Amy Jo Diaz and I were blown away by the dioramas created in our Personal Immersive Environments workshop at the Machine Project gallery. Thanks to the Machine Project for helping us organizing the workshop and to all of the participants for making it so much fun!
One of Ursula Brookbank’s five beautiful dioramas made at the workshop:
Alan Loomis (the Principal Planner, City of Glendale) and I are co-teaching a Architecture Design Studio at Woodbury University Department of Architecture, Spring 2012.
Proposed site along the 134 freeway in Glendale, California.
The studio will instigate the 134 freeway where it cut through Downtown Glendale. Students will research the opportunities and challenges presented by this complex site and propose designs that can transform the freeway from a divisive element into a condition that advances the city and culture of Glendale.
We’re looking forward to working with the students to develop innovative design proposals for this typical urban condition!
Amy Jo Diaz and Casey Hughes are teaching a diorama making coures on Sunday January 15th, at the Machine Gallery!
Image: forest scene made out of cinnamon sticks and moss. Artist unknown.
More about the course:
P.I.E. (Personal Immersive Environments)
Sunday, January 15th 2012 10am – 4pm
Instructors: Amy Jo Diaz and Casey Hughes
Join us for an afternoon of personal-diorama-making. These dioramas are intended to produce miniature immersive environments using both two and three-dimensional elements and a point-of-view.
The workshop will begin with a brief discussion of dioramas with examples representing the breadth of the medium. The participants will be asked to imagine a context (fictional or not) which they will construct within a provided frame. The intention isn’t to represent the context literally but rather create a palpable atmosphere. Throughout this workshop we will be introducing concepts and techniques to aid the participants in the development of their dioramas. These techniques will range from incorporation of lighting and viewing devices (peep holes, webcams, etc.) to working with intuition through lateral and associative thinking.
No experience in design is necessary for this workshop so people at all levels of design experience are encouraged to join. All the necessary materials will be provided but participants are invited to bring magazines and materials that they would like to use/share.
The workshop will be organized by Amy Jo Diaz, a Los Angeles based artist who has worked extensively in collage and Casey Hughes, a Los Angeles based architect who has a built, lit and photographed many-a-architectural model.
More info about the Machine Project from there website:
1) Machine Project is a storefront space in the echo park neighborhood of Los Angeles that hosts events about all kinds of things we find interesting – scientific talks, poetry readings, musical performances, competitions, group naps, cheese tasting and so forth. We usually do about two events a week, open to the general public and free of charge. Usually at 8pm. Information on upcoming events can be found on our future page.
2) Machine Project is an informal educational institution located in the same storefront space as mentioned above. We teach all kinds of things we find interesting – electronics, sewing, pickling, computer programming, car theft and so forth. We usually have one or two class going a week, open to the public for a fee by pre-registration. Information on upcoming classes can be found on our classes page.
3) Machine Project is a loose group of artist/performer collaborators, who do projects together when invited by other people and institutions, usually museums. Information on special projects can be found on our projects page.
xin nian kuai le | bonne année | ein gutes neues Jahr | kali chronia | שנה טובה | felice anno nuovo | あけまして おめでとう ございます | gott nytt år | a gut yohr | blwyddyn newydd dda
Casey was recently interviewed by Ideas are like Rabbits- “a library of sorts, an ever evolving archive of commiseration, illumination and inspiration.”
More about Ideas are like Rabbits from their website:
Creation is a strange and elusive process- the stuff of late nights, closed doors and black coffee. At times isolating, at times collaborative – alternately difficult and rewarding – making the subconscious manifest is always a journey, a wild ride on idea and emotion.
Whether the outcome is music or film, food or shelter, sculpture or science – the getting from “here” to “there” is a path every artist takes, regardless of medium.
As a writer and designer faced with our own unique challenges, we felt it would be a fascinating project to ask for insight into creativity from a wide variety of people… working in a broad range of media. We want to create a library of sorts, an ever evolving archive of commiseration, illumination and inspiration. It’s our hope you find something here that elevates you, blows your mind, or just makes you feel less alone in the dark.
Here’s to all those out there fighting the good fight, trying their best to bring beauty, innovation, weirdness, intensity, and strange dreams… into reality.
The Flatland installation opens at Gund Hall of Harvard University, Graduate School of Design.
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Flatland is an installation that forms a canopy over the south balconies of Gund Hall, Harvard Graduate School of Design. Designed by Casey Hughes (CHA) and installed in collaboration with Hiroshi Jacobs, the concept was developed for a design competition initiated by the Harvard Graduate School of Design Student Forum and Building Services.
Flatland is made up of 10,000 feet of custom-made 1/8-inch-diameter red and blue bungee cord, fixed in place by more than 1,000 hardware connections. Sixty individual lines emerge from the entrance of Gund Hall on Cambridge Street and traverse the south façade of the building, suggesting two continuous doubly ruled hyperbolic paraboloid surfaces. This highly rational geometry creates Flatlands’ distinctive whipped, saddle-like spaces.
Flatland studies the relationship between dimensionality and flatness by exploring how a one-dimensional line can at once produce a surface and a volume. The design began with the interest of developing a lightweight system that is economical and durable while having a large spatial impact. This led to Flatland, a system where, with mathematical efficiency, one-dimensional lines produce complex spaces with a wide range of scale and enclosure.
The title of the installation is based on Edwin Abbot Abbot’s 1884 novel Flatland, about a fictional two-dimensional world inhabited by geometric figures. The plot follows the protagonist, a square, who discovers “the mysteries of three dimensions” and returns to the Flatland to share it with others.
Flatland is dedicated to the incoming students of the Graduate School of Design.
Casey Hughes Architects in collaboration with Evangelos Kotsioris and Marcela Delgado presented their study of the Harvard Dance Center to the recently appointed director Jill Johnson and her associates.
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The study documented the existing building and proposed a phased plan for its renovation. The first phase of the plan, which focuses on the building’s street identity, the entry terrace and the lobby is currently under review by the director of the Harvard Office for the Arts.
Congratulations to the students for creating compelling designs that prompted such an interesting discussion!
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Today was the final review for the second project in Casey’s Architecture design studio in the Career Discovery program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Special thanks Mariela Alvarez Toro, Day Jimenez, Christopher Roach, Marta Ricart, Sandra Martinez Herrera, and all of the other critics for the insightful conversation.
Casey Hughes is scheduled to lecture to the architecture program of Career Discovery at the Harvard Graduate School of Design on June 21st.
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The lecture will discuss the use of abstraction in architectural representation. Casey will be presenting ongoing research initiated in a series of studios that he led at the Boston Architectural College.
The studio Casey taught this summer at the Boston Architecture College finished last week to great success. He truly enjoyed working with the students throughout the semester.
Take a look at an excerpt from the studio brief:
Mind the Gap- Modeling Discrepancies
C1 Advanced Design Studio‐ Summer 2010
“What we are witnessing is a shift in the traditional relationship between reality and representation. We no longer progress from model to reality, but from model to model while acknowledging that both models are, in fact, real. As a result me way work in a very productive manner with the reality experienced as a conglomeration of models. Rather than seeing models and reality as polarizing modes, they now function at the same level. Models have become co‐producers of reality.”
“Models are Real” – Olafur Eliasson
Models are useful because they organize information (ie: program, space, structure, material etc.) in a tangible way, but by definition models aren’t literally what they represent. Rather than seeing this discrepancy as a deficiency, it can be heightened to expose a project’s underlying concepts and experience. Regardless of the degree of abstraction, models themselves remain equally real, thus creating the potential to convey abstract concepts viscerally within the three dimensional space.
This studio will focus on exploiting this gap between a model and its subject. It is through this divergence that models become open, signifying more than what is represented. This method cultivates opportunities for chance, play, surprise, mistake, etc. allowing the modeling process to become inseparable from the development of an architectural idea..
V2 of the studio begin this Fall with a whole new crop of students…
The Converse Music Center is a hybrid youth community center and a band practice space. The project creates a vital space for youth to develop their musical abilities and is an outlet for them to perform for the broader community.
The Committee’s goal/objective is to develop a ”Master Plan to transform the Saturn campus into a park-like setting open to the community during non-school hours. The vision is inspired by the Trust for Public Land/People for Park’s ‘Community School Park’ concept, which has been unanimously endorsed by the LAUSD School Board and L.A. City Council.”
After much toil and sweat, our new website launches!
Be sure to check-back as we continue to add more projects to the site or sign up in the subscribe section to automatically receive updates.
We look forward to hearing your thoughts about the website, our work, or anything else that may be on your mind.
Thanks to Ross West of West and ByDesign for the CSS and PHP programming and to Daniel Eatock and Jeffery Vaska of Indexhibit for developing the elegant back-end interface.
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