Architect Ammar Eloueini is turning interior space in on itself with fluid, cellular design.
Ammar Eloueini is shaking it up. The architect, founder of New Orleans and Paris-based studio AEDS, takes the techno-savvy styles of mentors Hani Rashid and Greg Lynn, throws in a little filmmaking animation software, and comes out with projects like rippled dressing room pods for pleats-loving fashion designer Issey Miyake.
“With every project that I work on, I first start with software that wasn’t designed for architecture, but for the car industry, movie industry, or game industry,” Eloueini explains from his studio in New Orleans, where he teaches at Tulane. “The software is great for 3-D modeling, but it also incorporates time and motion.” Appealing as they are, though, he’s interested in more than pretty movies. “Usually when you start designing you don’t use time as a component in the process,” he says, lamenting the static nature of much of what makes up architecture. “To be able to use computer animation software and design within that environment is really interesting for architecture.”
An example is Eloueini’s CoReFab series, which takes its name from his Big Three: Concepts, Representation, and Fabrication. The CoReFab #71, a concept for a chair, is a combination of a static form and split-second animation capture. “The pattern is animated so you have a sequence like a movie,” he says. (See image at right.) “You can stop at any point and print the chair, or fabricate it through 3-D printing.” The animations, created using a program called Softimage, run short—about 30 seconds—but it’s a technique that offers up the potential for a consistent family of pieces, each with its own related uniqueness.
Eloueini’s projects for Miyake start from a similarly inventive ground but go in a completely different direction. For Miyake, says Eloueini, the material is as much a design element as the shape. “So many times, something is designed, and then the architect opens a catalogue of materials and picks one,” he says. “It becomes something that’s applied as an afterthought.” The dressing rooms for the ME Miyake boutique in Paris, on the other hand, could only have been fabricated out of the polycarbonate they were made from.
Eloueini is convinced that the kinds of programs and animation software that he does won’t be specific to architecture for long. “It’s changing the culture at large,” he says of what he sees as a culture-wide animation literacy. “You have to embrace it.” —Eva Hagberg
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