Archives: Projects

An assemblage of cast paper imprints derived from non-architectural objects, Yevrus 1, Negative Impression is a disposable architecture of literal references. It calls into question the contemporary architectural vogue for software generated form, complexity and abstraction. A 1973 Volkswagen Beetle and a late 1970’s open top speedboat were cast multiple times in recycled paper pulp and then united to make a strong structural whole. Visitors to the Gallery can occupy a mock tanning booth formed from the negative spaces left by the artifacts.

With Negative Impression, Ball and Nogues pose the question, “can we adapt everyday objects as tools for fabrication and generators of both architectural space and decoration?”

The project inverts and reworks some of the methods Bruce Nauman employed in making the sculpture A Cast of the Space Under My Chair in1965. Where Nauman makes a solid cast directly from a negative space found in the real world, Ball-Nogues makes a negative cast directly from a solid object and then expands the process to yield an architectural system of panels that can be arranged according to functional demands and aesthetic whimsy.

Prior to selecting the Beetle and speedboat, the designers considered several iconic relics gleaned from the Los Angeles suburban-scape including a 19-foot tall roadside “Muffler Man” and a classic kidney bean swimming pool. To study each objects feasibility for use in the project, the team explored the structural possibilities of its form, evaluated its potential to become a heated mold, and then tested a proprietary pulp casting process on it. Once chosen, the object was then digitally scanned in three dimensions. The scan data provided an accurate model of the object that reflected its idiosyncrasies in minute detail. The data was then used for studying the arrangement of spaces and determining how each shape might be divided into panels and unified within the structural whole.

The designers call this integrated design and production process “Yevrus”—the word “Survey” spelled backwards. In this project, the first in a series of Yevrus experiments; Ball-Nogues rethink conventional uses for scanning and surveying equipment and explore its potential within architectural design methodologies. No longer a simple tool for construction and engineering, the survey is a means for “finding” form, seeking structural stability, and realizing iconic meaning.

Long considered disposable, paper has traditionally played only a supporting roll for architecture. As a medium for drawings, models, and memos, it assists in the process of design. Origami notwithstanding, designers have recently begun to recognize paper’s potential for three-dimensional products and architectural building systems. Paper is also potentially more sustainable than other materials because it is made from a renewable resource making it well suited for provisional structures.

Ball-Nogues Studio: Benjamin Ball, Gaston Nogues, Benjamin Jenett, Allison Porterfield, Anirudh Dhawan, Melissah Bridge, Mora Nabi, Edwin Cho

Project Manager: James Jones

SCI-Arc Student Workshop Team: Sonali Patel, H Clark, Julian Rui Huang, Roger Cortes, Edwin Nourian, Vanessa Teng, Manori Sumanasignhe, Chung Ming Lam, Chi Hang Lo, Casey Benito, Duygun Inal, Hector Campagna, Cristen Dawson, Gyoung Min Ko, Jonathan Schnure, Francisco Movre, Pablo Osorio, Amir Hababiolaolalai

Other contributors: Forester Rudolf, Kristen Loheed

Digital Scans and Consulting: ScanLAB Projects

Structural Consultants: Buro Happold, Los Angeles.

Special thanks to Eric Kim for letting us use his pool.

The Pavillon Spéciale is an installation designed and built by students of the Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture under the direction of Ball-Nogues Studio. The installation can be arched and curled at full scale to form different types of space befitting the university’s summer program. The installation creates a sense of place while providing a respite from the sun and rain.

The pavilion is a unique structure. In architecture terminology, the phrase that describes a system whose form is derived from the deformation of its materials under force is “form active.” This type of structure is difficult to study using software. It often requires architects to explore their designs by testing full-scale mock-ups, and using that empirical information to help inform the process of digital modeling, which is studied in the studio rather than in the field. Students engaged in this iterative design process with Ball-Nogues.

The structure is comprised of approximately 200 “cells”, each made from locally sourced plastic tubing bent and curled in custom jigs designed and constructed by students.  To provide shade, each cell has locally sourced fabric membrane spanning between the tubes. The cell module is a very effective way of constructing a temporary structure: each can be transported as a flat unit and rapidly assembled on site; when it is time for the structure to come down, dismantling and transportation to a new site is easy.

project info:

Description of the competion:

The Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture enters its 2^nd edition of the “Pavillon Spéciale”, an annual spring architectural series that gives young emerging architects the opportunity to build with students, a temporary project in the heart of Paris. Once a year from June to October, The Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture will become an international theatre for architectural experimentation, making it unique in its kind. The timescale (maximum of 3 months from invitation to completion) will provide a unique model that presents a strong synergy between architecture and education and with talks before during and after construction, it will become a contemporary platform for architects, students and the city itself.

The “Pavillon Spéciale” program is curated by Matteo Cainer. Conceived by the later in the summer of 2010, it is an ongoing programme of temporary structures by emerging international architects. The series is unique worldwide because it not only presents the work of an international architect or design team, but is an on site collaboration with a team of students from the Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture. Each year a different pavilion will be sited on the school’s inner courtyard, and for five months there will be a programme of public talks, events, performances that will take place in and around the Pavilion.

Talus Dome is both a sculpture in the landscape and a mirror to the landscape.  It reflects the sky, the weather and the river of cars that pass by.   The hollowed dome is part of a holistic landscape where nature and culture are inextricably linked; a unity that belies our dualistic distinctions. The overall shape was developed from our investigation into the geological engineering concept – “angle of repose”, the natural inclination that an aggregated material assumes when dropped into a pile from one point.  In making a shape determined by natural phenomena, we aim to further blur the distinction between the notions of objective, naturally occurring reality and that reality which is culturally constructed through subjective experience.
Talus Dome is an earthwork fashioned from a non-earth work material; an aggregation of steel spheres. It might be perceived as a fragment of synthetic nature that emerges from the ground or a remnant of the process of constructing the bridge itself. Comprised of approximately 900 stainless steel spheres that together assume the shape of an abstracted pile or mound, it is void in the center rather than solid.  It also has spaces and gaps between the spheres, leaving the viewer to complete the shape with her mind’s eye while enabling her to see between the spheres and through the pile. The surrounding landscape is reflected within each of the spheres.  This duality contributes to the playful quality of the work.  In one way, the work becomes part of the environment through mimicry and reflection, however, in the same spatial gesture, the work is artifice by way of its transparency and the empty cavity within it.
Talus Dome embodies nature in two ways.  One, because its shape quite literally suggests natural features in the landscape of the Edmonton region such talus cones below river bluffs, piles of gravel on construction sites, snow drifts, etc. Two, because, in engineering terms, the domed form is a parabolic shell structure where each individual sphere settles into a gravity induced, self-organized relationship to its neighbors.  We also employed a “form finding” methodology to determine the overall shape of the dome. This process is akin to the one employed by architect Antonio Gaudi for his Sagrada Familia in Barcelona to yield shapes that have an optimal level of structural stability but use minimal amounts of material. The dome is structurally sound by virtue of its geometry rather than the mass of its materials; it is highly efficient.

Conversely, the surface of Talus Dome takes on different colors with the changing seasons and hours of the day as it literally reflects its surroundings. Under certain lighting conditions, it has a strong visual presence along the Drive, and at others, it visually recedes to blend into the scenery.  Its visual quality is not static, and it therefore creates an appealing tension between the permanence that it exhibits and aims to symbolize, and its changeable appearance that suggests the mutability of nature.

Talus Dome commemorates the unique beauty of Edmonton and the surrounding region while reminding us of man’s agency within it. We aim to call to mind the breathtaking vistas along the North Saskatchewan River while creating a landmark for bicyclists, pedestrians and motorists.  Unlike the mistake that was made by the City of Los Angeles when it paved over the Los Angeles River in the early 20th Century, Edmonton has woven the Alberta landscape through the city itself in the form of the River; it has allowed the River and its flood plains to remain pristine and idyllic while the City develops.  Talus Dome is an evocative emblem of this actuality and a celebration of the coexistence of human kind with the natural landscape along Whitemud Drive – a river of another kind.

Principals and Designers in Charge: Benjamin Ball and Gaston Nogues

Project Manager: James Jones

Project Team: Karla Castillo, Deborah Chang, Tyler Crain, Constantina Dendramis, Jessica DeVries, Isabel Francoy Albert, Julieta Gil, Benjamin Jenett, James Jones, Ayodh Kamath, Alison Kung, Luciana Martinez, Nicolas Pappas, Allison Porterfield, Samantha Rose, Ron Shvartsman, Caroline Smith, Alejandra Sotelo, Jess Thomas, Julianne Weiss, Evan Wiskup.

Custom Software Design: www.sparcestudio.com

Structural Engineer: Buro Happold, Los Angeles

Located in the barren desert near Joshua Tree National Park, 15 miles from the nearest human settlement, Yucca Crater is a synthetic earthwork that doubled as a recreational amenity during High Desert Test Sites on October 15 & 16, 2011. High Desert Test Sites generates physical and conceptual spaces for art exploring the intersections between contemporary art and life at large. After the event, Yucca Crater was abandoned to the entropic forces of the landscape.

The work resembles a basin that stands 30 feet from rim to low point and is depressed 10 feet into the earth. Rock climbing holds mounted on the interior allow visitors to descend into a deep pool of salt water.

Yucca Crater expands on concepts borrowed from land art, incorporating the prospect of the abandoned suburban swimming pools and ramshackle homestead dwellings scattered across the Mojave. Ball Nogues have re-imagined these interventions in the landscape through a method of production where the tools of fabrication transform to be become objects for display in their own right. The rough plywood structure of Yucca Crater was originally the formwork used to construct another Ball-Nogues work, Talus Dome, in which more than 900 boulder-sized polished metal spheres were assembled to appear as a monumental pile of gravel. The two projects were “cross-designed” such that the method of production used in the first (Talus Dome) has become the central aesthetic for the second (Yucca Crater).

This approach integrates concept, aesthetics, a social event and production, inviting viewers to reconsider their relationship to art by-products while repositioning them within an alternative economic and geographic domain.

This project was made possible with the support of United States Artists Projects.

Designers and Principals in Charge: Benjamin Ball and Gaston Nogues

Project Manager: Benjamin Jenett

Project Team (in alphabetical order): Karla Castillo, Deborah Chang, Tyler Crain, Constantina Dendramis, Jessica DeVries, Julieta Gil, James Jones, Isabel Francoy Albert, Luciana Martinez, Nicolas Pappas, Allison Porterfield, Samantha Rose, Ron Shvartsman, Caroline Smith, Alejandra Sotelo, Jess Thomas, Julianne Weiss, Evan Wiskup.

Structural Engineer: Buro Happold, Los Angeles.

Screen blends imagery of the human hand with production techniques borrowed from glass jewelry making.

The “catenary” is a basic form in nature: a chain suspended from two points will always make this shape. Long necklaces are catenaries. Screen, which is directly behind the storefront glass, is like hundreds of chain necklaces with individual links made of hand profiles made with colored translucent plastic. The chains continually transform the color of sunlight coming into the Teen Center. The work provides privacy for people within the Center from the busy sidewalk while allowing views of the street from within. Hundreds of different hand shapes link together to make up the chains: sometimes the hands have an open palm, sometimes the fingers are stretched outward, sometimes the fingers curl as if to gently hold an object, sometimes the hands grasp.  Combining the logic of animation with sculpture, the shape of each individual hand is derived from video footage. Arrayed in sequences, the hands produce the impression of human gestures.

Lead Artists and Designers: Benjamin Ball, Gaston Nogues

Project Management: Jonathan Kitchens, Benjamin Jenett

Project Team: Julieta Gil, James Jones, Ayodh Kamath, Alison Kung, Luciana Martinez, Allison Porterfield, Rachel Shillander, Caroline Smith, Julianne Weiss, Evan Wiskup

Custom Software Development: www.sparcestudio.com

For Cloud, we explored the universal symbol of the human hand.

Commissioned by the City of Santa Monica, Cradle is situated on the exterior wall of a parking structure at a shopping mall – originally designed by Frank Gehry.  The site is near the beach, and is heavily trafficked by tourists on foot and in automobiles. An aggregation of mirror polished stainless steel spheres, the sculpture functions structurally like an enormous Newton’s Cradle – the ubiquitous toy found on the desktops of corporate executives in Hollywood films. Each ball is suspended by a cable from a point on the wall and locked in position by a combination of gravity and neighboring balls. The whole array reflects distorted images of passersby.

Aside from the Newton’s Cradle reference, we wanted the overall shape to elicit things that we thought might be slightly provocative when inserted into the glitzy Santa Monica urban landscape.  On one hand the installation resembles a big banana hammock (the type worn by unashamed men at the beach) and on the other it suggests the female reproductive system. Sometimes we think of it as a giant fly eye with hundreds of little lenses and at others its like sea foam or coral. Sometimes it resembles an urban scaled wall sconce and at others, a kind of imaginary awning for an invisible storefront. Regardless of what it looks like, it was an opportunity to develop a new kind of building system.

Cradle is as much a sculpture as it is an approach to making experimental structure in the post-digital era. We were interested in exploring ways of producing large scaled self-organizing structures. Cradle is comprised of an “informal” arrangement of parts; the relationship between each cannot be accurately modeled with digital software. The work is, however, an outgrowth of digital technology.

A key technical concept for Cradle is “sphere packing” – the phenomenon where multiple balls squeezed together and self organize under the effect of gravity, a process we could only approximate, at best, using computer modeling. Software was useful for visualizing Cradle and for designing the overall shape of the formwork used to make it but not for predicting where the spheres positioned themselves in the physical world.

The fabrication process was a bit like the process of slip casting ceramics except instead of pouring ceramic slip into a mold we “poured” hundreds of spheres.  To our knowledge, this was the first time this technique has been used.

Principals in Charge: Benjamin Ball and Gaston Nogues

Project Manager and Lead Fabricator: James Jones

Custom Software Design: Ayodh Kamath

Project Team: Benjamin Jennett, Rachel Shillander, Alison Kung, Daniel Morrison, Jielu Lu, Amador Saucedo, Ron Shvartsman, Lawerance Shanks, Norma Silva, Andrew Lyon, Tim Peeters, Will Trossell

Structural Engineer: Buro Happold, Los Angeles. Matthew Melnyk lead engineer. Kurt Komraus

Table Cloth is a new performance space in the courtyard of Schoenberg Hall at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music in Los Angeles. Ball-Nogues Studio designed and fabricated the installation. The project is a result of ongoing research into the reuse of temporary structures and installations.

A collaboration between the UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design, the Herb Alpert School of Music, and the UCLA Design Media Arts; Table Cloth serves as an integrated set piece, backdrop, and seating area for student musical performance and everyday social interaction.  It is made of hundreds of individual low, coffee-style tables and three legged stools.   Each of these household items is a unique product (no two are alike), fabricated specifically for the installation by Ball Nogues. The public can take home the tables and stools after the run of the installation. The tables and stools link together collectively to form a “fabric” that hangs from the east wall of the courtyard. When the Table Cloth meets the ground, it unrolls to form an intimate “in the round” performance area. Visitors can sit on the tables and stools within this area.

“Tables are places for social interaction,” explains Ball-Nogues. “Dining tables, specifically, facilitate organization and communication within the typical American home. We see this project like the cloth adorning a dining table; however, at Schoenberg it will adorn the courtyard, an important social hub, and will facilitate community at the scale of the University.”

Used for a variety of activities, from musical practice to performance, dance to lectures, and from casual conversations to academic discussions; it will embellish the courtyard throughout the summer of 2010. Because of the work’s size and the materials used, its presence within the space helps to reduce reverberation and alter other acoustical phenomena.

The processes of designing manufacturing, assembling, and dismantling the performance space are examples of a unique design and manufacturing methodology that moves beyond and constructively critiques the three “R’s” of sustainability – recycling, reuse, and repurposing, processes that typically down-cycle material into less valuable states. After the structure has served its function as a performance space, the components comprising the installation will be dismantled to become smaller scaled household commodities, – tables and seating. This process, referred to as “Cross Manufacturing” by Ball-Nogues, is an integrated design and manufacturing strategy that harnesses digital computation and fabrication technologies to make architectural scaled installations that become collections of smaller scaled products. The items will be immediately available and given away as consumer goods, once the installation is dismantled. This approach moves beyond recycling and reuse

By using a consumer good as its basic building block, the project expands and critiques notions of “green” architecture. As a visual concept, the installation serves as a symbolic gesture of sustainability and a poetic reminder that the buildings and temporary pavilions we construct are impermanent: frozen moments in an ongoing flow of products and materials. Outside of its environmental considerations, the Table Cloth dramatically re-contextualizes consumer products – symbols of mass consumption and standardization– into alternative gestures of hope and one of a kind manufacturing.

Table Cloth will be the site of performances hosted by the Herb Alpert School of Music through the summer of 2010. Please see the Herb Alpert School of Music Website to confirm dates and start times.

Project Theory:

Spatial installations represent a growing phenomenon within our culture. There is a new demand for “instant” architecture.  We see this in entire environments which become advertisements, like subway platforms; stage sets; window displays; and event spectacles.  They have become forums for the production of architecturally scaled structures and spaces that exist for only a limited period. Our installation explores the making of structures which produce very little waste when their usefulness as architecture is complete. While there is an increasing interest among artists architects in recycling and repurposing their urban scaled creations, our project moves beyond this approach to consider life cycle through the development of a “cross manufacturing” strategy. Cross manufacturing is a design and production approach that considers objects as part of a continuum. After the structure has served its use as a performance space, the components comprising the installation will be dismantled to become smaller scaled commodities, immediately available as coveted products – in this case tables and seating. Unlike recycling, which down-cycles material into a less valuable state, this scenario foresees small products made from the parts of a larger product (the installation itself).

“Diversified series” is a fitting description for the resulting products rather than the “standardized series” that typically results from a mass production approach. Each of the tables and seating elements will be fabricated using industrial methods but will still be unique, contrasting the anonymity inherent in most industrially manufactured goods. At the end of the life of the installation, the approximately 500 tables and stools, no two alike, will be given away to the UCLA community.

By using a consumer good as its basic building block, the project expands and critiques notions of “green” architecture. As a visual concept, the installation serves as a symbolic gesture of sustainability and a poetic reminder that the buildings and pavilions we construct although seemingly timeless, are actually impermanent: frozen moments in an ongoing flow of products and materials. Outside of its environmental commentary, the installation dramatically re-contextualizes consumer products – symbols of mass consumption and standardization– into alternative gestures of hope and one of a kind manufacturing.

It is made possible by generous support from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and the UCLA Arts Initiative.

Principles in Charge: Benjamin Ball and Gaston Nogues

Structural engineering and analysis by Buro Happold Los Angeles. Matthew Melnyk lead engineer

Software Development: Ayodh Kamath

Project Team: Benjamin Jenett, James Jones, Jonathan Kitchens, Alison Kung, Deborah Lehman, Brian Schirk, Rachel Shillander

Created for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) off-site gallery at the Charles W. White School, Double Back-to-Basics is comprised of brightly colored letters constructed using paper and assembled in a form suggestive of a monumental arch scaled to the size of a child. Viewed from the gallery entrance, the monument has characteristics of a wall; when seen from the opposite side it resembles a heap or pile – a primitive architectural structure and the most rudimentary form of monument. The letters are the cousins of the magnetized refrigerator variety used to teach children written language. Here, the characters instruct but they also serve as bricks, the most elemental components of architecture. Unlike bricks made of clay, which are solid and heavy, these bricks are hollow and lightweight — in structural terminology they are “shells.” Using a fabrication process developed by Ball Nogues, the letters were formed of recycled paper pulp then colored with natural dyes and infused with wildflower seeds; repurposing what was once waste while generating new life in the form of flora. Rather than conceiving the work as an unchanging installation, the designers view it as a continuum — from unformed material to the constructed monument to dismantling and beyond. When the project is taken down after six months, students will be able to create their own flower gardens using the refuse from the original structure.

The letter is the fundamental unit of written language; the brick is the fundamental unit of architecture, the seed is the fundamental unit of life. Double Back to Basics is a monument to these elements. It is a monument that changes form from stasis to dispersion into the urban environment: its disappearance is as essential as its presence. Double Back-to-Basics is a monument to transformation.

Project Team: Benjamin Ball, Tyler Crain, Martina Dolejsova, Jonathan Kitchens, Alison Kung, Hannes Langguth, Deborah Lehman, Gaston Nogues, Allison Porterfield, Rachel Shillander, Julianne Weiss