Onouye Studio | Mark West | 2018
Description
In 2017-2018, the Onouye Studio welcomed Mark West, formerly of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of Manitoba, to explore material transformation in both a studio and seminar setting.
In studio, students were encouraged to enter the rich, larger-scale territory of design development, including explorations of how materials, detailing, and structure, affect the spirit, character, and performance of a building’s physical reality. This studio experimented with what happens as a design scheme is materially and technically developed beyond the scheme or parti, into a fully-fleshed building design. This work took the form of material experiments and inventions, employed to create a ‘cover version’ of an existing building on the University of Washington campus. This involved hands-on ‘modeling’ of spatial transformations, with critical acuity. Students were expected to work as a ‘mad scientist,’ working in an exploratory manner with a multiplicity of results. Each ‘model’ – be it digital, physical, conceptual, behavioral, or procedural, or other – was seen as an ‘analogue’ of the full-scale reality.
In a hands-on seminar, students were able to work directly with fabric-formed concrete at full scale. The seminar experimented with adapting, or ‘hacking’ an innovative formwork system (called DUO by PERI) with Using flexible fabric moulds. By removing and replacing its rigid-panel mould-walls with an inexpensive and powerful “geotextile” fabric (successfully used in other fabric formwork applications), this method could both reduce the cost and labor of the formwork system while offering new expressive dimensions. The purpose, however, went beyond the technical aspects of this research, to embrace a method of study and design that finds inspiration directly from construction materials and processes. This “backwards” method of design research finds design ideas through physical play with materials and methods in construction, rather than applying construction materials and methods to a pre-existing formal design.
Chair Bio
Chair Lecture
UW Instructor
Tyler Sprague, University of Washington
Industry Support
Frank Ilg, PERI
Tom Grose, PERI USA
Ben Nelson, ACF West Inc.
Mike Weeks, Stoneway Concrete
Dave Alston, Stoneway Concrete
Bruce Chattin, Washington Aggregates & Concrete Association
Students
Morocco Branting
Annalisa Marie Castelli
Zuoming Chen
Amber Grace Kinman
Melissa Alejandra Marquez
Bali Lushane Mshar
Amandeep Kaur Panach
Nik Rustad
Jiapei Tan
Gechang Xu
Ruisheng Yang
Mikhail Zogorski
