Fifteen artist/architects were selected to build interactive installations at various sites in the French Quarter for the annual Descours event sponsored by the AIA New Orleans in 2010. Once a year for ten days, private courtyards, gardens and shelters were opened to the public, volunteer docents recruited and the entire art/architecture community mingled.
Number 14 in the tour, this piece was installed in a private garden on the East side of the French Quarter. Because materials were scarce, no material could be wasted. In order to eliminate waste in the laser-cutting process, the design of the tiles was limited to rectilinear shapes. And connections had to be made with alternative materials, in this case rivets and mylar strips.
With the use of three small space heaters installed in the center of the cylindrical piece, the prototype demonstrated the capacity of the thermobimetal material to change with temperature. When the heaters were turn on high, each individual piece would curl, the openings would widen and the overall shape of the piece would change. In other words, the waist would cinch as if it were a corset being tightened.
Site:
DesCours AIA New Orleans
Date:
December 2010
Lead Designer/Researcher:
Doris Sung
Principal, DOSU Studio Architecture, Assistant Professor, University of Southern California
Team:
Julia Michalski, Dylan Wood, Brent Nishimoto, Joseph Sharaf, Peter Vu, Ross Jeffries.
Grant support:
AIA New Orleans
Doris Sung
After receiving her B.A. at Princeton University and M.Arch. at Columbia University, Doris Sung worked in various offices in cities across the U.S. before arriving in Los Angeles in 2001. She developed her research focus while teaching at University of Southern California (USC), the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), University of Colorado and the Catholic University of America.
In 1999, she opened her office, dO|Su Studio Architecture, and soon received many AIA and ASID awards for her work, including the prestigious accolades of AIA Young-Designer-of-the-Year, ACSA Faculty Design Award, R+D Honorable Mention from Architect Magazine and [next idea] award from ARS Electronica.
Currently, she is working on developing smart thermobimetals and other shape-memory alloys, unfamiliar materials to architecture, as new materials for the "third" skin (the first is human flesh, the second clothing and the third architecture). Its ability to curl when heated allows the building skin to respond for purposes of sun-shading, self-ventilating, shape-changing and structure-prestressing. Her work has been funded by the national AIA Upjohn Initiative, Arnold W. Brunner Grant, Graham Foundation Grant, Architectural Guild Award and USC ASHSS and URAP Awards. Her TEDxUSC talk is available on ted.com.
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