Showing posts with label AA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label AA. Show all posts

Monday, March 25, 2024

Grasshopper UK UGM March 2024 – Meeting Notes and Recording



On Wednesday, March 6th, 2024, Simply Rhino held the Grasshopper UK User Group Meeting at The Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. This free event was kindly hosted by the AA [EMTECH} team and delivered to a busy room at their London base.

We have made a full meeting report and invite you to view it below. We hope this is useful for those who were not able to attend and those who joined us but would enjoy a reminder of the presentations. Our thanks to Luca Biselli for his help with the write-up of this meeting.



Friday, November 26, 2021

Re-Emerge Pavilion, a collaboration between AA [EmTech] and Hassell

Photography: Studio NAARO


Architectural Association (AA) Emergent Technologies & Design (EmTech) Post-Graduate Programme and Hassell in London have collaborated to create a new pavilion in Bedford Square.

EmTech Post-Graduate Programme at the Architectural Association has a long history in designing and creating structures and pavilions. This year’s pavilion is titled Re-Emerge and is the first time since the pandemic that the students could closely work together, fabricate and assemble a full-scale structure.

For this collaboration, Hassell gave the students the challenge to keep the project's carbon footprint to an absolute minimum and therefore only use reclaimed timber.

Xavier De Kestelier, Head of Design at Hassell, said, “The students really took on the challenge with both hands and decided early on to build the pavilion out of timber from reclaimed wooden pallets.”

The Re-Emerge pavilion explores new design and construction technologies that repurpose materials that have completed their first life cycle towards innovative structural formations. The project addresses themes of generative design, material computation, large-scale fabrication and assembly technologies, emphasizing the pavilion's ecological impact from the early phases of the design process onwards.

Re-emerge revives the tradition of building on Bedford Square as a collaboration between an academic programme at the AA and partners from the world of practice to test ideas at scale and imagine new possibilities.

Dr. Elif Erdine, Director of the EmTech Program, said, "This collaboration with Hassell demonstrates a successful illustration of how academia and practice can come together to discover novel solutions to complex spatial and material problems. With the support of our other sponsors, BuroHappold Engineering and One Click LCA, EmTech and Hassell explored new design and construction technologies for repurposing timber."

She added, "As designers, architects, and engineers, we share the responsibility to maintain a mindful approach towards our environment while designing and building. Our mutual insight into how construction waste can be a useful resource has originated this research into repurposing timber for an outdoor structure that is lightweight, emphasizing the project’s ecological impact from the early phases of the design process."



The EMTECH (Emergent Technologies and Design Programme) is a post-professional graduate degree at the Architectural Association open to graduates in architecture and engineering who wish to develop skills and pursue knowledge in architectural design science located in new production paradigms. EMTECH investigates new synergies of architecture and ecology through the critical intersection of computational design and fabrication.