February 11–March 20, 2010
Buffalo Art Studio
Nicholas Bruscia, Matthew T. Hume, Omar Khan
This exhibition in the UB Art Gallery’s Second Floor Gallery presents faculty and student research in responsive materials conducted at the Center for Architecture and Situated Technologies at the University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Urban Planning. It displays the products of the design lab, presented through drawings, models, tools, material studies, and working prototypes that demonstrate the process by which projects are conceived, researched and developed. Reflexive Architecture Machines envisions architecture that is self-organizing, capable of transforming itself in response to changes in its environment or use. It re-imagines how we shape and assemble conventional materials, like rubber, plastic, and wood through a combination of material and computational processes to develop more complex relations between parts and wholes. This fundamentally challenges the static nature of conventional building materials and sensitizes them to the ephemeral and dynamic qualities of environmental conditions like heat, moisture, air chemistry, and gravity.
Projects on view include Allotropic Systems designed by Nicholas Bruscia, which uses flexible rubber molds to produce self-similar plastic casts. By reusing the same mold to produce one plastic sibling after another both plastic’s and rubber’s mutability is exploited to yield a considerable amount of formal variety. Matthew T. Hume’s Warped offers experiments in plywood construction featuring a set of walls and arches composed from mechanically joined wood plys that change their shape in response to atmospheric moisture by twisting and bending between open and closed conditions. Omar Khan’s Gravity Screens and Open Columns explore the possibilities offered by elastomers for developing an organically kinetic architecture. They use the unique quality of this material to build collapsible and expandable structures that move similar to plants and respond to information gathered by electronic sensors.
As part of the exhibition, there will be an offsite installation on view at the Buffalo Arts Studio from February 9 through 22, 2010. Omar Khan’s installation of Open Columns, a responsive environment composed of nonstructural columns made from flexible composite urethane elastomers that descend and ascend based on the carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the given space. The project responds to crowds of people that alter the CO2 chemistry of the air. Both live and prerecorded video feed will be transmitted to the UB Art Gallery from the Buffalo Arts Studio.
Buffalo Arts Studio (BAS) is located in the Tri-Main Center: 2495 Main Street, Suite 500, Buffalo, NY 14214. BAS hours are Tuesday through Friday from 11 AM to 5 PM and Saturday 11 AM to 3 PM. For more information call 716.833.4450.
Joe Andoe was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1955. He received his MFA from the University of Oklahoma in Norman, Oklahoma in 1981. In 1993, Norm was given the title of Honorary Chair for the University of Oklahoma.
Curated by Al Harris F. and Karen Emenhiser.