After Liu Chien Sheng and his St. Stephen’s Cathedral from Angewandte, here are two other very interesting projects by students of Hernan Diaz Alonso. His various studios at Columbia, Angewandte, Pratt, Sci-Arc etc. made us used to a redundant morphological style to this point that, in our addiction to first degree images, we would actually could miss the real interesting point when there is one.
In my opinion, Isaie Bloch from Angewandte and Kyle Stover from Yale each understood a very interesting narrative aspect of Diaz Alonso’s morphological research. The first one created a pavilion directly or indirectly inspired by David Cronenberg’s aesthetics; a kind of ambiguous organic technology whose shapes recalls those of viruses. The second one has a very different approach. Instead of a the usual retro-future projects, this one is a “retro-past” (sorry for the pleonasm !) house that seems to have been built in a very vernacular way with dry mud and clay.