FIELD OF DREAMS Four installations — winners of the Field Constructs Design Competition — occupied a brownfield site in East Austin for two weeks in November. The projects on view drew attention to the quickly aligning trends of digital fabrication and environmental sensitivity. by Jack Murphy, Assoc. AIA photography by Whit Preston
70 Texas Architect
1/2 2016
Architecture was once said to be technologically decades behind other constructive disciplines. Post-World War II mass production yielded the modern airliner for aviation, but Levittown for architecture. Now, thankfully, we’re catching up. Rapid prototyping soft- and hardware allow designers to directly test and manufacture at the human scale, from jewelry to complete building components. Our expanded tool kit arrives just as we’re also tasked with addressing our collective environmental crisis. These advances in fabrication and environmental investigation were key components of Field Constructs, a recent competition in Austin that featured four installations by talented, young designers. Field Constructs Design Competition (FCDC) was co-directed by Rachel Adams, Associate Curator at the University of Buffalo and previously at The Contemporary Austin; Catherine Gavin, former editor of TA; and Igor Siddiqui, principal of ISSSStudio and assistant professor at The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture. As these three discussed
ideas for a competition involving site-specific installations, the opportunity arose to partner with Ecology Action to locate the project at Circle Acres, a 9.7-acre creek bed-turnedquarry-turned-landfill brownfield in Austin’s Montopolis neighborhood. From there, the idea expanded to become, in the organizers’ words, a competition focused on “new technologies, materials, and models of practice.” FCDC was formally launched in November 2014. Its call for proposals, widely circulated online, yielded over 60 entries from four continents. An invited jury narrowed the ideas to a shortlist of 18. From there, the curators selected four projects to be realized at Circle Acres. Their choices maximized the diversity of the designers’ ideas, materials, and physical locations — both onsite and in practice — while ensuring the teams had the experience to realize their work at a difficult site on a limited budget of $5,000 per project. In mid-November, after months of preparation, teams arrived in Austin for a busy week of