Events

LECTURE: APRIL 10 AT 6:00 PM, CASCIERI HALL

Recent Work by Hideo Sasaki Distinguished Visiting Critics at the BAC
Jinhee Park and John Hong / SINGLE speed DESIGN

Each spring the Boston Architectural College appoints Distinguished Visiting Critics to conduct an advanced studio for those seeking to study with highly accomplished design practitioners. A grant this year from the Hideo Sasaki Foundation has enabled the BAC to appoint the founding principals of SINGLE speed DESIGN, Jinhee Park and John Hong AIA, Leed, as the inaugural Hideo Sasaki Distinguished Visiting Critics for 2007. Park and Hong / SINGLE speed DESIGN embody the values of Hideo Sasaki, fostering collaboration and integration across the design disciplines of landscape architecture, architecture and interior design.

Convergent Design demonstrates how Jinhee Park and John Hong explore the interdisciplinary territory between social and structural systems in design. Instead of imagining structure as merely supporting social space, or social space merely fitting preconceived frameworks, SINGLE speed DESIGN has actively sought to create a simultaneous conception of social use and structural resolution. The works in this exhibit, SsD's Asian Cultural Complex, Boston Harbor Islands Pavilion and the Big Dig Building, express the notion that interweaving socio-structural issues must also be informed by strategies of landscape design, historical and cultural research and environmental sustainability.



SINGLE speed DESIGN extends the definition of interdisciplinary design to include more than combining disciplines; in their work it becomes the simultaneous convergence of them. How can differing fields of research like architecture, landscape, history, technology, structure and sustainability become interwoven rather than folded onto each other? How can this interweaving inform and change the profession and practice of architecture? Convergent design.

An important undercurrent of convergent design is SINGLE speed's new translation of minimalism. Where traditional approaches based on layering rely on several autonomous systems forming a complex whole, the goal of convergence is to replace this redundancy with an economy of means. Minimum form takes maximum effect across a range of interrelated disciplines. Rather than merely focusing on what reductive form looks like, Jinhee Park and John Hong approach it from a SINGLE speed: they explore what it actually does.