We will have a view­ing party at Curbs and Stoops Active Space in Brook­lyn. 566 John­son St. Brook­lyn, NY
Host your own view­ing party in your city and expe­ri­ence to the work being done at RISD Architecture.

About the Façade Media Festival

This Spring RISD’s newly formed Amer­i­can Insti­tite of Archi­tec­ture Students(AIAS) brings you the Façade Media Fes­ti­val — an event explor­ing build­ing scale pro­jec­tions, the rela­tion­ship between media and space. This event will fol­low an after­noon sym­po­sium pre­sented by the archi­tec­ture depar­ment, Teach­ing Archi­tec­ture Beyond the Desk­top Horizon.

The event will show­case selected works pro­jected onto the north façade of the BEB, viewed from the park­ing lot. Per­for­mances, visu­al­iza­tions, instal­la­tions, inter­ven­tions, any media. The AIAS is accept­ing sub­mis­sions until April 1^st. (no joke) Sub­mis­sions might engage ques­tions of architecture/​space, technology/​media, scale, light etc. Sound accom­pa­ni­ments are wel­come. Pro­pos­als should account for a 2 – 10 minute per­for­mance. The pro­jec­tion dimen­sions are roughly 100’ x 75’. Along with the per­for­mances, selected stu­dent projects will be doc­u­mented and pro­filed by some of our media partners.

Teach­ing Archi­tec­ture Beyond the Desk­top Horizon

In recent years, the agenda of local share­holder engage­ment in the teach­ing and prac­tice of archi­tec­ture has reemerged in ways that cou­ple human­i­tar­ian moti­va­tions with the­o­ret­i­cal savvy and hands-​on con­struc­tion think­ing to result in spa­tially and tec­ton­i­cally beau­ti­ful con­tri­bu­tions to the built environment.

This set of inter­ests has been pro­nounced in the Depart­ment of Archi­tec­ture at RISD over the past five years. The pur­pose of this round table is to take stock of what has been accom­plished, eval­u­ate the dif­fer­ent ways in which it has been part of archi­tec­tural edu­ca­tion and spec­u­late on how future devel­op­ments could evolve. The work of the Depart­ment in this vein can be con­sid­ered within a few pre­lim­i­nary categories:

• Mate­r­ial– based projects, as rep­re­sented by the work in bam­boo done by Enrique Mar­tinez in sev­eral stu­dios, and cul­mi­nat­ing in the con­struc­tion of a sports facil­ity in Costa Rica dur­ing WS, 2009 (crit­ics Enrique Mar­tinez and Sil­via Acosta)

• Tectonically-​based projects, as rep­re­sented by the solid con­struc­tion meth­ods stud­ied in suc­ces­sive stu­dios by Sil­via Acosta and real­ized in the two adobe projects for Casita Linda in Mex­ico (WS 2008 and 2010), and planned for the ongo­ing col­lab­o­ra­tion in Guatemala with three part­ner­ing NGOs and using earth bag con­struc­tion (FS 2010, ongoing)

• Small-​scale activist-​based projects, as rep­re­sented by the stu­dios in Detroit and Paw­tucket taught by Thomas Gard­ner and by his own expe­ri­ence build­ing the first sin­gle fam­ily house in down­town Detroit since the 1970s for a stake­holder family.

• Projects based in civic the­ory part­nered with local CDC and NGO part­ners in Prov­i­dence, as rep­re­sented by Brian Goldberg’s stu­dios on the idea of “com­mon­wealth” (FS 2009 and 2010).

Graf­fiti Research Lab
Inter­ac­tive Architecture