Fresh Punches: Experimental Architecture Exhibition Catalogue
Fresh Punches brings together a large group of experimental architectural educators to write and speak about their current teachings as well as their thoughts on the state of architectural education today. Exciting innovations at schools across the United States are incubating, and their strengths and struggles are examined on the following pages. With this fantastic range of explorations we see new potentials for dialogue and hope to encourage the quick flow of knowledge, across the Internet and other forms of media, from institution to institution. We feel that this collection of contemplations and criticisms on the contemporary American academic design climate not only captures this moment, but provides the motivation to riff on current trends and drive the discipline forward. Fresh Punches features contributions from a cast of architecture educators including: Volkan ALKANOGLU & Jennifer BONNER, Kelly BAIR, Kristy BALLIET, Aaron BETSKY, Kory BIEG, Francis BITONTI, Brennan BUCK, Erick CÂRCAMO, Jeremy CARVALHO, Josh DANNENBERG & Brian de LUNA, Joe DAY, Adam DAYEM, Hernan DIAZ ALONSO, Ramiro DIAZ GRANADOS, Gabriel ESQUIVEL, Thom FAULDERS, Wendy W. FOK, David FREELAND, Adam FURE, Mark Foster GAGE, Eric GOLDEMBERG, Marcelyn GOW, Matt HUTCHINSON, Lydia KALLIPOLITI, Simon KIM, Ferda KOLATAN, Nicole KOLTICK, Perry KULPER, Sean LALLY, Carla LEITÆ’O, Matthew LUTZ, Frank MELENDEZ, Alexander MAYMIND, Kyle MILLER, Dwayne OYLER, Jason PAYNE, Ben PELL, Paul PREISSNER, Nick PUCKETT, Casey REHM, Heather ROBERGE, Jonah ROWEN, Jenny SABIN, Roland SNOOKS, Marcelo SPINA, Nader TEHRANI, Danielle WILLEMS, Tom WISCOMBE, Michael YOUNG, and Andrew ZAGO. The catalog also documents the Fresh Punches exhibition mounted in the fall of 2012 at the Land of Tomorrow Gallery in Louisville, Kentucky. The show featured the collision of experimentation and contemporary discourse in the work of American architecture students. Collected from the Spring and Fall semesters of 2011, the cutting-edge work exhibited featured provocative explorations in technology, space, and materials. In this collection, architecture is contaminated by the likes of transmogrifications, strange sensations, primal textures, unfamiliar geometries, self-propagating architectural species, augmented atmospherics, vicissitudinous juxtapositions, reinvented building typologies, sensual pleated skins, a crisis or two, physiologically responsive interfaces, threshold-blurring gizmos, and plenty of robots. The show was comprised of 19 projects, selected through online voting that took place on suckerpunchdaily.com in the spring of 2012. A jury of architects, including Hernan Diaz Alonso, Aaron Betsky, Mark Gage, Greg Lynn, Michael Speaks, and Tom Wiscombe selected three of the projects for full-scale prototype fabrication by Rives Rash and students at the University of Kentucky College of Design. The exhibition presented a unique opportunity to see the explorations of multiple schools in one location and survey the current state of research in American schools of architecture.
