October 31 – November 20

MBUS Design Gallery

Installation: October 26-30

Exhibition Title: In Part Whole

Description:

In Part Whole presents recent work by Gilles Retsin Architecture, through the notion of the part. The exhibition advances a critical discussion about the nature of the digital in architecture, suggesting that architecture has never been digital.

After two decades of experimentation with the digital, a better understanding of computation, robotics, material sciences and a research-driven architectural culture have pushed architects to question and revise the prevalent paradigm of continuous surfaces and formal differentiation.  Architects may have in fact consistently misunderstood the nature of the digital, having mainly based their argument on the affordance of computer controlled machines to create differentiated forms. This new body of work is centered on the discrete building block or part: universal elements that are as scalable, accessible and versatile as digital data. The work in this exhibition researches the implications of an architecture that is fully digital – in its conception, production and organization.  This emerging discrete approach has major implications for how we design, produce and build architecture. The initially modernist understanding of architecture as an assemblage of prefabricated, discrete elements enters the new domain of the digital, where it results in a previously unseen architecture that is open-ended, versatile, complex and accessible to many. Through its rejection of continuity,  the Discrete demarcates itself from Parametricism, while continuing a process-driven, digital research agenda. However, the focus on the discrete element or building block implies as well a demarcation from the more recent interest in OOO ( Object Oriented Ontology), which privileges the object as something independent of process, parts or relations between parts.

For more information about Gilles Retsin, CLICK HERE.

[Shown above left: 3D printed Voxel Chair 1.0; and above right “Diamonds” Multi-family house.]