by: admin
Event: Oculus Book Talk: Mark Foster Gage presents Composites, Surfaces, and Software — High Performance Architecture
Location: Center for Architecture, 05.18.11
Speaker: Mark Foster Gage — Founding Partner, Gage/Clemenceau Architects & Co-editor, Composites, Surfaces, and Software: High Performance Architecture (Yale School of Architecture Books/W.W. Norton, March, 2011)
Organizer: AIANY Oculus Committee
Composites, Surfaces, and Software: High Performance Architecture (WW Norton, March, 2011).
Courtesy Amazon.com
While computer technologies and digital fabrication techniques have had an increasingly powerful impact on the architectural profession, many have debated just how well these new tools are being used to integrate beauty with efficiency. Composites, Surfaces, and Software: High Performance Architecture, by the Yale School of Architecture and edited by Greg Lynn, Mark Foster Gage, AIA, and Nina Rappaport (series editor), delves into these issues and explores, through a beautifully curated compendium of voices, the development of design, performance, and aesthetics through cross-disciplinary collaboration. Examples of boat, airplane, and automobile design tools and software applied to architectural projects are illustrated using, for example, robotics and high-strength, low-weight, carbon fiber composites.
Greg Lynn’s studio and Mark Foster Gage’s seminar at Yale — with participants Frank Gehry, FAIA, Lise Ann Couture, Chris Bangle, Bill Kreysler, Adriana Monk, William Pearson, and Greg Foley — generate a dialogue invigorating the future of design. I will leave you to ponder the question posed by Robert A.M. Stern, FAIA, dean of the Yale School of Architecture, in his preface to the book: “Will these explorations do more for architecture today than the engagement with advanced technology did for Modernist architecture in the early twentieth century? Or will it prove a diversion, taking architects away from age-old responsibilities to physical place-making?”
Maxinne Rhea Leighton, Assoc. AIA, is a member of the AIANY Oculus Committee. At Parsons Brinckerhoff she is in charge of managing the Northeast Region Business Development and Marketing. Maxinne is also working with the New York Transit Museum on a new book on Grand Central Terminal for the centennial in February, 2013.
Note about Oculus Book Talks: Each month, the AIANY Oculus Committee hosts a Book Talk at the Center for Architecture. Each talk highlights a recent publication on architecture, design, or the built environment — presented by the author. The Book Talks are a forum for dialogue and discussion, and copies of the publications are available for purchase and signing. The next talk will take place on 06.22.11, featuring New York Dozen: Gen X Architects, by Michael J. Crosbie, AIA, with a forward by Kristen Richards, Hon. AIA, Hon. ASLA (Images Publishing Dist Ac, 2011). Click here to RSVP.