ARCHITECTURE with a TWIST

Architecture with a twist is what I experienced over the last few days. Standing on the border of architecture, industrial design and computer science. Designing the Dynamic was the theme of our studio hosted by Mark and Jane Burry. Hugh Whitehead Director of Foster+Partners was invited to Australia to be our 'Capitan'!

Re-thinking the design of a sailboat was our mission - increasing speed our objective. For that we had to clearly understand the dynamics of sailing such as wind factors and all the variables around. Aspects of digital virtual simulation and analogue testing with physical models. We spent time in the lab, the pool and Phillip Bay, Melbourne for testing, validating and enjoying sailing.

"...sailing is a natural-science, sailing is a social-science, sailing a non-science but the experiential and emotional act of engaging with nature on a man-made artifice to take advantage to what is given to us - wind. Sailing is performance but also beauty, the crew and the individual. The aesthetics of sailboat fabrication emerges from the science of computing and manufacturing out of templates... the final validation is the human eye - the expert's wise inspection where the tacit take over the explicit... an iterative interplay of rationality and intuition. The loop is thus closed by visual validation - under the feel/looks good factor. Hand sketching and sculpting is part of the process; scripting and construction computing is what makes it real. Carving a beautiful high-performance, yet fragile structure, is what our assignment is!"

There is a reason for naming this blog architecture with at twist - twist is a technical term in sailing which applies to the sail itself and the angle of attack onto the sail, wind pressure points and that sort of thing.... we worked on such TWIST for about a week to achieve "absolute speed"!

enjoy the show,

GAM