Designer: Jonathan Gales
Firm: Factory Fifteen
Web, Web2
jonathan@factoryfifteen.com

About the Designer:
Born in Jersey, Channel Islands, Jonathan Gales trained in architecture; First Class honours in B.A from University of Brighton and Distinction in M.Arch from The Bartlett, UCL. Jonathan’s work focuses on the design of space and speculative environments using film and animation techniques. Jonathan’s work has won awards including first place in the image category of the Architectural 3D Awards 2011 and the Fitzroy Robinson Drawing Prize 2011. Jonathan’s work has been exhibited a at the Shanghai Expo 2010, the Royal Academy of Arts London and the Whitechapel Gallery. Jonathan is a founding member of Factory Fifteen, London.

About the Proposal:
The city is a centre of population and culture. It is also a concentration of built infrastructure, capital and architecture. The project focuses on the perception of the city in total construction; inspired by the incomplete states of world icons such as The Shard and Burj Khalifa. Megalomania is a short animation that explores the aesthetic of change as an ambiguous language that can be read as both growth and decay. The built environment of the city is explored as a labyrinth of architecture that is either unfinished, incomplete or broken. Megalomania is a response to the state of many developing cities, exaggerating the appearance of progress into the sublime.

The project took inspiration from Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s Carceri plates, which show a fictional architecture of prison environments. The geometry that make up the spaces within the Carceri series is ambiguous of its scale and enclosure and could be argued as impossible to be built. These themes were applied to envision an exaggerated contemporary urban construction site on the scale of a city. The project began by making a series of graphics that propose new architectures in, around and stacked on top of others. These graphics were then treated as scenes of the animation as well as becoming drawings that would stand alone.

The film is made up of a number of point of view and virtual camera movements, mixing between the experiential perspective of an individual alongside impossible camera positions elevated above the city. Megalomania was created predominantly using 3D CGI with some 2.5D animated sequences.

To see the film, please visit http://www.vimeo.com/25446891 (posted above)

Designer: Yao Gao

Location: San Francisco
Academy of Art University
Professor: Kory Bieg

Proposal: Augmented Reality Pavilion
Investigating the relationship between humans and the built environment when the virtual, real, and augmented realities of our world collide. As a temporary pavilion the intensity and frequency of visitors drawn to the site will amplify the extreme spaces and force the occupants to question what is real.

This Pavilion Expo is located in the Mission Bay area in the city of San Francisco. It is a simulation venue to demonstrate the new technology and new structure. The main structure is located on several artificial platforms which are connected to the land by several bridges. Different opened aisles will lead people to the lobby, bar and admin which are all located on the first floor. The unique skeleton structure connects different interior spaces. For example, the café which is on the top of the lobby has a independent entrance. By the elevator to the underground area, people could enter the core of the building, which is a virtual cinema. The Expo shows the contrast of virtual world and the real world by two unique structures, which are opened skeleton corridor with viewing deck and fully enclosed interior spaces.

For example, the underground virtual cinema could simulate the whole virtual world. The cinema could float on the sea, in this case, people could feel the virtual world by sense of hearing, sense of sight, sense of smell and sense of touch. With the changes and transformations of the surrounding walls and retractable screen colors, in which it is like for people in the Avatar movie, people will enter the whole virtual world. Through the opened skeleton corridor, people could reach the restaurant on the top floor of the building from the lobby. People could feel the real feeling provided by the nature by standing at this place. The enclosed interior spaces are connected by the opened bridges. Just like the daily life that transforms from wake up to falling asleep and from the social networks on the internet to the real communication, people wanders between the virtual and the real world by passing through the enclosed interior space and the opened skeleton corridors. The exterior of the building will change its color and color intensity with the seasonal temperature change and sea rise. This new Expo will be an iconic new technological building in the Mission bay area.

Designer: Pat Panupaisal
Location: San Francisco currently // From Thailand
Academy of Art: Professor Kory Bieg

Proposal: Aquaria – The Floating Pavilion

This proposal explores the possibility of floating structures and the interaction between architecture and water level fluctuations. The form of the pavilion evolved from a series of formal explorations documented in a modifier catalogue. The form consists of a skeletal/structural frame that holds the floating clusters of pod-like volumes in place.

Surrounding the building are tidal walkways, which as the name suggests, can become inundated throughout the course of a day. As the tide rises, the movement throughout the walkways is affected, constricting circulation and disconnecting the pavilion from the rest of the expo.

The underwater aquaditorium provides a dynamic and lively backdrop to the performance space as sea dwellers underneath the bay swim by. The main concept for this pavilion is the interaction between architecture and the world of water by exploring new possibilities for underwater architecture as well as floating architecture.

Designer: Isaie Bloch / Eragatory
Website
Location:
Excessive studio, die Angewandte
Vienna Austria / Ghent Belgium

*What can we say – Reality Distorted is a HUGE fan of the Excessive Studio by Hernan Diaz Alonso – check out some more amazing, intense, beautiful and highly talented work coming out of Vienna!

Proposal: Concert Hall
While the architectonic aesthetic may seem to revolve around a straightforward gimmick, the work is much richer than that. The more you look, the more you realize how many levels it operates on, from its allusions of architectural ruïnification/collapse as in the romantic era to its connections to our current culture of remixes and mash-ups.

The Concert hall balances on a fine line between sculptural architectural objects and functional monuments, between meaning and use and between the beautiful and the horrific. Each successive component of the design layers the pragmatic with an evocative spatial experience obtained by degeneration of architectural primitives in stead of the aggregation of complex freeform geometries, which would lead to very linear repetitive spatial experiences. It reorients the visitor toward a new architectural perspective and circulational/functional logics. A way of entering into the subject of the exclusive high class Vieanese theatre spectator or his opposite looking for a free platform to spread his word.

While this “fictional” concert hall is visually divorced from reality, it gives a sly commentary on the current state of architecture. After leaving this page and stepping back into the build environment, it shocks how much the building across from you, with its cheap-looking touches of faux masonry or abundant technical supplies, starts to evoke similarities with this so called “horrific, dystopian, retro past aesthetic” concert hall.

Designer: Numen / For Use
website
facebook
Croatian/Austrian Design Collective

NOTE: These are images from various different exhibitions they did with Tape around the world – for more exact info on locations please contact the designers.

About the Designers:
Numen/For Use is a Croatian-Austrian design collective working in the fields of scenography, industrial and spatial design and conceptual art.
The group first formed in 1998 as a collaborative effort of industrial designers Sven Jonke, Christoph Katzler and Nikola Radeljković under the banner For Use. In 1999 they establish Numen as a collective identity covering all projects actualised outside the sphere of industrial design.

Proposal: TAPE
The tape concept developed further towards a more sculptural architectonic form. It was practically “found” through the act of chaotic wrapping, where a one-dimensional line (“tape”), slowly turned into two-dimensional plane, which then finally curved into volume.

The installation was envisaged as a site specific, parasitical structure invading an arbitrary location. The straight lines of main trajectories are stretched across a given area and these tendons are then wrapped diagonally with layers of elastic tape, giving shape to a complex organic form through a process similar to the emergence of such structures in nature. With the further layering of the tape, the figure becomes more and more corporeal as it picks up on the slow increase of the curvature. The interior of the structure is supple, elastic, and pliable while the form itself is statically perfect, as it ideally follows the trajectories of forces, being literally defined by them. In the moment when the audience enters the installation, what started off as a sculpture seamlessly morphs into architecture.

*Check out the Gallery of Images below for more images.