DESIGN MAKE FESTIVAL

LAUNCHING TURENSCAPE ACADEMY’S FIRST DESIGN MAKE FESTIVAL

In October 2017, Turenscape Academy (TA) will launch its first Design Make Festival, a 9-day event hosted at our newly completed campus in Xixinan, Anhui.

Design teams from visiting universities and independent students will focus on designing and building a series of material installations, built on TA’s campus.

Emphasising a comprehensive, integrated and multi-disciplinary approach to design, each workshop group is led by an internationally recognised expert in their

field, and taught by a team of motivated designers and scholars.

The emphasis of these design-build projects will be on the combination of high tech computational design techniques combined with low tech construction

methods and materials. The goal is to work towards researching and discovering new ways in which design intelligence can be migrated from advanced design

tools to innovating upon standard modes of on-site manufacturing and assembly processes. In a first stage of work, the teaching of skills in Rhinoceros 3D

modeling software, and plug-ins, including grasshopper, among others, followed by a second stage of building a distinct material structure such as a pavilion,

enclosure or exterior furnishing.

COMPOSITE BAMBOO AND CONCRETE SHELL STRUCTURES

This workshop exposes students to the physical act of making in architecture through dynamic structural logics and material testing.   The objective is to prototype

new kinds of shell structures, using concrete as casting material, and engaging more closely with the material’s unique properties: fluidity, pressure and weight.  

Learning from seminal precedents of thin shell concrete structures, such as those by Torroja, Candela, Isler, Dieste, Nervi and others, the workshop aims to innovate

upon composite formwork techniques which are more responsive to liquid material than cumbersome and labor intensive, timber planking formwork methods.

In a first stage of the workshop, students will be tooled up with a variety of form finding techniques for shell structure design, ranging from computational

processes, structural simulations, geometrical descriptions and   analogue formwork devices.   Through trial and error experiments, not only the limits of how a

material might perform under gravity will be tested, but also how to direct the exact contribution a material may bring to a hierarchical assembly of live forces at

play, in order to enhance material performance. In a second stage, the initial research findings will be synthesized towards a collective proposition and construction

of a full-scale and site-specific installation. An inventive fabrication process of translating emerging geometries to traditional building techniques,

will use local and low-cost materials, such as bamboo, textiles and cable-net as reinforcing and formwork for composite concrete shell structures.

PARTICIPANTS

• Dr. Jerry Hsiao, Fengchia University, Taichung, Taiwan

• Olivier Ottevaere, Double (o) Studio, The University of Hong Kong Department of Architecture

• Richard Hsu, Tongji University

• Tom Verebes, Turenscape Academy

• Xiong Ying, Turenscape Academy