Satterfield, Blair & Swackhamer, Marc
Satterfield, Blair & Swackhamer, Marc
Bio Sketch
American architecture educators and practitioners, and the co-founders (1998) of HouMinn Practice — the portmanteau of Houston and Minneapolis, the two cities between which the partnership has been conducted (they began collaborating as Fleece Design while students at Rice University, Houston). HouMinn, an award-winning collaborative "known for interdisciplinary partnerships, unconventional making, material misuse, and the role of decay in architecture" (national design awards from ACSA, Architect Magazine, ID Magazine, Fast Company, and Core77), is the vehicle for their research into how designers can recapture agency over production. Blair Satterfield is a designer and educator at the University of British Columbia's School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (Associate Professor; former chair of the architecture program; co-director of HiLo Lab, and member of the sister LoDo Lab at the University of Colorado Denver, established by Swackhamer), previously worked for Atelier Feichang Jianzhu (Yung Ho Chang), Michael Bell Architecture (now Visible Weather), Oliver + Ray, and Bricker + Cannady (Director of Design). Marc Swackhamer is Dean of the College of Architecture and Environmental Design at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo; previously professor at the University of Minnesota (where VarVac Wall was installed in the School of Architecture lobby) and founder of the post-disciplinary MinnLab and LoDo Lab research collaboratives; he studied at the University of Cincinnati and Rice University. With Blaine Brownell (see brownell-blaine) he co-authored Hypernatural: Architecture's New Relationship with Nature (2015) — the book whose "hypernatural condition" Brownell's own Reader chapter theorizes (hypernaturalization); Swackhamer's University of Minnesota studios supplied several of that chapter's exemplars (the borax-crystal pavilion, the termite-digested panels, the Artificial Thicket).
Their chapter "Swimming upstream" gives the wiki's interior-architecture cluster its twelfth self-conception — the process (agency) conception: designers repositioned along the production stream ("swimming upstream, midstream, or downstream from the design of the project itself") so that authorship migrates from the object to the system, tool, and process. Their own VarVac Wall is the demonstration: "We did not actually design the wall itself. We designed a system for managing information and a new approach to material fabrication."
Key Works
- *Swimming upstream: Repositioning authorship and expanding the agency of the architect* (2018) — chapter of The Interior Architecture Reader (ed. Marinic); the production-stream model (Sabin, Gehry Technologies, SHoP, the Silk Pavilion) and VarVac Wall as the built thesis of repositioned authorship.
- Hypernatural: Architecture's New Relationship with Nature (Princeton Architectural Press, 2015, with Blaine Brownell) — on biomimetic and nature-inspired material systems; cited in their chapter's notes. (Not yet ingested.)
Key Concepts
Concepts associated with these authors that have pages in this wiki:
- authorship — repositioned rather than dissolved: the designer as "strategist" whose system and tool generate the form
- production-stream — their central model: upstream (extraction/research), midstream (storage/distribution), downstream (refinement) as locations of design work
- mass-customization — the economics of non-identical elements; the variable vacuum-forming mold that turns variation from cost into parameter
- digital-fabrication — the enabling technology eroding industry's hold on construction; control of assembly "at the point of production"
- computational-design — software as "generators of real physical form"; the Grasshopper script translating acoustical performance into mold geometry
- interactive-architecture — the upstream-borrowed branch: Sabin's eSkin as responsive surfaces authored with biologists
- nonhumans — the Silk Pavilion's silkworms as a construction team with delegated design authority
- interior-architecture — the discipline their chapter re-arms with practice models
Relevance to the Core Research
Satterfield and Swackhamer extend the wiki's practitioner-theorist strand of the interior cluster (Webb's boundary, Manack's fabrication, Campos's territory) with a production-economic register: their question is not what the interior is but where in the flow of production its designer stands. This connects the interior cluster to the wiki's authorship cluster from a new direction — not the star-architect's authored object (iconic-architecture, star-architecture) but the repositioned author of systems, tools, and molds — and to the everyday cluster through the chapter's stakes: cheaper, more responsive, less spectacular production of ordinary interiors. The Gehry Technologies case also gives the wiki's Gehry page a second register: not the icon-maker but the tool-author.
Source Support
Source notes in this wiki drawn from these authors' work:
