Cumulus — Soft Launch

April 16, 2013 | Cumulus and News. 0 Comments

cumulus CumulusRings 500x196 Cumulus Soft Launch

Mat­ter Design is excited to announce the soft launch of our first line of jew­elry titled Cumu­lus.

We have been work­ing on this exten­sive line of rings, cuf­flinks, and other items for about a year and are happy to release this pas­sion of ours to the pub­lic. This soft launch con­tains many of the cur­rent ring and cuf­flink designs. While we have received incred­i­ble responses from our phys­i­cal pro­to­types, we would love to hear what you think. For the lim­ited time of this soft launch, we are offer­ing all of the cur­rent designs directly from our man­u­fac­turer (they will make the prod­ucts to order and ship directly to you) allow­ing us a bet­ter under­stand­ing of which designs are most prone to stock our­selves, as well as pro­mote to retail loca­tions. We thank you for your help and for this rea­son we have aggres­sively priced these items to reward early adopters. We are very proud of these designs and we hope you enjoy them as well.

To see the full array of designs and pur­chase your own Cumu­lus, please visit our online shop. If you are inter­ested to carry Cumu­lus in your retail loca­tion, please email brandon[at]matterdesignstudio[dot]com

Cumu­lus is a fam­ily of designed objects rem­i­nis­cent of cloud formations—not only for its rhetor­i­cal appear­ance, but for it’s capac­ity to morph, adapt, and change. Clouds are often per­ceived to carry sig­nif­i­cance beyond their phys­i­cal states. While some indi­vid­ual items in the Cumu­lus fam­ily appear famil­iar as a known type—for instance the pearl—the same sys­tem trans­forms, mutates, mul­ti­plies, and evolves into a fam­ily of solu­tions, each pro­duc­ing their own iden­tity within the large fam­ily of cloud formations.

Introducing Helix

March 18, 2013 | Helix. 0 Comments

helix Helix Matter 01 500x620 Introducing Helix

helix Helix Matter 06 500x245 Introducing Helix

helix Helix Matter 09 500x337 Introducing Helix

We are pleased to intro­duce Helix, a half-scale non-reinforced pre­cast con­crete spi­ral stair. Helix will be on exhibit at the BSA Space until May 15, 2013. The gallery is open Mon­days through Fri­days from 10:00AM to 6:00PM and until 5:00PM on week­ends and hol­i­days. The Gallery is located at 290 Con­gress Street, Suite 200, Boston, MA 02210.

A spe­cial thanks to Matthew John­son and Simp­son Gumpertz & Heger for their facil­i­ties, sup­port, and exper­tise. Another spe­cial thanks to Boston Sand & Gravel, Lehigh North­east Cement Com­pany, and Head­wa­ters Resources, Inc. for their mate­r­ial dona­tions that made this project possible.

Volume Price Reduction

March 18, 2013 | News and Volume. 0 Comments

news CoverVolume WhiteBackground 500x373 Volume Price Reduction

Our pub­lisher has informed us that that Vol­ume: Bring­ing Sur­face into Ques­tion has received a price reduc­tion and will now be on sale for $64.53. To pur­chase your own copy, please visit our online book­store. We hope you enjoy it.

In addi­tion, we are offer­ing a dis­count until March 31st of $10 off Vol­ume! Just use the code SHARE10 upon checkout.

Design Biennial Boston

February 10, 2013 | Helix. 0 Comments

helix Wide 250x697 Design Biennial BostonWe are pleased to announce that Mat­ter Design will be exhibit­ing at this years Design Bien­nial Boston. We have been busy cast­ing a half-scale spi­ral stair­case we call ‘Helix’ that will skewer the exist­ing entry stair at the BSA. This project is a con­tin­u­a­tion of our ded­i­ca­tion to vol­ume with a series of scale pro­to­types and applied research trans­lat­ing past meth­ods of mak­ing into con­tem­po­rary cul­ture. We hope to see you there and please spread the word!

Please join us for the open­ing of the third Design Bien­nial Boston. Thurs­day, 21 Feb­ru­ary 2013, from 6 to 8 p.m. at BSA Space, 290 Con­gress Street, Boston.
For direc­tions, please click here.

The Boston Soci­ety of Archi­tects and pinkcomma gallery rec­og­nize emerg­ing prac­tices and design­ers in the Bien­nial exhi­bi­tion. The pro­gram show­cases sig­nif­i­cant design tal­ent among Greater Boston’s early-career, inde­pen­dent prac­ti­tion­ers through a juried exhi­bi­tion, pub­li­ca­tion, and four site-specific instal­la­tions at BSA Space. This year’s par­tic­i­pants are Bran­don Clif­ford and Wes McGee of Mat­ter Design, Wil­son Mar­tin and Eden Dutcher of Ground­View, Ana Mil­jački and Lee Moreau of Project_, and Kiel Moe.

The exhi­bi­tion will include an archive of works by the 2008 par­tic­i­pants (Ground, Höweler + Yoon Archi­tec­ture, LinOld­hamOf­fice, Merge Archi­tects, MOS, over,under, SsD, Stu­dio Luz Archi­tects, UNI and Utile) and the 2010 win­ners (C&MP, Dan Hisel Archi­tect, Schnei­der Stu­dio, Touloukian Touloukian and William O’Brien, Jr.)

Volume is now available

December 9, 2012 | Volume. 0 Comments

volume Volume Cover 500x328 Volume is now available

We are pleased to announce that Vol­ume: Bring­ing Sur­face into Ques­tion is com­plete and cur­rently avail­able for pur­chase from the online book­store. For those of you that have been patiently wait­ing, this is the pub­li­ca­tion pro­duced via the SOM fel­low­ship. Click on the image to pur­chase your very own copy! This book is 336 pages of obser­va­tions, expla­na­tions, imagery, and insights on the topic of vol­ume in archi­tec­ture. We hope you enjoy and can sup­port the project. This is the first in a line of research to come. Stay tuned for updates on exhi­bi­tions, lec­tures, pro­to­types, and fur­ther publications.

Marc Jar­zombek recently sug­gested one could deter­mine how well a soci­ety is doing by their abil­ity to pre­cisely carve stone. I like his met­ric for its sim­plic­ity, but also for its assump­tion that we must not be doing so well today. So much of the dis­cus­sion sur­round­ing dig­i­tal design has focused on the sur­face. Per­haps this is because we inher­ited eco­nom­i­cally thin sheet mate­ri­als from the indus­trial era, or because we no longer con­sider compression-only struc­tures to be valid. While I argue these struc­tures out­last any partial-tension struc­ture, mak­ing them inher­ently sus­tain­able, I also argue the pur­pose of the pro­posed research is not to revert to this ‘anti­quated’ archi­tec­ture. This research is intended to mine the lost knowl­edge of stereotomy (the art of cut­ting solids, more typ­i­cally stone) as a way to inform our con­tem­po­rary meth­ods of mak­ing with the dimen­sion of vol­ume.

This report was funded through the Skid­more, Owings & Mer­ril Foun­da­tions 2011 SOM Prize, a Fel­low­ship awarded for inde­pen­dent Travel / Research in Archi­tec­ture, Design or Urban Design.

Brandon Clifford to Lecture at Princeton

November 7, 2012 | Uncategorized. 0 Comments

Bran­don Clif­ford to lec­ture at Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity tomor­row, Thurs­day, Novem­ber 8 at 6pm in Betts Audi­to­rium on the  topic of Ani­mate Mat­ter along side Greg Lynn, Hilary Sam­ple, Michelle Forn­abai, and Car­o­line O’Donnell. It is pos­si­ble to view the lec­ture live.

Brandon Clifford Appointed to Belluschi Lectureship

August 19, 2012 | News. 0 Comments

Bran­don Clif­ford has been appointed first holder of the Bel­luschi Lec­ture­ship in MIT’s, School of Archi­tec­ture and Plan­ning, Depart­ment of Archi­tec­ture, a new three-year teach­ing and research post named for Pietro Bel­luschi, Dean of the School from 1951 to 1965, in recog­ni­tion of his gen­er­ous guid­ance of young prac­ti­tion­ers and scholars.

Introducing La Voûte de LeFevre

May 27, 2012 | La Voûte de LeFevre. 0 Comments

la voute de lefevre VOUTE PER 03 BC 500x502 Introducing La Voûte de LeFevre la voute de lefevre VOUTE PER 01 BC 500x267 Introducing La Voûte de LeFevre

We are pleased to intro­duce La Voûte de LeFevre. A com­pres­sion only vault built inside the Ban­vard Gallery at The Ohio State Knowl­ton School of Archi­tec­ture.

GlassCast

April 9, 2012 | GlassCast. 0 Comments

glasscast GlassCast med 500x333 GlassCast

Glass­Cast is an ongo­ing research project into glass form­ing using recon­fig­urable molds

Glass is a ubiq­ui­tous part of the built envi­ron­ment today, but rarely is it seen in appli­ca­tions involv­ing cur­va­ture. This is both a result of the com­plex­i­ties of work­ing with such a sen­si­tive mate­r­ial, and the high cost of tool­ing and the form­ing processes required to con­trol its shape.  Con­tem­po­rary design is mov­ing towards a more per­for­mance based com­pu­ta­tional model, con­nect­ing gen­er­a­tive algo­rithms with sec­ondary and ter­tiary inputs such as envi­ron­men­tal and struc­tural per­for­mance as well as fab­ri­ca­tion and mate­r­ial con­straints. This project seeks to tie these com­plex influ­ences into one cohe­sive process, from design to fabrication.

Cen­tral to the devel­op­ment of the process was the design and fab­ri­ca­tion of a servo con­trolled recon­fig­urable glass slump­ing kiln. Based on the clas­sic “pin mold” typol­ogy, the kiln allows the rapid reshap­ing of the mold sur­face, to allow the pro­duc­tion o0f con­tin­u­ously vari­able com­po­nents from a sin­gle tool. Cou­pled with the devel­op­ment of cus­tom jig sys­tems for robotic abra­sive water­jet cut­ting, the sys­tem can pro­duce uniquely trimmed, dou­ble curved com­po­nents in stan­dard float glass. Par­al­lel to this tra­jec­tory has been the devel­op­ment of cus­tom grasshop­per com­po­nents to apro­vide the designer with instant feed­back on the lim­i­ta­tion of cur­va­ture and scale which the kiln can pro­duce. The com­po­nents then pro­duce the out­put to the kiln for the posi­tion­ing setup, which is dri­ven through a cus­tom motion controller.

glasscast 3wide1 01 1 500x200 GlassCast

The ini­tial work cul­mi­nated in a instal­la­tion which ran from Jan­u­ary to April at Lib­erty Lofts Annex, in Ann Arbor, MI.

Project Cred­its:

Lead: Wes McGee of Mat­ter Design Stu­dio and Catie Newell of Alibi Stu­dio

with Aaron Wil­lette, Lucy Ole­chowski, Bran­don Clifford

Fab­ri­ca­tion Team:

Grant Weaver, Simon Rolka, Patrick Ethen, Maciej Kaczyn­ski, Eti­enne Turpin, Andrew Stern, Brian Mus­cat, Chuck Newell

Con­sul­tant:

Steve Karnowski

This work has been funded by:

Research Through Mak­ing Grant | Taub­man Col­lege of Archi­tec­ture and Urban Planning

and

Office of the Vice Pres­i­dent of Research | Uni­ver­sity of Michigan

Introducing Pongo

March 2, 2012 | Coat Rack. 2 Comments

coat rack Pongo 500x361 Introducing Pongocoat rack PongoDetail 500x201 Introducing Pongocoat rack PongoManufacturing 500x286 Introducing Pongocoat rack PongoAssembly 500x261 Introducing Pongo

We feel strongly that great designs appear to be effort­less.  Objects of desire that func­tion, while main­tain­ing a state of com­fort.  Our design method­ol­ogy trans­lates proven and estab­lished clas­sics into con­tem­po­rary meth­ods of mak­ing.  This trans­la­tion serves to invert a new iden­tity for a famil­iar strategy.

For this project, we tack­led the twisted-stick coat rack as a typol­ogy.  Our first incli­na­tion was to melt and weld these sticks together.  Though imprac­ti­cal, it would have been pos­si­ble to pur­chase a tree and carve this object out as a solid.  Instead we looked to 5-axis milling as an oper­a­tion to ensure three indi­vid­ual sticks could be carved effi­ciently, shipped effi­ciently, and still align pre­cisely with mechan­i­cal fas­ten­ers.  Clever spi­ral­ing fas­tener place­ment allows the sin­gle com­po­nent to attach to itself, instead of requir­ing vari­a­tion between the sticks.  In doing so, we were faced with the chal­lenge of pro­duc­ing the moment in the design we are most fond of — the belly but­tons.  These inter­nal­ized nubs rhetor­i­cally call for the bolts.  The three sticks wrap around each other in such a way that the bolts align with the neigh­bor­ing parts, mak­ing the assem­bly a sim­ple task that requires no instruc­tion manual.

We hope you can help Pongo find a great home.