Architecture Students Create Full Scale Pavilion on Campus
A Woodbury School of Architecture education recognizes that the design of the built environment is a collaborative endeavor. And a lot of collaboration happens in our design built workshops and object making classes. As Norman Millar, Dean at Woodbury School of Architecture, points out: “We encourage our students to develop their architectural curiosity at all scales—from hands-on experiments in craft and fabrication to investigations in local urban traditions to speculations on regional watersheds and global consequences.”
One of the recent hands-on projects on the Woodbury University Los Angeles (Burbank) campus involved the making of a full scale pavilion. Under the guidance of adjunct professor Mahdi Alibakhshian, who is also the principal at QASTIC LAB, architecture students at Woodbury University documented their process of building “The Void” in this time lapse video:
Woodbury School of Architecture – Creating The Void from WoodburyU on Vimeo.
Void space is a research based initiative to create site specific responses that address two very specific designs questions: How do you create a floating shade device with no explicit structural interfaces at adjacent walls or the ground? And secondarily, how do you to create a specific site design insertion that is constantly influenced by the environment, users, and other elements that define its context.
As a result the Void Pavilion, is a collaborative design parti between the students and faculty at the Woodbury School of Architecture. The project explores the idea of optimization in form finding by testing the potential quality of materials when defining a monolithic structural surface. Working with aggregated stripes of aluminum, VOID SPACE offers a complex surface that is minimal in its aggregate. The surface creates a dialogue with the ground, however without touching it. Triangular dashed patterns are folded then attached to form a double curvature surface which takes its shape from its relaxed condition under the force of gravity. The structural performance of the hanging surface is primarily defined through its interaction with tension forces.
