Digitally Fabricated Australian Beach Hose In New York

ABC TV this week features Jeremy Edmiston's digitally fabricated "Burst" house in a display at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York. The building is designed on a computer and the each piece is cut by a computer controlled system.

Unfortunately unlike the architecture and the TV report, which is a work of art in itself, the web information about the exhibition by MOMA and by the architects are poorly designed. It may be that art galleries and architects do not understand how to design usable web sites, or simply don't care about usability. As it is I was unable to navigate within the architect's web site and had to use an external search engine to find my way around. To make it harder the designer decided to have the links move around the screen, making them very hard to click on.

See also:

• Digital architecture

• Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling

Broadcast:

Synopsis

Sitting just off Sixth Avenue, amid the skyscrapers of Manhattan, the beach house is disarmingly simple in appearance. But Burst is a structure on the cutting edge of technology and design.

Its twisting, sculptural form is generated by a computer and was assembled on site from 1,100 laser-cut pieces of plywood.

Architect Jeremy Edmiston says, “There’s no way to arrive at that twisting form easily without the computer …the twisting is about creating the right conditions to take advantage of the cross-ventilation of the site … to take advantage of the heating and the cooling the sun gives us on the site.“

Barry Bergdoll, curator of the Home Delivery exhibition says, “We threw our net incredibly wide.... Burst is just a fantastic piece of architecture … brilliantly formally inventive … intriguing.”

Bergdoll says the beach house has been a real hit with MOMA patrons. “It’s a house which is at the cutting edge of applying the forces of digital fabrication ….. it really is something which you wonder if, historically, people will look back and see as the beginning of something.”

From: New York - Aussie Beach Shack, Reporter: Michael Maher, POSTCARD SERIES 18, EPISODE 15Foreign Correspondent, ABC TV, 07/10/2008