Philip Beesley from Waterloo Architecture/Philip Beesley Architect Inc. visited Ball State along with Brad Rothenberg of Pratt Institute to conduct a physical computing workshop for An Inconvenient Studio. The resulting installation from this four-day workshop is a kinetic mesh system entitled Arcus Animus.
The hanging, layered meshwork composed of impact-resistant acrylic, bamboo, and mylar components reacts to human occupation interpreted by arrayed proximity sensors. These physical reactions consist of “shaking” and “waving” movements actuated pneumatically using solenoid valves and custom air muscles, and controlled by Arduino microcontollers with processing-based code development.
Arcus Animus is a recent incarnation from a long lineage of mesh and actuator installations at Waterloo Architecture and Philip Beesley Architect Inc. from 2006-09, and we kindly thank Philip and Brad for their tremendous energies throughout the workshop, as Arcus Animus was fabricated and constructed.
Additionally, Philip Beesley delivered a lecture at Ball State entitled: “Partial Objects.” In his lecture, Beesley presented a series of his recent field-oriented installations and offered a post-humanist cultural context for this work. Illustrated projects included the Hylozoic Soil series, an immersive interactive reef construction  composed of overlapping flexible meshworks populated with kinetic ‘pores’, recently installed in Montreal, Linz and Madrid, and the 2008 UCLA installation Endothelium, a delicate skeletal tripod-field powered by densely massed organic power units and organized as unit-clusters forming a continuous lattice outfitted with faint signal-lure lights, microprocessor-controlled burrowing agents and space-filling filter packs.
Philip Beesley is an associate professor in the School of Architecture, University of Waterloo who practices digital media art and experimental architecture in Toronto. His work in the last two decades has focused on field-oriented sculpture and landscape installations, with extensions in stage design and buildings. His projects in the past several years have increasingly worked with immersive digitally fabricated lightweight ‘textile’ structures, and the most recent generations of his work feature interactive kinetic systems that use dense arrays of microprocessor, sensors and actuator systems.   He is co-director of the Integrated Centre for Visualization, Design and Manufacturing at Waterloo. He was educated in visual art at Queen’s University, in technology at Humber College, and in architecture at the University of Toronto. He was a member of art and performance collaboratives Open Series and Studio Six/Kataraque in Kingston and the George Meteskey Ensemble in New York. Periods of study were undertaken in Rome at the Vatican and the American Academy and in New York with the Wooster Group. Prior to beginning his practice he apprenticed in instrument making and in lighting design.  Distinctions for his work include the Prix de Rome in Architecture (Canada), Governor-General’s  and  Dora Mavor Moore Awards. He is the 2009 recipient of Fundacion Telefonica’s VIDA Award. 

Ball State Installlation/Development Workshop:
Philip Beesley, University of Waterloo/PBAi
Brad Rothenberg, Pratt Institute

An Inconvenient Studio:
Deepak Baniya
Elizabeth Boone
Eric Brockmeyer
Adam Buente
Luke Christen
Brad Horn
Brandon Hoopingarner
Paul Konwinski
Yevgen Monakhov
Brianna Newton
Daisy Winkler

Faculty:
Mahesh Senagala
Joshua Vermillion 

Stephen Deters from UCLA visited i.M.A.D.E as a research fellow to conduct a 3-day studio workshop to examine the performative capacities of materials–specifically, $20,000 worth of donated hardwood veneer. The resulting Bodhi Tree is comprised of laser-cut veneer components created specifically for curving, twisting, and layering in order to negotiate structural capacity with aesthetic sensibilities of lightness, patterning, and light/shadow.

A lecturer at UCLA, Stephen Deters has practiced architecture in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.  His experience covers a broad scope of building typologies through all stages of design and construction, from furniture to skyscrapers to urban design.  He has worked in the offices of Eric Owen Moss (LA), Kohn Pedersen Fox (NY), Pei Cobb Fried (NY), Beyer Blinder Belle (NY) and Fujikawa Johnson Gobel (CHI).  He holds a Bachelor of Science in Architectural Studies from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a Master of Architecture from the University of California Los Angeles, where he now teaches. He has also studied at the Ecole d’Architecture de Versailles (FR) and the Universitat fur Angewandte Kunst, Vienna (AU) under Zaha Hadid.  He has been a licensed architect since 2003, and is founding principal of Deterfabrik.

i.M.A.D.E wishes to thank CASE Design founders David Fano, Federico Negro, and Steve Sanderson for each personally visiting Ball State to lead workshops and roundtable discussions, critique student work, and advise us on future projects and curriculum offerings. Dave, Fed, and Steve have smart ideas and run a smart business, and we look forward to the possibility of working with CASE in the future as partners.

In this podcast, recorded in August 2008, Michael Speaks discusses the shift in design knowledge creation, both in practice and academia. For innovative architecture, “design intelligence” is a way to affect, not only architectural projects, but the architecture of ideas, processes, techniques, and materials, while managing and negotiating the complexities of design in a connected world.

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William E. Massie received a Bachelor of Fine Art in Architectural Studies from Parsons School of Design, New York, NY. He subsequently received a Master of Architecture from Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture. Upon graduation he worked for Robertson + McAnulty Architects and James Stewart Polshek and Partners. In 1993 he started his own company while simultaneously accepting a teaching position in the Graduate School of Architecture at Columbia University where he was appointed as the Coordinator for Building Technologies Research.
William is currently the Architect-in Residence / Head of Architecture Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan and a Tenured Professor of Architecture at Rensselear Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. He has taught at Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana and Parsons School of Design in New York City. He has participated as a visiting critic at many institutions nationally including, Harvard, Yale, California Polytechnic Institute and Lawrence Technological University. Currently, (Spring 2005) he is participating as the Keynote Speaker and appointed Bruce Goff Chair at the University of Oklahoma on the future of technology and digital processes in architecture and architectural education.
William Massie’s work utilizes computer applications and digital information as a way of redefining “formal architectural construct” – a synthesis of ideas linked to construction in conjunction with the development of a theoretical position, all in support of an attempt to redefine architectural practice and making.
His research in computer applications in architectural construction has been recognized by Architecture Magazine in back-to-back Research Awards - “Augmented Reality in Architectural Construction” in association with Tony Webster, Steve Feiner and Ted Kreuger and “Virtual Model to Actual Construct.” Massie has also received Progressive Architecture awards from Architecture Magazine for the design of the “Big Belt House” located in the foothills of the Big Belt Mountains in Montana and for the design of “A House for a Photographer.” He has been an invited lecturer at over 50 national and international institutions, most recently at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., and The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.
Massie was selected as the winner of the Museum of Modern Art’s Young Architects Program Competition for his project “Playa Urbana / Urban Beach” which was installed in the courtyard of the P.S.1 Museum located in Long Island City, New York. His work has been, exhibited at Parsons School of Design, MoMA/Qns and the Shanghai Biennale, Shanghai, China. Recently, a scaled model of the “Big Belt House” was acquired by The Museum of Modern Art as part of their permanent collection. Currently, Massie’s work is included in several exhibitions: “Liquid Stone: New Architecture in Concrete” at The National Building Museum in Washington, DC., “P.S. 1 Young Architects Competition from 2000-2004” at KW – Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, Germany and, most notably, the “Big Belt House” is included in the “re-opening” show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Phillip Anzalone from Columbia University delivered a lecture at Ball State University. Phillip is an adjunct assistant professor at the GSAPP and is the Director of the Avery Digital Fabrication Lab, as well as an Associate Director of Building Technologies.  Phillip presented a selection of full-scale digital design and fabrication research projects from Columbia.

In this podcast, Phillip describes his views on the role of academia in preparing professionals that bring value to practices through digitally-led innovations.

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Mark Cabrinha, an i.M.A.D.E Research Fellow and Phd candidate at Rennsalear Polytehnic University, conducted two workshops at Ball State.  Cabrinha focused on a “materials first” approach–the primary goal was to look at how materials can take shape prior to cutting shape from material.  Digital fabrication was introduced as a necessity to extend / expand these material tactics and, more significantly, to form larger design strategies enabled by digital tools (including scripting and parametric design).  Cabrinha gave brief lectures/presentations on his Phd research, introducing the historical precedent of the spline in the 18th Century from which Pierre Bezier and others abstracted into NURBS.  The workshops stressed the study of a material sensibility which could then be applied/tested/implemented as production strategies for interior fit-outs.

SmartScrap is the digital cataloguing of waste products from the building industry -specifically the Indiana limestone industry- and developing computational means to apply the catalogued information to parametric design models in order to effectively reuse the waste.

One of the aims of the research consultation was to inaugurate an exchange which could lead to future collaborations between i.M.A.D.E and RMIT University.

Andrew Kudless of MATSYS conducted two Rhino scripting workshops and delivered a lecture at Ball State.  Andrew’s presentations framed scripting as a means to develop and automate procedural design and production techniques which could be directly applied to the students’ design work.  Throughout the workshops, Kudless presented examples of scripting techniques from contemporary architecture practices along with his own work and research.