Architecting Air
Robotics & Inflatable Architecture for A Portable Maker Lab
Making Space
Considering Air as both as a metaphor and a building material, explorations in this workshop drew on the valve mechanism that collapses when inflated.
The weight and heat of a Shaker hearth are combined with the levity and portability of lightweight structures to imagine a maker space to house community gatherings.
“For centuries, architects like Louis Kahn have thought about how to create spaces that evoke particular states of mind. There is an even longer tradition of folk architecture embedded in the structures ordinary people have created for themselves, tweaking and tuning inherited forms. Now the emerging field of ‘neuroarchitecture’ has begun to examine empirically how the brain responds to buildings and their interiors, and to theorize about how these reactions might be shaped by our evolutionary history and by
the biological facts of our bodies.”
—Annie Murphy Paul
The Extended Mind
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Inhabiting Form
Tangible Mind hosted a design charette with Che-Wei Wang, a friend/ collaborator from CW+T, who is an expert in inflatable architecture. He joined Riley Studebaker, a robotics specialist and architecture professor at RPI, Claire Moriarty, an architecture professor at RPI specializing in AI and Robotics, and Nadav Hendel, a mechanical engineer and nature-informed designer with a specialty in with specialty in agricultural systems.
Together, they ideated on a portable maker space inspired by Shaker Form and the landscape.