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GREYSHED

Ryan Luke Johns is an architectural designer focused on augmented materiality and context-aware fabrication. He is co-founder of GREYSHED, a design-research studio focused on advanced workflows and robotics in architecture, design, and manufacturing.

Johns has taught as a lecturer in the Princeton University School of Architecture and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and as an adjunct assistant professor at Columbia GSAPP. He is a current faculty member in the department of Cognitive Science at Vassar College, and a doctoral researcher in the Gramazio and Kohler Chair of Architecture and Digital Fabrication, ETH Zürich.

Ryan’s work as GREYSHED has been published and exhibited internationally, including the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale and the 2017 Seoul Biennale of Architecture. Ryan holds a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture with a concentration in Mathematics from Columbia University (2009) and a Master of Architecture from Princeton University (2013).

Exhibition

Found Form Finding

  • 19 Dec 2019 - 15 Mar 2020

  • 10:00 - 22:00

  • THE MILLS

Computational design tools and digital fabrication machines have enabled new levels of complexity in construction, allowing architects to design and materialise a wide range of expressive and novel forms. Unfortunately, the infinite freedom of computational design software often does not reflect the material constraints of reality, and the realisation of digital designs can be wasteful and inflexible. In order substantially to improve the long term sustainability of the built environment, it is necessary to develop new tools that do not simply introduce new formal complexity into the world, but intelligently and elegantly adapt to existing complexity on the construction site.

Such tools could allow designers and builders to leave some strategic details to be resolved during construction, and would make the use of low-energy, nonstandard raw and reclaimed materials in architecture once again financially and logistically feasible. This project uses machine vision and algorithmic geometry processing to generate reciprocal structures from irregularly sized reclaimed materials—thus, the form derives from the available materials, rather than from structural or aesthetic goals alone.