Our long term collaboration with the colleagues from the ITE at the TU Graz recently culminated in the opening of the structural ceramic pavilion on the grounds of the castle of St. Martin just outside Graz. Over the last year the ITE team advanced the research that was begun at Harvard’s MaP+S group from a lab project into a site-ready construction system. The project completes a multi-year project that started with an installation at the 2014 Cevisama in Valencia. More soon in a separate posting!

We hope to see many of you at ACADIA 2017 – in our neighborhood at MIT. Nice to not have to travel halfway around the world for a change… On Thursday afternoon we are presenting our work on auxetic systems!

MaP+S M. Bechthold will participate with a lecture and podium discussion in the Future Now Symposium – the conference looks at how the digital impacts ceramic artists.  A link to the livestream will be posted shortly.

We have begun work on our next exhibition for the Valenica-based Cevisama – to be held in February 2018. We will update the post as work progresses!

MaP+S is filing our third patent on innovative material systems, with potential applications from buildings to consumer products and medical devices.

The next public lecture by MaP+S director M. Bechthold will be held on October 25 at the Barcelona Design Museum. From the announcement:

“Architects have rediscovered their interest in architectural ceramics as a multifunctional material for contemporary designs. Today’s innovations in material technology, digital production methods and assembly approaches allow for applications that combine the materials’ emotional appeal with new functionalities. “Expanding Designs” presents speculative designs and research by Harvard’s Material Processes and Systems (MaP+S) group that involve robotic technology, design experiments and studies geared towards industry integration.”

Check out the announcement here.

MaP+S has been commissioned to produce a ceramic installation for the 2017 Cevisama in Valencia. Prototyping and final design efforts are on their way. The new project is a collaboration with Sal Craig from the Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities. We are currently finalizing the production process and are producing final 3D computational models for production. Our local partners are the Ceramics Research Institute ITC in Castellon and the installer Jordi Font de Mora. Check back for updates!

Prof. Bechthold delivered lectures on MaP+S research at the New Jersey Institute of Architecture, at the 2016 COVERINGS in Chicago, as well as at the Bergamo (Italy) based Italcementi. The next lecture will take place in Nottingham Trent University (UK, June 2016), and at the Museum of Design in Barcelona (Spain, October 2016).

Bechthold, founder of MaP+S, was recently honored with a named chair, the Kumagain Professor of Architectural Technology. Read more in the GSD News Note.

Prof. Ali Malkawi will be hosting a book launch party at the Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities, celebrating the completion of ‘Ceramic Material Systems’ co-authored by M. Bechthold, A. Kane and N. King.

The new Cevisama installation is in production in Spain, this year featuring a novel ornamental extrusion that is CNC custom cut into tectonically active elements. Check back for updates!

The GSD’s 2015 Ceramics course, taught by Leire Asensio Villoria, presented student projects that involved investigations of analogue and digital ceramic craft and the production of tectonic prototypes in collaboration with Harvard’s ceramics studio and its director Kathy King. A selection of the projects will be exhibited at the 2016 CEVISAMA in Valencia, Spain.

The ALivE group produced its third exhibition for the annual Wyss retreat. This year’s installation featured work from the ongoing ‘Nano, Micro, Macro’ class co-taught by Martin Bechthold and James Weaver, and was framed by a large structure that investigated elastic deformation patterns based on negative poisson ratio buckling research in collaboration with the Bertoldi Group.    more

MaP+S recently formed a collaboration with Italy’s CTG, Centro Tecnico di Gruppo S.p.A, to advance research on emerging techniques for reinforced concrete.

MaPS is welcoming Eva Pirker as our visiting scholar for the fall of 2015. Ms Pirker has dual backgrounds in architecture and structural engineering. Her home institution is the Institute of Structural Design at TU Graz. Pirker’s research focusses on computational optimization approaches for complex structures.

M. Bechthold will deliver the evening keynote at the 2015 AIA Vienna Convention, entitled ‘Ceramic Material Systems’.

The MaPS group has been awarded an Autodesk BUILD Grant to conduct research in the area of additive manufacturing. Research in this area will commence in the fall of 2015. The group will also be collaborating with the company’s new BUILD space environment in south Boston.

As guest professor at the Institute of Structural Design at TU Graz M. Bechthold co-taught a studio that investigated the structural use of thin ceramic modules. Student groups designed and tectonic systems, and produced functional prototypes in collaboration with the ceramics study department at the Ortweinschule Graz.

Video Interview (in German)

Check out the article on our exhibition in Valencia in the ‘Architect’, the publication of the American Institute of Architects. Archdaily coverage is linked here.

A new installation is in the works for the 2015 Cevisama. Production of the ceramic elements is now completed, and the assembly is well advanced in Spain. Again we will be at the center of the Transhitos area, working with a group of local producers as well as with Bambalina for the actual installation. Along with three sizeable prototypes we will exhibit small scale models and an exhibition catalogue. > more