He’s also very interested in the phenomenology of architecture—how it’s sensed by humans, and its impact on our existence.
We spoke in a totally unremarkable conference room at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, the day before Holl was scheduled to give a keynote presentation for the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture’s conference.