003 March 10 2021
Grand Designs
First aired in 1999, this British house design TV program has produced over 200 episodes and more than 3 spinoffs in countries like Australia, New Zealand, and Sweden. This program’s unique aspect is its showcasing of almost the entire process, giving you the full breadth of what it is like to go through the design, construction, and finishing phases of some extremely custom homes.
You can find almost all of the episodes on youtube!
The Sliding House
Located in Suffolk, England, this innovative residential project was designed for homeowner Ross Russell and his wife, with the intention for the owners to grow food, entertain, and enjoy the landscape. Appearing as an oversized red barn with a timber-clad exterior and 45-degree angle roof, design studio dRMM‘s Sliding House encompasses 3 separate buildings; house, garage and guest annex. Each segment is connected by a 20 ton, motor-driven enclosure that slides back and forth to create a variety of configurations depending on season or climate.
Automatically recharged through solar power, four electric motors silently slide the outer house shell back 28 meters to reveal the inner glass and steel structure. After 6 minutes, the glass enclosure has been completely exposed and the outer shell is positioned to create a shaded patio area for the summer.
Neri Oxman and the World of Material Ecology
An architect, scientist, engineer and inventor, Neri Oxman has led the creation of scientific research and technologies with an emphasis on integrative design across scales and disciplines.
Dr. Neri Oxman is the founder of the discipline she calls material ecology, which marries the technological advances of computational design, synthetic biology and digital fabrication (otherwise known as 3-D printing) to produce compostable structures, glass objects that vary their optical and structural properties, and garments made from a single piece of silk fabric.
Material Ecology is design philosophy, research area, and scientific approach. It serves to explore, informs, and express interrelationships between the built, the grown, and the augmented.
