Integrative Materialities: Design & Fabrication Competition

The Brooklyn-based design and fabrication studio, FLATCUT_, announces the ACADIA 2011 Design + Fabrication Competition, an international call for submissions that challenges academics and designers to push the boundaries of materials, minds, and machines. In a partnership with the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (“ACADIA”), FLATCUT_ is opening up their 100,000 square foot fabrication facility, complete with more than 100 cutting-edge machines, as a laboratory for the competition.

UPDATE: The jury has been announced, and consists of Bjarke Ingels, Tod Williams, Dror Benshetrit of Studio Dror and Tom Wiscombe of Emergent.

Each year ACADIA attracts pioneers in computational design to discuss new discoveries in their respective fields. This year FLATCUT_ is offering them the opportunity to translate their ideas into physical form. “We want them to challenge us and to challenge what our machines can do,” says FLATCUT_ founder Tomer Ben-Gal. “We believe this is a great opportunity for designers to search through our encyclopedia of machines and generate innovative ways of combining materials and creating new forms.”

FLATCUT_ and ACADIA are looking for participants to explore integrative material strategies in three design categories: lighting, partitions, and furniture. The jury will be announced in May. Winning designs will be fabricated by FLATCUT_ and exhibited at the ACADIA Conference in Calgary, Canada in October 2011. In addition to having their designs built, the winning designers will receive a $1000 stipend, free admission to the conference and the opportunity to speak on a panel led by Ben-Gal and other Conference organizers.

Designs should demonstrate an experimental approach to the problem of digitally fabricating multiple part assemblies that address both themes of the conference: integrative trajectories- the areas of overlap between design and other disciplines such as computer science, material science, mathematics, and biology - and the performance criteria of the category in which they are situated. Contestants are encouraged to minimize waste and fully engage the performance of their selected materials, to be creative and inventive with their choice of materials and take risks in their material pairings.

“We want to promote design that engages the latent potentials of multiple materials simultaneously in a way that is innovative and takes advantage of the growing range of technologies becoming embedded into the design process.”, said Jason S. Johnson, ACADIA 2011 Co-Chair.

For full competition details or to enter go to:
www.acadia.org/acadia2011/competition.html

Entry Fee: $100


FLATCUT_ is a fabrication studio with a design sensibility that is committed to expanding the creative horizons of designers and architects by exposing them to working models that transcend the traditional, and introducing them to new computational and material capabilities. While they maintain a comprehensive machine shop with state of the art technology and can operate in the traditional sense of “fabricator,” they are excited to be at the forefront of a new design era that integrates the cerebral, creative and material processes. Their design studio in DUMBO, Brooklyn in conjunction with their 100,000 square foot fabrication house in Passaic, NJ is dedicated to pushing the limits of architecture and design through machinery.

The ACADIA 2011 Annual Conference will explore integrative trajectories and areas of overlap that have emerged through computation between design, its allied disciplines of engineering and construction, and other fields, such as computer science, material science, mathematics and biology. The conference will highlight experimental projects in which methods, processes, and techniques are discovered, appropriated, adapted, and altered from elsewhere, and digitally pursued.