Office CA

BIO

Through art installations, designed objects/spaces, and interactive media, our projects play with and address the complex forces that shape contemporary culture. Some recurring themes of the practice include absurdity, genre fiction, conspiracy theories, world-making, storytelling, simulation, and the parafictional.

Stephanie Sang Delgado (she/her) is an architect and Assistant Professor at Kean University in the School of Public Architecture at the Michael Graves College. She is the co-director of office ca, an experimental collaborative practice. Her research focuses on how architectural scale interfaces create new fictions and realities through subtle and overt manipulations of building components. She also researches food, its colonial legacy, and the cultural value of food images. Stephanie holds an M.Arch from The Ohio State University, and a B.A. in Architectural Studies from Ithaca College, where she was an MLK Jr. Scholar.

Galo Canizares (he/him) is currently Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Kentucky’s College of Design. He researches the socio-technical networks of relations between design’s softwarization and the architectural imagination. He is the author of Digital Fabrications: Designer Stories for a Software-Based Planet, a collection of essays on software and design. He co-directs office ca, a research and design collaborative that investigates alternate methods for architectural practice. He holds a Master of Architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Bachelor of Environmental Design from the College of Architecture and Planning at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

---

---

Dream Project: Lightweight Deconstruction (2024)

Lightweight Deconstruction is part of an ongoing project we call "Lightweight Construction" that questions the relationship between virtual and physical materials while finding new kinships between them. It acts as a critical response to ongoing dialogues of digital models and their perceptions in design disciplines. Today, it is common to hear the virtual world described as a mirror world, and digital buildings are referred to as “digital twins.” While these may be apt ways to familiarize oneself with these mediums, they still skirt the core contradictions at play in virtual/digital space. These contradictions are not hindrances but opportunities for richer forms of engagement. This project embraces contradictions and tests their limits through distinct material explorations in virtual space.

While typical digital rendering techniques represent materials as surface images applied to geometry through a UV map, Lightweight Deconstruction asks: what would a volumetric approach to architectural visualization look like? What if digital materials were defined and represented as volumes rather than surfaces? Here, traditional raytracing algorithms are substituted with a custom-built volumetric raytracing engine that traces light through the objects without stopping at the surface. The result is a set of geometric construction assemblies represented as uncanny, vaporous volumes that are both hyperreal yet impossible to realize physically. If materials always tell stories, we’re interested in the new kinds of stories that virtual/digital materials can tell beyond appliqués or textures. Together, the projects that make up "Lightweight Construction" form a conceptual triptych that forces us to think deeper about pixels, voxels, and their narrative potentials.

↓ Click on the image below to reproduce the artwork ↓

---

---

What is Responsive Art to Office CA?

For us, responsive generative art takes full advantage of computation and makes engaging with art into a dynamic experience. We regard the world around us as a kind of interface, and many of our projects from architectural installations to software artworks prioritize interactivity.

We firmly believe that we can leverage computation to produce fun and dynamic experiences that welcome engagement.

/ TGAM's NOTES

---

Office CA brings a new angle to the generative art practice, where space exploration and interaction through innovative research creates a unique playground for the user to discover.