Princeton, NJ - Spiraling and swiveling - the large, metal structure currently sitting in the lobby of Princeton University’s School of Architecture opens and closes like a blossom. An aluminum blossom with sharp, louvered blades for petals. It’s a Cool Oculus, a high-tech chimney prototype that uses passive cooling techniques to keep a building comfortable in a desert climate. This week, that structure and another display are at the center of an exhibition and conference, Ultrastructures, which explore the complex and intriguing connections between the macro level of buildings and design and the micro level of physical processes such as thermodynamics.
The conference, featuring several Princeton faculty members and guest speakers, took place Saturday, Sept. 19, at the architecture school from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.
The exhibit, which opened Sept. 14, will run through Oct. 2. The event is supported by the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, Tides Foundation, the architecture school, and the Cooling and Heating for Architecturally Optimized Systems (CHAOS) Lab, a research group headed by Forrest Meggers, an assistant professor at the architecture school and the Andlinger Center. The conference was hosted by Meggers; Dorit Aviv, who earned a master’s degree in 2014 from the architecture school; and Axel Kilian, an assistant professor at the school as well.
“The Ultrastructures conference and exhibition are an attempt to elucidate better the connection of large scale things we design in architecture with the small-scale processes that we as engineers and researchers have to understand in order to design the operation and true function of physical objects in the world,” said Meggers.
For the full story: http://www.princeton.edu/research/news/features/a/?id=15532
The exhibit, which opened Sept. 14, will run through Oct. 2. The event is supported by the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, Tides Foundation, the architecture school, and the Cooling and Heating for Architecturally Optimized Systems (CHAOS) Lab, a research group headed by Forrest Meggers, an assistant professor at the architecture school and the Andlinger Center. The conference was hosted by Meggers; Dorit Aviv, who earned a master’s degree in 2014 from the architecture school; and Axel Kilian, an assistant professor at the school as well.
“The Ultrastructures conference and exhibition are an attempt to elucidate better the connection of large scale things we design in architecture with the small-scale processes that we as engineers and researchers have to understand in order to design the operation and true function of physical objects in the world,” said Meggers.
For the full story: http://www.princeton.edu/research/news/features/a/?id=15532
