Exploring Digital Sketching in Architecture

The next presentation of AIA New York Technology Committee will explore the use of digital sketching in architecture as an alternative to traditional, manual approaches to the earliest stages of design.

Markus Dochantschi, the principal and founder at studioMDA New York, will share his design explorations using digital sketching July 8, 2008 starting at 6:00 p.m., at the Center for Architecture, 536 LaGuardia Place, New York City. RSVP is required to “paul-dot-seletsky-at-som-dot-com.”

studioMDA has used animated digital sketches to write a script, a digital story book, which becomes the basis for architectural design. studioMDA has teamed with artists, video artists, and choreographers, among others to define space generated by various artistic endeavors. According to AIANY Technology Committee member Erleen Hatfield, PE, studioMDA uses the resulting multi-discipline context to layer architectural syntax “into micro and macro scales, balancing the smallest detail with the topographical/urban fabric.”

Dochantschi was trained as an architect in Darmstadt, Germany, where he graduated with a master of architecture in 1995. He worked in Japan with Arata Isozaki in Tokyo in 1993 and with Tom Heneghan in 1994. From 1995 to 2002, he worked with Zaha Hadid in London, as a director, project director, project architect and designer for such projects as Landesgartenschau Germany, Ski Jump Austria, Contemporary Arts Center Ohio, and the Vista Master plan Singapore. He founded studioMDA in New York in 2002.

Markus has been guest critic at the Architectural Association London, UK; Columbia University, Cooper Union, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, the ETH Zurich, Switzerland; the Hochschule für Angewandte Kunst Vienna, Austria, and has taught at the Yale School of Architecture as a “Critic in Architecture” with Zaha Hadid in 2004, 2005 and with Stephan Behnisch and Gerald Hines in 2006. 

For more information on studioMDA, visit www.studiomda.com

  --RSN