OpenForm

For more information on Open Form: http://www.o-f-a.net http://openformarchitecture.wordpress.com///OPEN FORM // Studio SatelliteUN NOUVELLE FORME D'ARCHITECTUREOpen Form se définit comme une structure de studio souple orientée vers une démarche architecturale basée sur l’intégration, l'émergence et à la complicité de la computation et des réalités constructives contemporaines. Ces jeunes stagiaires en architecture soit, Maxime Moreau, Maurice Martel, Darrel Ronald et Minh Tuan Khai Le, croient en l’arrivée de nouvelles méthodes de conception supportées par l’émergence des technologies numériques comme une façon innovatrice de produire des formes construites viables et possibles qui répondent à la fois à la culture et aux potentialités de notre ère. Le studio recherche des manières fraîches d’incorporer les possibilités technologiques dans la pratique architecturale afin de transporter ces idées vers un degré plus élevé de structures réactives; l’expression d’une culture vivante qui capture et indique de nouveaux paradigmes architecturaux.Open Form Architecture (OFA) was founded by four award-winning architecture interns, Maxime Moreau, Maurice Martel, Darrel Ronald, and Minh Tuan Khai Le. Open Form Architecture defines an architecture practice as a satellite studio wherein partners join together to work on projects, competitions and exhibitions. The team join together from their studios in Montréal, Los Angeles, Paris, and Rotterdam. OFA seeks to define a new practice of contemporary architecture based on complex tools such as programming, generative algorithms, bio-mimetic software, and associative design in order to arrive at a nonstandard practice wherein the formal investigations are endless, open forms. Since 2001, OFA has participated in the Concours du Musée de la Nation Huronne Wandat (Finalist); City of Skyscrapers, Biennale of Ljubljana, Slovenia (Third Prize); the Il Ponticello International Charrette, Montréal (Mention); Beirut Martyrs' Square Competition; the City Crossing International Competition, Winnipeg; the Abbaye Cistercienne d'Oka; Théâtre de Terrebonne; and the Bibliothèque de Châteauguay.
FOLLY ISLAND//The virtual line separating the water of the earth and the water of the sky is an important figure in the history of the territory of the Netherlands, because it recalls the return to chaos, which is to say the restoration and invasion of waters.As Rotterdam appears to arise out of the sea, Folly Island appears at the surface of the water among the port landscape of Rotterdam like a new land, a marvel due to its prodigious topography. Folly Island is an artificial island that dares to place it’s limits to the sea and continues to tame the rages of the waters that battles with the permanent menace that is the ocean. The creation of Folly Island by one single agitated surface and its mirror has a symbolic value. The Netherlands, a sea of prairies, learns from the spectacle of the sky and their admiration for the sea’s surface. The perpetual agitation and movement of the water, the mirrored images of light, the magic of their reflections, and the refraction of the sky by the aquatic mirror, these all compose an enchanting environment that suggests the reversibility of the universe.PLAN-LESS HOUSE//Fundamentally the Plan-Less House is our shelter, but it is also a place of appropriation, where we create our identities and our memories. An interface with the world, the home is a device in which we filter our environment and transfer information about ourselves to others. Our proposal for the Plan-Less House seeks to create a simple system of movable elements which together yield almost an infinite combination of spatial configurations. The idea of the home is no longer a plan diagram indicating a hierarchy of divisions, but a set of variables which creates a flexible system adapting to the user. Now a more interesting and complex exchange and interaction can occur, one in which the inhabited(s) can constantly re-appropriate, re-territorialize space as needed. The house conceptually becomes a stage set, in which many activities and storylines take place simultaneously in the same “space” and can also be reconfigured for different “scenes”. A mutable code for living, the Plan-Less House fulfills the need for the special complexity which our lifestyles demand.CITY OF SKYSCRAPERS//Nomadicity is a new way of living in contemporary society. The program of a hotel is an opportunity to reflect upon the city, to research the behavior of contemporary societies and to question urban character in contemporary architecture. The nomadic lifestyle is a "fictitious" world of absolute freedom, perpetual trips and increasingly renewed adventures; a way of life moving, shifting. While it may be a kind of life in movement, the urban nomad always gravitates towards strong areas of population density where territory is already saturated and structured. The nomadic life, then, creates problems regarding space, namely: how to conceive a permanent structure, like skyscrapers, which reflects the dynamic characteristics of the nomads?HOTEL 102 is a social and urban nature, a kind of living representation of the density of the cities and the societies of today. The components of the hotel are interlaced with the programs of the city, as architecture tangles up with volumes of the urban fabric. Each layer of the project is treated in relation and comparison to the others expressing the public field. For example, the streets, parks, private spaces, landmarks, points of views are all of the dependent elements which take part in the creation of a composite skyscraper that integrate different life styles that at the same time split and bind in order to take part in the same scenario. Thus, HOTEL 102 becomes a social and urban structure that group functions in relationship to the private and public fields. By pushing the limits of architecture, HOTEL 102 creates a new direction, a new social context that becomes a cultural conception for social function, a new manner of architectural thinking capable to define new forms of societies.