“Of the three entries we’ve actually seen, Rael San Fratello’s is probably the most interesting. Yet it is Sukkah of Signs that is most audacious in its scope and, we imagine, shape, as it tackles. Rael and San Fratello have gone about collecting signs from homeless people in the Bay Area and, with the help of volunteers, from across the country, in what they’re calling “The Homeless House Project.” Somehow, they’re going to repurpose these into a sukkah, a challenge we can’t wait to see in action. Best of all, as Foer points out, “It’s really great because they’re basically transferring their award money to the homeless population,” as each sign is gotten in exchange for a donation.”

Read more at the Architects Newspaper Blog.

Rael San Fratello Architects has been selected from over 600 entrants to participate in the Sukkah City competition. Our concept, The Homeless House, will use signs collected from the homeless to clad the entire structure. Just as the sukkah commemorates shelter provided during the forty desert-wandering years of Exodus, the design for our sukkah brings attention to the contemporary state of homelessness and wandering and will serve as a vehicle to raise awareness of homelessness in the United States.

Because of the great effort needed to obtain enough signs, we are asking for your help. If you are interested in exploring your city, meeting people in need and offering a donation for their sign, please let us know.

Among the jurors for Sukkah City were Thom Mayne, Ron Arad, Geoff Manaugh, Adam Yarinsky, Ada Tolla and several other notable scholars, designers, architects, thinkers and writers. Sukkah City is organized by Reboot and the Union Square Partnership.

For more information about this project: [ www.thehomelesshouse.com | Sukkah City Winners ]

PRAXIS 11+12 cover

PRAXIS 11+12: 11 Architects/12 Conversations

The cover of PRAXIS issue 11+12 maps a conceptual path through the conversations held within the journal deriving an actual tool path of the most common words found within the journal. The primary words were organized in a word cloud using wordle and the tool path was derived by rhinocam. The cover stock paper was embossed to articulate the scalloping that would be created by an actual mill operation, giving the cover depth and dimension.

Toolpaths created of word cloud

Embossing detail

Jumplines interconnecting the various toolpath operations

Project Date: 2010
Project Team: Ronald Rael, Maricela Chan, Emily Licht, Maya Taketani. Editors: Amanda Reeser, Ashley Schafer
Project Info: PRAXIS 11+12 was released at the symposium 11 Architects / 12 Conversations, where a moderated discussion invited audience participation in an open dialogue that explores shared and contested territory among this emerging generation of practices on June 25 at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens.Special thanks to Matthew Bitterman, Benjamin Golder and Justin Syren.

Teddy Cruz (left) and Ronald Rael (right) with moderator Michael Moore (center)

Parallel to the border, 800 miles of border wall has been constructed, and many more miles are planed—bisecting private and public lands, cities, farms, wildlife preserves and a university. The construction and maintenance costs of this security infrastructure are estimated to exceed $49 billion over the next twenty five years. A 60 linear-mile cross section, tangential to the border wall, between the two border cities of San Diego and Tijuana comprises the most dramatic issues currently challenging our normative notions of architecture and urbanism. We can find along this section’s trajectory a series of collisions, critical junctures, or conflicts between natural and artificial ecologies, top down development and bottom-up organization. Architects Teddy Cruz and Ronald Rael presented and discussed research that engages the metropolitan and territorial sites of conflict that encompass the border at the first Biennial of the Americas, July 6, 2010.

Hyperculture will be on display as part of the Consume exhibit at Exit Art in New York City. Consume, a project of SEA (Social Environmental Aesthetics), investigates the world’s systems of food production, distribution, consumption and waste. Consume will be exhibited concurrently with ECOAESTHETIC: The Tragedy of Beauty.

With fuel prices fluctuating and climate change causing monumental shifts in weather patterns, we have been forced to rethink our methods of food production and distribution. Natural disasters have wiped out entire crop cycles (the rice supply in Burma and the wheat harvest in Australia) and experts are saying that a global food shortage is imminent. The prices for wheat, corn, rice and other grains have steadily increased since 2005, causing food riots and hoarding from Morocco to Yemen to Hong Kong. The New York Times recently reported an estimate that Americans waste 27% of the food available for consumption. What are some possible solutions to these mammoth problems?

As more people change their habits, and as the government ratifies new regulations, we can make significant progress in the fight for food. The American public has shown awareness that the industrial-food system is deeply flawed. Expanded recycling and composting programs – as well as the growing local, organic and free-range movements – are indicative of a profound shift in the way we think about food. Consume will also include a series of public talks, screenings and workshops that confront and take up diverse food-related issues. Consume is curated by Papo Colo, Jeanette Ingberman, Lauren Rosati and Herb Tam.

Display table demonstrating the tools and outcomes of rapid manufacturing and rapid prototyping with concrete

Earthscrapers is an installation for the 2010 Biennial of the Americas that imagines the potential of employing Computer Aided Design (CAD) and Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAM) processes in the construction of a proto-architectural landscape—one where the building material source and the building itself are seamless. It also demonstrates the internal design, research and experimentation process by Rael San Fratello Architects in hacking a 3D printer to rapid proto­type and rapid manufacture clays, ceramics and ultimately cement.

A rapid manufactured concrete tower maquette

Mining, desertification, dredging and erosion are a few of the many examples of natural and anthropogenic processes for shaping the landscape and have become the theoretical material sources, sites and contexts for the forms and spaces created.

Full scale wall prototype constructed of rapid manufactured concrete masonry units

Studies, animations, sketches, scale models and full-scale concrete architectural building components, designed primarily with modo, are the result of the open-ended and open-faced investigation. The project also imagines a future scenario for the material and the process as a scalable technology—one that also dissolves the role of the architect and builder—where designer and geomorphologist merge.

Tools, models and powdered material used in the fabrication of Earthscrapers

linear and vertical modularity using rapid manufactured concrete

3D printed concrete form

Project Date: 2010
Project Team: Ronald Rael, Virginia San Fratello, John Faichney, Maricela Chan, Chris DeHenzel & Emily Licht
Project Info: Earthscrapers was made possible with a grant from 2010 Biennial of the Americas and is on display as part of the exhibit The Nature of Things from July 1, 2010 through August 1, 2010 at the McNichols Building at Civic Center Park, Denver, CO. Special thanks to Ehren Tool, Professor Richard Shaw, Professor Dr. Mark Ganter at the Solheim RP/RM Lab, Pax at MediumVFX and Luxology. 1, 2, 3

Rael San Fratello Architects was invited to participate in The Nature of Things, the central art exhibition of the The 2010 Biennial of the Americas, an international event celebrating the culture, ideas and people of the Western Hemisphere hosted by the City of Denver from July 1-31. Featuring 24 artists from countries throughout North, Central and South America. Curated by Paola Santoscoy, the exhibition responds to the overarching themes of the Biennial—innovation, sustainability, community and the arts—with a diverse roster of artists from across the Hemisphere presenting different perspectives within a single space. A central component of The Nature of Things will be a series of performances and discussions with the artists, all of which will take place in the renovated McNichols building in Denver’s Civic Center Park.

The Nature of Things will feature works by the following artists:

• Gabriel Acevedo Velarde (Peru) • Martín Alonso (Chile) • Brígida Baltar (Brazil) • Teddy Cruz (Guatemala) • cypher13 design studio (USA) • Santiago Cucullu (Argentina) • Darío Escobar (Guatemala) • Gregory Euclid (USA) • Rubén Gutiérrez (Mexico) • Jerónimo Hagerman (Mexico) • Karlo Andrei Ibarra (Puerto Rico) • Lucia Koch (Brazil) • Miler Lagos (Colombia) • Armando Miguelez (Mexico) • Felipe Mujica (Chile) • Nicholas de Monchaux (USA) • Víctor Muñoz (Colombia) • Sandra Nakamura (Peru) • Estefanía Peñafiel (Ecuador) • Rael San Fratello Architects (USA) • Pedro Reyes (Mexico) • Clark Richert (USA) • Alexis Rochas (Argentina) • Joseph Shaeffer (USA)

Rael San Fratello Architects will also participate in the Biennial’s speaker series. Curated by Lauren Higgins and led by an international group of established and emerging artists, leaders, innovators, and celebrated individuals, The Nature of Things – Speaker Series will explore the Western Hemisphere’s most pressing challenges and exciting innovations. Designed as an open platform for conversation and idea exchange, the series will provide a public forum for engaging with speakers, panels, and dialogue sessions, with topics ranging from ecology, art, technology and society, to culture, design, education and civic engagement. Please join us this July to lend your voice to a new era of ideas and possibilities for the future of the Americas.

Architects Teddy Cruz and Ronald Rael will present Adaptive Architecture and Security Infrastructure at, along and across the U.S.-Mexico Border and discuss research that engages the metropolitan and territorial sites of conflict that encompass the USA / Mexico border. Tuesday, July 6 – 6:00pm at the McNichols Building, Denver, CO.

Additional Information: [ Biennial art offerings will intrigue, provoke the eye and mind ]

Precision planting yields diversity

Two vitally important fields of work in architecture and computing – in digital fabrication methods and in the development of interfaces between digital and analog systems – can find new forms in their combination with one another. Moreover, a recent such experiment in the production of landscape rather than building not only suggests a number of implications for architectural work, but of ecological, economic and urban structures that underlie the projects’s visible formal and aesthetic orders. This project, “Hyperculture: Earth as Interface,” studied the potential outcomes of modifying a commonly employed information infrastructure for the optimization of agricultural production throughout most of America’s heartland; and that same infrastructure’s latent flexibility to operate in both “read” and “write” modes, as a means for collaborative input and diversified, shared output. In the context of industrialized agriculture, this work not only negotiates seemingly contradictory demands with diametrically opposed ecological and social outcomes; but also shows the fabrication of landscape as suggestive of other, more architectural applications in the built environment.

GPS, GIS and satellite surveillance assist in cultivating hyperculture

The Hyperculture project is sited within several contexts: industrial, geographically local, ecological, and within the digital protocols of landscape processing known as “precision agriculture.” Today, these typically work together toward the surprising result of unvariegated repetition, known commonly as monoculture. After decades of monoculture’s proliferation, its numerous inefficiencies have come under broad recent scrutiny, leading to diverse thinking on ways to redress seemingly conflicting demands such as industry’s reliance on mass-production and automation; the demand for variety or customization in consumer markets; and even regulatory inquiries into the ecological and zoning harms brought by undiversified land use. Monoculture, in short, is proving unsustainable from economic, environmental and even aesthetic and zoning standpoints. But its handling in digital interfaces, remote sensing and algorithmically directed fabrication is not.

A web interface can control the agricultural interface remotely

Project Date: 2010
Project Team: Rael San Fratello Architects: Virginia San Fratello, Ronald Rael, Maricela Chan, Ga-Ga: Jordan Geiger, Lizzy Saleh, Nicole Marple
Additional Project Information: Watch the Hyperculture: Earth as Interface video

Earth Architecture: The Book

The groundbreaking survey Earth Architecture is now available in a paperback edition. Only a few copies of the hardcover collectors edition are still available, but going fast. Buy Earth Architecture if you live in the following countries:

[ U.S. | Japan | Germany | U.K. | France | Canada | Australia ]

Read what others say about Earth Architecture.

“One wonders if there will be an outbreak of botanical piracy, whereby someone lassos in one of the floating mobile gardens by the tentacles and anchors it right above his house all summer long, its cooling shades cutting down his air conditioner use, not to mention his electricity bill.”

Read more at Pruned.