Soomeen Hahm, Founder of SoomeenHahm Design Ltd, discusses her recent SCI-Arc Gallery Exhibition “2021: A Steam Odyssey.” The exhibition is conceptualized around the notion that making in AR reinvigorates traditional craftsmanship by augmenting hand and material skills with the precision and formal possibilities of digital modeling—occupying the territory between purely automated, exclusively robotically-driven fabrication and highly crafted processes requiring human labor. The centerpiece of the exhibition, designed in collaboration with Igor Pantic, is a structure built out of steam-bent hardwood using hand tools augmented with the precision of intelligent holographic guides. It explores alternative strategies for the fabrication of digitally designed architectural structures, utilizing cutting-edge, head-mounted devices (HMDs) to holographically assist workers in the manufacturing and assembly of highly varied components using traditional craft techniques. The exhibition piece itself, which is a full-scale section of a larger inhabitable space, represents a next step in the evolution of the SoomeenHahm Design’s ongoing research into complex timber structures, assembled with the assistance of AR. It builds on the methodology developed for the 2019 Tallinn Biennale Steampunk Pavilion (designed by Hahm, Pantic, Gwyllim Jahn, and Cameron Newnham), further expanding it in the realm of fully functional space.

Architecture has always been incomplete. Reliant on and completed by multiple subjects, perceptions and associations, it is time to expand what is integral to architecture. No More Room leverages the contemporary relationship between the rooms we inhabit and the images we consume to produce a sense of being in multiple spaces at once, a type of quantum superposition in architectural terms. It is a layered construction of volumetric relationships centered around a designed core sample. Geologic in nature, it represents a partial architecture embedded with information from many points of origin and melds their traits to find completeness in the round. It asks backgrounds and middle grounds to foreground spatial experiences. No More Room makes room for architecture as the territory between things.

Claude Parent’s (1923-2016) injunction to architects called them to “open the imaginary,” “dislodge the immobile,” “surf on the surface,” and “limit without closing.” In a life dedicated to provoking new alternatives to how life might be lived through drawing, Parent transformed the direction of architecture and influenced many of the most radical contemporary practitioners, from Thom Mayne to Jean Nouvel, to Zaha Hadid. 

Dolmens are prehistoric stone assemblies. At the end of the 19th century, Eugène Trutat, Director of the Museum of Natural History of Toulouse, took photographs of these megalithic structures in the French landscape. Inspired by the Dolmen de Vaour in Tarn, this exhibition imagines extending the elusive quality of rude forms into the modern-day Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU).

An inside look into artist Fabian Marcaccio’s “Paintants Lab” in the SCI-Arc Gallery. Marcaccio considers the “Paintants Lab” to be his dynamic structural atlas, a constellation about pictorial complexity.

Highlights from the 2020 SCI-Arc Selected Graduate Thesis Exhibition. The show features award winning Graduate Thesis projects from SCI-Arc. Graduate Thesis represents the culmination of the M.Arch curricula at SCI-Arc. The exhibition includes projects from the recipients of the SCI-Arc Gehry Prize [2020 Gehry League] Saleh Jamsheer, Zoe Małecki, Richard Mapes, Justine Poulin and Irvin Shaifa, as well as projects by Merit Graduate Thesis Prize winners Linzi Ai + Juicheng Hung, Christina Griggs, Wendy Guerrero, Sam Kaufman, Liu Qiao, Rish Ryusuke Saito, Robert Sipchen and Vincent Yung.

Highlights from the 2019 SCI-Arc Selected Graduate Thesis Exhibition. The show featured award winning Graduate Thesis projects in the SCI-Arc Gallery. Graduate Thesis represents the culmination of the Graduate curriculum at SCI-Arc.

SCI-Arc’s thirteenth annual Spring Show was presented to the public and surrounding community to showcase exceptional Undergraduate, Graduate, and Postgraduate studio projects, along with seminar work in the Visual Studies, Applied Studies, and History + Theory curricula.

A look inside Environment[al], a recent exhibition in the SCI-Arc Gallery, curated by Herwig Baumgartner and Marcelyn Gow. Environment[al] features the work of architects, designers and landscape architects including Izaskun Chinchilla [Izaskun Chinchilla Architects], Enric Ruiz Geli [Cloud 9], Carme Pinós [Estudio Carme Pinós], Wolf D. Prix [Coop Himmelb(l)au], Gilles Retsin, and Günther Vogt [Vogt Landschaftsarchitekten]. Environment[al] examines contemporary attitudes toward environment in a post-digital context.

Mira Henry (SCI-Arc Faculty, DID Coordinator) speaks with friend and colleague Victor Jones (Principal Fievre Jones) about her exhibition “Rough Coat” in the SCI-Arc Gallery. The conversation begins to unpack the aesthetic and social intentions of the piece as it relates to current forms of practice.

Highlights from the 2018 SCI-Arc Selected Graduate Thesis Exhibition.

SCI-Arc’s twelfth annual Spring Show was presented to the public and surrounding community to showcase exceptional Undergraduate, Graduate and Postgraduate studio projects, along with seminar work in the Visual Studies and Applied Studies curriculum.

Mark Foster Gage [Principal - Mark Foster Gage Architects / Assistant Dean - Yale School of Architecture] and Hernan Diaz Alonso [SCI-Arc Director / CEO] discuss the role of parafiction in architecture in the context of Gage’s SCI-Arc exhibition Geothermal Futures Lab.

Join Graduate Programs Chair Elena Manferdini and Graduate Thesis Coordinator Florencia Pita for an in-depth look at SCI-Arc’s Selected Graduate Thesis Exhibition 2017, a juried exhibition of exceptional thesis projects by 2017 graduates.

Curated and organized by Kristy Balliet and David Eskenazi, SCI-Arc’s eleventh annual Spring Show featured work from all school programs: Undergraduate, Graduate and Postgraduate design studio projects as well as coursework from the Applied and Visual Studies seminars

Graduate Programs Chair Elena Manferdini and Graduate Thesis Coordinator Florencia Pita give an in-depth look at SCI-Arc’s Selected Graduate Thesis Exhibition 2016, a juried exhibition of exceptional thesis projects by 2016 graduates.

A SCI-Arc Gallery installation that examines how in the presence of meaningless pictures we find the ever-present apophenia of the human being—the need to see meaning and relationships where none exist.

An exhibition walkthrough of José Oubrerie’s ‘The Chapel of the Mosquitoes’ at the SCI-Arc Kappe Library with José Oubrerie & Todd Gannon.

ARRAYS collects over three dozen maps and diagrams developed by Joe Day and his practice deegan-day design over the last two decades.

A look at the ‘Close-up’ exhibition in the SCI-Arc Gallery curated by Hernan Diaz Alonso and David Ruy and features work by Frank Gehry, Neil Denari, Thom Mayne and others.

An exhibition walkthrough of Maxi Spina’s THICK at SCI-Arc Gallery.