Aaron Lee – Looking Outwards 08

Michael Szivos of SOFTlab is an architect based in New York City, which alone gives me an enough reason to review his talk as an architecture student. Michael created this design studio shortly after graduating from the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University. Despite the fact that he described himself as an outsider of architecture world, it is quite surprising to find what many architecture firms today do in practice seems similar to SOFTlab’s work in the past.

At first glance, SOFTlab’s main body of work largely contemplates about the process of fabrication that support the design idea. However, this studio really governs both the initial design and the fabrication process. Many of their works have been successful and were selected by different publications and exhibitions including MoMa, The Met and The New York Times. One of their projects that I found inspiring was from Mobile World Congress 2017 at Barcelona. This large-scale installation of roof structure was designed for IBM booth promoting Watson. For this project, SOFTlab got its design motif from Antonio Gaudi, the legendary Spanish Architect. The beautiful cladding of aluminum petal like panels glow in different colors to as to show the glimpse of future technology of IBM. It was also interesting to watch beside from coding, many of the digital tools they were using overlapped to that of mine in school.

The way Michael Szivos presents is actually very interesting. Because he digressed from being traditional architect, he starts the presentation by comparing his firm to the fields using movie reference. This whimsical self-introduction gave me a better understating to picture about their practice furthermore.

The attached video is another project by SOFTlab called Iris – an array of responsive mirrors with LEDs that rotate in response to people’s movement.

The attached video is another project by SOFTlab called Iris – an array of responsive mirrors with LEDs that rotate in response to people’s movement.

website: https://softlabnyc.com/