The Penn State College of Arts and Architecture's Stuckeman School will be debuting "Visionary Visuals Re:Vamped," an exhibition that will look at the future through the lens of a changing, modern architecture landscape, at 5 p.m. on Jan. 21 in the Rouse Gallery in the Stuckeman Family Building.
The exhibition is organized by Orsolya Gáspár, assistant professor of architecture, and Luisa Caldas, professor of architecture and director of the XR Lab at the University of California, Berkeley College of Environmental Design. Caldas also is a recipient of the 2024-25 Stuckeman School Interdisciplinary Design Professorship.
The exhibition will run until March 6 and is free and open to the public.
"Visionary Visuals" will use mixed reality (MR) as a new way to connect audiences and architects. The interactive exhibition will explore the question of how people will live in the future when it comes to their homes. The showcase will encourage the audience to interact with the installations, shape the designs of buildings, and test the ideas explored in the Immersive Environments Lab at the Stuckeman School, with which Gáspár is affiliated.
The exhibition is based on the selected projects of Swiss-Hungarian architect Elemér Zalotay, who combined participatory building practices and high-rises with a desire to reduce cost and environmental footprints of buildings by using adaptive structures and vertical forests through comic-like visuals to reach a wider audience.
"Our exhibition focuses on one aspect: how to use technology to enhance communication between architects and the public," Gáspár said. "This is a recurring issue in the discourse about architecture, and our exhibition explores whether mixed reality is a potential medium to engage people in discussions about problems that concern all of us - like how we will live in the future."
The four installations in the exhibit will address problems such as the lack of affordable housing and unequal access to services in cities. The installations are based on the work of architecture students from the Design Research Studio that Gáspár and Caldas led in the fall semester. They will explore the "megastructure movement" that was popular in the 1960s and '70s where architects set out to design massive, multipurpose designs that could house communities or even entire cities.
"Shallow as it might sound, I mostly hope [visitors to the exhibition] will have fun. I firmly believe that engagement starts with interest. If we can get the audience interested, I will be over the moon," Gáspár said.
Those attending the opening reception on Jan. 21 are invited to use the MR during the gallery's opening hours using an IOS or Android device. They also will be able to try out the HoloLens2 headset.
Gáspár joined the Department of Architecture in July 2023 and focuses her work on structurally informed architecture design and construction history, studying geometry, topology and structural performance of spatial structures. Before joining the Stuckeman School, she was a visiting fellow at the Form Finding Lab at Princeton University and participated in the lab's Angelus Novus Vault project for the 2023 Venice Biennale of Architecture. She has been published in top-tier architecture journals, including the International Journal of Architecture Heritage.
Caldas will join the opening of the exhibition remotely but will visit the Stuckeman School in person to present a lecture in March during the closing of the exhibition.
At UC Berkeley, Caldas directs the XR Lab - Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality Laboratory - which focuses on the use of immersive environments for building design and simulation, health care design, ADA, parametric and generative design, UI/UX, narrative and storytelling. Her work focuses on the use of advanced computational tools to support sustainability input in early design decision making.
