The Lake & Stars

We were selected as one of five design teams for BOFFO‘s Building Fashion 2011. It was a lot of fun working with Maayan and Nikki of the The Lake & Stars.

Location: 57 Walker Street, NYC

Design Team: Michael Szivos, Carrie McKnelly, Liz Kelsey, Elliot White, Alex Singer-Bieder

Installation: Sean Madigan, Maciej Barwinski, Virginia Melnyk, Pearl Ho, Kathrine Salamat, Prudence Katze
more photos

R&D:azzle

We had an amazing time at Creators Project | New York 2011. Wish all of our projects were surrounded by parties, concerts, great people and artists! It was an amazing weekend and we were honored to be included with artists and designers that inspired us when we first started the studio! Many thanks to everyone at Vice and Intel who not only invited us to be a part of the event, but were so accommodating throughout the whole project.

In an effort to have viewers engage with a static object we designed an installation that is defined by impossible views. The piece is graphically camouflaged so that the shape is discovered by viewers as they move around the piece. The interior of the piece is an inversion of the exterior. While the exterior uses a disguise as camouflage, the interior  uses a hyper version of its surroundings to confound a person with the environment. The piece acts as an irregular kaleidoscope of color and light to produce fractured images of views that are irregular and at best impossible.

The two structures are made of plywood panels zip-tied together. The geometry is completely held together by the zip ties. There is no frame and the triangulation not only provides an irregular surface, but also a stable combination of points for each piece to rest on.

Design Team: Michael Szivos, Elliot White, Carrie Mcknelly, Alex Singer-Bieder, Sean Madigan, Liz Kelsey

Installation Team: Rolando Lineros, Simon Kristak,  Andrew Chen,  Andrew Manart, Najwa Doughman, Emily Mak

Fabrication: FLATCUT_

Photos: Alan Tansey

more photos

DAY TRIP

We have been ATTACKed! Phil Chang and his crew at Attack over at WK have featured us the latest issue of Day Trip, a limited run publication distributed to Wieden+Kennedy offices and clients. Day Trip is curated, designed, published and distributed to by our friends at Attack.

San Genarro

Xtra Moenia is a site specific installation designed and produced by SOFTlab for the San Gennaro North Gate. The piece was commissioned by Two Bridges Neighborhood Council and produced by The They Co. The piece serves as the North Gate to the annual San Gennaro Festival. We developed a form that created out of two distinct oculi as a reference to one of the simplest and most effective classical architecture devices. One oculus points up while the other hangs down defining a zone on the street for pedestrians. The two forms are created using a minimal surface blending the two oculi together in a way that blurs the distinction between the two. The final geometry was developed closely with the structural engineering firm Arup. The piece is completely held in tension from cables attached to the surrounding buildings. The shape is completely site specific and can only find its true form when attached at these specific points and tensioned with the proper lengths. Each piece is unique requiring custom software tools to be developed to fabricate the installation.

The installation is made of 4224 laser cut panels. Each panel is a unique shape and printed with a custom color. The panels are connected using over 6,000 aluminum grommets. The shape is held in complete tension using a complex system of cables and tubes attached to the surrounding buildings.

Materials: Mylar, Aluminum Grommets, Photo Gels, Aluminum Pipe.

Size: 25′x25′x60′

Surface Area: 1683 sq ft

Location: Mulberry Street between Houston and Prince, NYC

Design Team: Michael Szivos, Carrie McKnelly, Sean Madigan

Installation: Elliot White, Brandt Graves,  Sarah Hunter, Liz Kelsey, Brandon Bartle, Sonal Patel, Sally To, Simon Kristak, Henry Choi, Julia Schleppe, Katherine Salamat, Anthony Buccellato

Bring to Light

We worked with our good friends over at Njenworks to develop the website for this years Bring to Light Festival in Greenpoint. One of the bigger issues each year is locating all of the artists and where their work will be displayed. We integrated a custom google map as the major graphic element of the site to help the guys at Nuit Blanche locate and catlog the work.

You can check out the site here: www.bringtolightnyc.org

FRAME

SOFTlab is featured in the latest issue of FRAME magazine! And check out the cover girl! Thanks to everyone at FRAME and our photographer, Alan Tansey, for always making our work look amazing! You can order a hard or digital copy here.

ARCHI-FILM MASHUP 2

We will part of the Archi-Film Mashup 2 currated by Superfront and taking place at 3rd Wardat 4:30 on Saturday May 27th. We don’t really know what’s going to happen yet… usually pretty fun when you throw a bunch of interesting people in a jar and shake it up! We are interested in meeting,  presenting, and mashing up with the whole group: Antonio Torres & Michael Loverich of Bittertang, Janette Kim & Erik Carver of The Underdome, and Danielle Willems of Volatile Matter.

We will trying out some real time green screening and sketching!

POLYP.lux

Flash:Light: 2011
Festival of Ideas for the New City

Materials: Mylar, Acrylic, LEDs, Conductive Thread, Lithium Batteries
Area: 270 sq.ft.
Date: May 7th, 2011

SOFTlab produced a hanging installation for the entrance to School Nite, an exhibition of site-specific installations, performances, and discussions. The installation was curated by Nuit Blanche New York as part of Flash:Light 2011 along with the Festival of Ideas for the New City sponsored by the New Museum. 

The installation was in the entrance of St. Patrick’s Catholic School at the corner of Prince and Mott Streets in NYC. The form was generated through a gravity driven process and then prepped for production. The surface contains more than 1400 battery powered LEDs. The piece was designed to light up the entrance for the night time event. The main formal expressions of the installation are the hanging pieces that flicker and blow in the wind, with the intention of slowing down traffic through experience and effect rather than typical barriers. Visitors are meant to co-mingle and interact with the piece, not unlike a clown fish and the sea anemone.

Photos: Alan Tansey

Design Team: Michael Szivos, Carrie McKnelly, Inessah Selditz, and Elliot White

Installation: Carrie Chang, Andrew Chen, Caitlin Duffy, Rich Ericson, Jeff Geisinger, Brandt Graves, Ayaka Hales, David Hecht, Genevieve Hoffman, Mike Kelberman, Simon Kristak, Matt Lake, Avery Max, Owen Nichols, Chris Niederer, Geetha Pedapati, Julia Schleppe, John Schlueter, Austin Smith, Chi Tam, Felisia Tandiono, Alan Tansey, and Joan Tom

Festival of Ideas

Saturday was amazing and a lot of fun! Our good friends at Nuit Blanche and all of the other organizers of the many events really tore the roof off in the Bowery. It was one of those nights that really makes us realize why we love living and working in NYC .  Great to see creative people prove that they not only know how to party, but that they can get people on the streets to stop and wonder how the city can be made better through art and design. The hangover was definitely worth it!

NPNY Website

Mind Blowing Color – PANTONE!

We just received our Pantone package from the Mind-Blowing Color Competition over atBehance! We are now the proud owners of a ColorMunki! Still trying to figure out what it is…

HOLIDAYS 2010

(n)arcissus

(n)arcissus is a site specific installation designed and produced by SOFTlab for NODE10. The piece hangs in the center of the stairwell at the Frankfurter Kunstverein in Frankfurt, Germany. The installation is 9 meters tall and is supported by two metal rings. One at the top of the stairwell and one attached to the lobby ceiling. The form of the piece is controlled by over 1000 custom panels and the 2 rings. The skin of the piece is made of three layers of Mylar. The shape of the panels changes from a square to an x shape based on the position of the panel in relation to the space. Two of those layers change in reverse to produce a gradated color on the outside.

The piece is meant to be seen as both an object and a spatial intervention. As a viewer enters the lobby it is unclear that the piece extends the height of the museum. It is not until the viewer enters the piece on the lobby or ascends the stairs that the extent of the piece is revealed. Both experiences are radically different due to the double skin. From the lobby the interior of the piece is reflective and produces a very narrow vertical space where the viewer is confronted with their distorted reflection produced in hundreds of changing panels. As a visitor moves up the stairs and through the galleries the piece ties the three floors together through a translucent gradated shape produced through the tension of the hanging surface.

The installation is made of over 1000 laser cut panels of Mylar and vinyl and metal snaps.

Info:

NODE10 – Forum for Digital Arts

November, 15th – 2oth 2010

Museum: Frankfurter Kunstverein.

Group Exhibit:
abstrakt Abstrakt
The Systemized World

Curated by:
Marius Watz & Eno Henze

Photos: Marius Watz

Design Team: Michael Szivos, Carrie McKnelly, and Charlotte Vlerick

Installation: Brandt Graves

Photos: Marius Watz

Cellular Automata

…been messing around off and on trying to create a 3d cellular automata  model in Maya using expressions. It is fairly difficult to create an agent based or object-oriented system using expressions because once you drive an attribute from within an expression it cannot receive any other inputs (unless I am missing something or there is a utility node that allows this). So it was a little harder than doing something like this in Flash. The only changing input from the outside is time, which is controlled by the timeline. Files are below for download: the original cell + an updated duplicate script that allows you to create a 3d grid of the cells. Also through in an already built 8x8x8 cell grid. Make sure you set all of the cell’s Timer  attribute to -4 and then go to frame 1 on the timeslider. Choose a cell and set Timer to 0 (this will be the starting point) and playback the animation. It works best with over 6 cells in each direction, but it can get heavy with over 20.

Download Source: cell.mb + 8x8x8 cells.mb + duplicated3d.mel

CHROMAtex.me

CHROMAtex.me is a site specific installation designed and produced by SOFTlab for the bridgegallery. The installation was designed to produce a complex environmental and spatial combination of six colors. The color is mixed in the interior of the form leaving a vibrant interior that is back lit by the gallery. The piece is inverted spatialy; the interior of photo glossy ink jet printed paper is meant to look very precise, finished, and smooth, while the exterior is textured with an array of binder clips used to hold the piece together. Rather than having a finished façade or skin that hides the method of construction we chose to invert this relationship. The first thing viewers see is the method of fabrication. As viewers move around the piece they discover the finished effects produced by the construction. Viewers experience the interior through a series of portals designed to offer a specific glimpse into the piece starting from the front of the gallery. The installation was not only designed with the interior of the gallery in mind but also responds to the street, drawing people in. The largest portal into the piece is attached to the front window of the gallery completely obscuring the interior of the gallery except for the glass door into the gallery. Viewers are invited to look into the colored interior only to enter the gallery and see an all white exterior textured in thousands of binder clips. It is this contrast that makes the portals into the piece so sensational.

The installation is made of over 4000 laser cut panels of photo ink jet paper. Each panel is a unique shape and printed with a custom color. The panels are connected using a set of over 17,000 binder clips. The shape is reinforced using a series of custom acrylic rings. The overall form is hung from the ceiling of the gallery and attached to street facing window, completely suspended in the space without touching the ground.
Design Team: Michael Szivos, Jose Gonzalez, Carrie McKnelly, Elliot White, Tyler O’Rielley, Troy Zezula, Sean Madigan, Corey Kingston
Installation: Julia Schleppe, Andrew Manart, Simon Kristak, David Gonzalez, Andrew Chen, Anthony Buccellato, Laura Vincent, Michael House, Brandt Graves, Austin Smith, Andrew Sutton, Alan Tansey, Mac Glovinsky, Robin Jones

CHROMAtex.me GH Definition

We are working on an installation called CHROMAtex that is set to open at the Bridge Gallery on August 26th. The piece is comprised of over 4400 separate colorful panels. It is being made possible by all of our kind and generous friends who have donated to ourKickstarter page…

Follow along, watch for updates and donate if you feel like it! There are still plenty of spaces for names and messages.

So far the list of communal GH thanks extends to the following (the definition’s not quite done yet… there may be more people to thank in the end):

Chris Chalmers of BIOS : Unrolling Surfaces in Grasshopper

http://biosarch.wordpress.com/2009/09/23/unrolling-surfaces-in-gras…

@ [ u t o ] : Mesh Analysis and Utility Component

http://utos.blogspot.com/2010/06/new-mesh-analysis-utilities.html

Giulio Piacentino : Grasshopper tools in C# : txtLines

http://www.giuliopiacentino.com/grasshopper-tools/#more-1033

Damien Alomar : JPEG file output consultation

http://www.liquidtectonics.com/

Here is the Grasshopper definition that we have been tangled in the past few weeks. By no means is this the most efficient way to go about a project this large but since we basically had to start printing and cutting right away we went with the first thing that worked. It runs a little slow but after we broke the mesh up into separate chunks things became more manageable.

Too busy right now with production to explain everything step by step so I will just outline the basic steps that we (Troy and I) took to tackle the monster.

To read more click on read more.

Read more…

CINCH furniture

eVolo

The new Evolo website has officially launched! We helped our good friends at Evolo design the new site and convert it to an updatable format.  We came up with something very simple that allows visitors to see the three types of content right away from the homepage: News, Magazine, and Competitions. Once again we are lucky enough to have friends and clients that have such good content that it makes our job easier!

Also check out the latest issue of Evolo Magazine, its a great publication!

NPNY 2010

CHROMAesthesiae

We had a lot fun producing CHROMAesthesiae for Devotion Gallery. The installation is a quilted gradient of color populating gallery. The color and scale of each of the funnel structures changes as the viewer moves across the suspended landscape. The installation investigates and challenges ones spatial and chromatic perception of space. CHROMAesthesiae customizable installation is made of discrete, laser cut photo- glossy paper structures held together with binder clips: everyday objects repurposed and precisely recombined.

Design Team: Michael Szivos, Carrie McKnelly, Elliot White
Photographs Alan R. Tansey

Blue Marlin

CROMA

HOLIDAYS 2009

SURFACE: Avent-Guardian

SOFTlab was featured in the latest Avant Gaurdian issue of Surface magazine. We are among great company. It is great to see the studio featured next to work we have long admired.

pAlice

Shizuku @ OVERLAP

DCPP

We launched the site for DCPP arquitectos! It was fun working with Pablo while he was here and in Mexico. The studio has some very amazing built work for such a young studio. A lot of nice work on the way as well. The site is nice and simple like the work of the studio, but still fun to play around with. We imagined each project as a building, with images and a foundation of drawings and sketches. Sort of like DCPP city! Check out the site at the link below. Also check out the DCPP blog to see whats going on in and around the studio.

StudiosGO

T Magazine

The New York Times’ T-Magazine invited us, among 10 other design studios/individuals, to create a short intro animation for their online magazine. The animation was featured in August for the launch of their Fall issue.

We ended up producing a couple of pieces. One was a video and the other was an interactive piece. T-Magazine surprised with their love for the flaming schools!

EFGH

We designed and developed a website for our friends and studio mates Hayley Eber and Frank Gesualdi at EFGH, an architecture and design studio. The interface is made of large pixels that are always changing between a randomly generated color. The idea was to have the work appear as a field that is constantly changing. The effect produces a slow pulsing as if the site and work are breathing

Shizuku for le:60

We produced a video in house for the le60 film festival in Boston. Our entry was selected to be viewed at the festival in Harvard Square on Oct. 4th.

WILD CHILD @ bridgegallery

We helped create a microsite and graphics for the show WILD CHILD at the bridgegallery. The show was a selection of work from young architectural studios practices in NYC and LA. The work was curated by our friend Peter Macapia. We created an interactive piece that relies on two cellular automata systems to show that yound design studios from LA and NYC are actually always comingling through their respective ideas, mathods, and academia. You can check out the site here: bridgegalleryny.com/wildchild

The Red Sea

Michael Somoroff asked us to help produce a large sculpture for the Saint Peter Art Center in Cologne, Germany. He needed help producing an adjustable computer model that would simulate thousands of pieces of wood along a surface with a controllable degree of randomness per unit. In the beginning we produced a set of custom MEL scripts to help visualize variations of random wooden sticks placed normal to a surface. These scripts allowed for adjustable degrees of randomness through rotation and scaling of each individual piece of wood. We also developed a framing structure for the final sculpture. The piece was installed in May and was on view from May 27th through June 15th 2008.
Photographs courtesy of Constantin Meyer.

The video below shows how the custom tools were used. You can check out the source code for custom MEL we wrote here: http://www.softlabnyc.com/2008/02/tile-object-to-surface/

Urban A&O

We designed and developed the website for Urban A&O, a design studio based in NYC focusing on parametric design at all scales. The site archives almost all of the images produced by the studio and makes apparent the volume of work each of their projects involve. Visit the site to view some very interesting photographs of the construction, installation and fabrication of their projects: www.urbanao.com

Paul Poiret – King of Fashion

Governer’s Island

We collaborated with Martin/Baxi Architects on this proposal for Governor’s Island. The project includes a master plan for the southern half of the island, conserving the northern half as a historic zone. The plan proposes a giant greenhouse, enclosing a park with 30 unique landscapes and 30 low-rise buildings. Ten commercial towers rise above the greenhouse. The mixed-use plan creates a self-sustaining environment by accommodating a diverse range of programs, from the mundane to the exotic.