Search
|

Skylar Tibbits

Architect, director of SJET LLC, and researcher and professor at MIT, Skylar Tibbits is also the director of the Self-Assembly Lab and has given talks for TED. His current research, which stems from computational architecture, focuses on self-assembly, programmable materials and 4D-printing. He was named R&D Magazine’s 2015 Innovator of the Year as well as, in the same year, National Geographic Emerging Explorer.   Self-Assembly Lab MIT

Article

Self-assembly & programmable materials

Skylar Tibbits

Article

Self-assembly & programmable materials

According to Skylar Tibbits, we are living a period of revolutionary convergence between programming capabilities, biology, physics and nanotechnologies. Bolstered by these scientific breakthroughs, he works with his lab at MIT (the Self-Assembly Lab) in two main directions: self-assembly and 4-D printing of programmable materials, which accounts for the dimension of time, and changes in the behavior of materials when specific conditions are met and according to predefined scenarios. The development of these technologies will allow him to return to the scale of architecture, with elegant solutions in terms of both engineering and form to address the challenges of contemporary construction. Skylar Tibbits is an architect and director of SJET LLC. He is a researcher and teaches at the MIT, where he is the director of the Self-Assembly Lab.

Discover

Related Contents

Article

Training Citizen Architects to Serve a Community

Andrew Freear

Article

Training Citizen Architects to Serve a Community

Designing an inclusive city implies involving their residents in urban projects, but what is the role of architects and urban planners in this process? For Andrew Freear, the head of the Rural Studio program, they both have the ethical responsibility of getting locally involved via concrete projects. Architectural schools must thus take on training citizen architects by engaging them in learning by doing, and thus have them redevelop a deep connection with context and places, acting as neighbors and activists within communities in order to collectively carry out experimental projects that tangibly improve society and the environment.

Discover
Vidéo

Collaborating with situations

Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige

Vidéo

Collaborating with situations

The two Lebanese artists and filmmakers were awarded the 2017 Marcel Duchamp Award for Unconformities, a project currently on display at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. This artwork, like their approach, is based on a methodology of investigation and excavation and aims to offer another reading of history and the traces of the past.

Discover
Article

Design: Reparation

Nicolas Nova

Article

Design: Reparation

Nicolas Nova is a social anthropologist. Inspired by New Media Studies and design fiction, he contends that the future of design lies in recycling and reparation as well as reinventing forms and functions. Did you know that a used flip-flop could serve as a lighter?

Discover
Article

From "Mediance" to Places

Augustin Berque

Article

From "Mediance" to Places

The geographer and orientalist Augustin Berque revisits the polysemic dimension of the term “milieu,” and explains the distinction made by mesology—“the area of biology that deals with the relationships between the environments and organisms”—between “environment” and “milieu.” The reality of things differs depending on the environment of each species or culture, the object doesn’t exist in itself but according to its relationship with the subject. In this way, mesology goes much further than the subject/object dualism of modern science. Ontologically “trajective,” the environment is neither objective nor subjective, but firmly between the two theoretical subject/object centers. Berque takes the term “mediance,” meaning the dynamic coupling of the individual and their surroundings, from the Japanese “fūdo,” to which he adds “trajection,” a process that results in the “mediance” of human existence in its concrete surroundings. Taken as a whole, all human environments, distinct from the biosphere through their eco-techno-symbolic dimension, form the ecumene. For architecture, this implies a respect for history and the environment, without mimicking ancient forms, creating from the “mediance” of each place.

Discover
Vidéo

An Attempt to Drain Places

Larissa Fassler

Vidéo

An Attempt to Drain Places

Larissa Fassler is a “Neo-Situationist” artist. By exploring places over the course of many hours, she gleans their ephemeral essence, which she then superimposes on the fixed urban master plan. The subjective maps thus generated highlight both urban narratives and history.

Discover
Vidéo

Maximizing reuse, minimizing transformation

Armand Bernoud

Vidéo

Maximizing reuse, minimizing transformation

Maximum is a design studio that maximizes the value of waste; its material, its form and its engineering. Some materials are transformed in a semi-industrial process while others give birth to unique pieces, such as the glass walls of the Centre Pompidou caterpillar.

Discover

Explore More

Eager to share more generously the results of its collaborations and research, PCA-STREAM publishes STREAM VOICES, its online magazine!

Discover Stream Voices