News

Look out for the enlightened research of Ines and Shan is the Fabrication 2017 book, pages 106-113.  Link to digital copy of the book below:

http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1546589/1/Fabricate.pdf

The more the merrier!  Join Quarra Stone Company and WOJR in celebrating the debut of the Other Masks exhibition at the gallery BALTS Projects in Zurich, Switzerland.  6:00 pm.

The body of work shown in the exhibition, Other Masks, stems from an ongoing project entitled Mask House, which offers a grieving man a hidden space of refuge in the woods. Included in the exhibition is a range of artifacts that explore the periphery of architectural representation; while orthographic drawings and a scale model provide the work with an architectural center of gravity, pieces such as a stone bas-relief and seven sculptural masks engage the overlapping domain of art.

Other Masks situates the artifact of the mask within the context of the discipline of architecture. An artifact is an object of intrigue that elicits close readings and analyses, which in turn may reveal evidence of its culture and its use. A close reading of an artifact involves examination of all of its physical characteristics, including its figural, structural, material, and decorative features. This study is done not only with the aim of identifying the cultural significance of the particular object, but also with the broader aspiration of understanding the rituals and values of the users of the object, and those of its makers. The most curious of artifacts are those whose features invoke multiple, competing interpretations of their cultural significance.

For WOJR, the making of architecture is the making of artifacts. To think about the design of a work of architecture as such is to regard the acts of making form and reading form as simultaneous and inseparable. Being attuned to architecture in this particular way has lead to a practice that is invested deeply, if not wholly, in the agency of architectural form as the medium through which cultural commentary is conveyed.

About WOJR Organization for Architecture
WOJR: Organization for Architecture is an independent design practice based in Cambridge, Massachusetts founded by William O’Brien Jr. in 2009. O’Brien is an Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Founder of the collaborative design practice, Collective–LOK. He has been a recipient of the Rome Prize Fellowship in Architecture awarded by the American Academy in Rome. He is a MacDowell Fellow and an Aspen Institute Socrates Fellow. He was winner of the Architectural League of New York Prize for Young Architects and Designers. O’Brien studied architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design where he was a recipient of the Faculty Design Award. His background prior to architecture is in fine art and music theory.

Congratulations to Zain Karsan of MIT and Layth Mahdi of the the University of Michigan.  Quarra Stone Company is looking forward to the amazing creations these two will fabricate during their 10 weeks in Madison, WI this summer.

The 2016 Autodesk University (AU) convention, held November 15–17 in Las Vegas, offered plenty of motivation for innovative professionals to use Autodesk’s data-driven technologies. These can enable design teams to operate at peak productivity, creativity, and efficiency and the greater AEC industry (architecture, engineering, and construction) to embrace novel disruptive ideas. One of the highlights of the convention was The Generative Design pavilion, a creative collaboration between Autodesk, Quarra Stone Company, Simpson Gumpertz & Heger, and the University of Michigan (photo by Nathan Miller).

Check it out! Quarra’s fine work was featured in Architectural Digest on May 31, 2015. The article is by Mayer Russ, with photographs by William Waldron. The house in Aspen, Colorado was designed by Bohlin Cywinski Jackson. Quarra worked closely with the architects, creating mock-ups, fabricating and installing the custom Valser quartzite for this stunning Rocky Mountain residence. See article

The sculpture was modeled full scale from a smartphone 3-D photo by the artist of a plaster cast of Michelangelo’s 15th century masterpiece in the Queens Museum. With the aid of robotics, Quarra carved a massive block of cement aggregate containing rubble, remnants and refuse collected around New York City. Pietà is a modern day fossil that exposes relationships between the abstraction of technology and the palpable effects of time.