Ammar Eloueini is an Assitant Professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago, he has taught throughout France and in Germany at Merz Akademie. He studied architecture in Paris where he graduated with honors receiving a DPLG degree in 1994, and received a Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Design from Columbia University in New York City in 1996. In 1997, he was the co-founder of Digit-all Studio in Paris.

He takes part in exhibitions and lectures at various institutions, in France and abroad. Lately, he was part of the International Exhibition "Transarchitectures 02", (Paris, New York, Gratz, Firenze, Berlin and Rotterdam) and "Virtual Architecture" in Lisbon.

Over the past five years, Ammar Eloueini produced projects that challenge traditional design processes. Integrating digital media to investigate new approaches, based on animation software and the use of computers as a design tool. Extending his activities in the theoretical field, he participated in various international ideas competitions, where a conceptual and projectual approach, based on dynamic, non linear systems, answering new architectural and urban complexities was tested.

Winner of the Villa Medicis Hors les Murs (AFAA, French Ministry of Culture) in 1998, he is working on a research project (Living in Strereoreality) and publication in Tokyo.

Invited by the French Ministry of Culture in 1999, Ammar Eloueini is working on his first personal exhibition which will take place in Paris in June 2000.

http://www.digit-all.net  

http://services.worldnet.net/ae77
http://www.architettura.it/extended
http://www.archi.org.transarchitectures

ammar eloueini
5, RUE DE L’HARMONIE 75015 PARIS FRANCE   T/F: 33 1 48 42 49 44
651 SOUTH WELLS STREET 805 CHICAGO ILLINOIS USA   T: 312-583 0049 F: 312-583 0051

Cultural information Exchange Center
Wall street, New York City

Located at the eastern end of Wall street, the Cultural Information Exchange Center, was designed to be a temporary structure. The small scale of the site, in comparison to the large neighboring sites, brought up the challenge of designing a small structure, that can hold up against the monumental scale of surrounding buildings. Temporariness was understood as a way to generate architectural form. 

Capture
The elaboration of a conceptual process started by an attempts to create a new architectural space, without getting involved in the early stages of design with any reference to buildings typology, or architectural repertoire of form. The space was considered as an ether, and the design intention was to capture a space rather than imposing one. To accomplish this goal, the process of design started with computer simulations, using « flock animation ».

Ether
The building was considered as a flow of bodies and information through space, over time. The programmatic elements were modeled as attractors on the site. Visitors, information and exchanges were modeled as particles. Once the particles attracted, they started forming varying degrees of concentration. A halo of particles was floating over the site, suggesting an eventual architectural space. As a cloud in the sky, the particles halo started forming a virtual building, an interrelated spatial fields. This constellation was crystallized to form the new Temporary Cultural Information Exchange Center.

Project team : ammar eloueini, celine parmentier

Sarajevo Concert Hall

Metastasis

The project for Sarajevo Concert Hall Competition was approached in relation to a dilema between the context and the program. The context, is both very poor and emblematic at the same time. The Concert Hall being in the midst of a newly planed urban zone, make it one of the most important building in this area. The Concert Hall in relation to the history of this region and its very deep relation to music makes the symbolic of this building very important, in a period of reconstruction after serveral years of civil war.

DOUBLE MEMBRANE
The Concert Hall was first modeled as a double membrane on the limit of the site.
The inner membrane retracing different music tempo.
The outer membrane retracing the city vibrations, noises and breath.

Using computer simulations, a amination was produced reproducing a double systeme of reaction between the membranes and the sounds input. Both membranes were modeled very close to one another.

An interstial space was created in result of the reactions of both membranes. The project consist in occupying this space. On the edge of the site, most of the programatic elements were placed, keeping the center of the site as an empty space, were the two music halls, music can be performed.

Project team:
		Ammar Eloueini
		Celine Parmentier
		Nathalie Roubaut
		Nikola Jankovic

ACQUA ALTA

1) Situation

Venice, between the Lido, Malamocco and Chiogga, at the meeting of the river current and the sea, identifies itself with its lagoon.  Water is at the same time what makes its difference and which would announce its loss, if there were not this permament struggle, as of Sisyphus, between man and nature.

The core of the project trifles with this ambiguity and this potential.  It states processes of sedimentation, at the same time historical, related to the envelope of the old buildings (Magazzini Frigoriferi) but also " corporeal ", resulting from the generic material of the city: water.  
In the contemporary cities, the general attitude is to destroy or to reproduce identical. The advances in this project are more ambiguous, from substitution to the genetic crossing, between what had existed and new possibilities: a kind of recycling.

This project proceeds thus of three processes, 
One related to the preexistent print (Magazzini Frigoriferi) 
The second with the lagoon movement
And the third with its matter

2) The process

The print 
Is there any other possibilities then imposing a hegemonic building?  The assumption to slip into the “ body ” of the Magazzini Frigoriferi and the Docks, to substitute a matter with another (concrete with jellyfish) lies in the will “ to make with ” these previous identities.  

Aspiration
The movement results from an aspiration process (as the refering image with the glass shows it). The modification of the water surface (by computer simulations) in a fixed volumetric envelope gave rise to a new topographic space and created tension fields, as a kind of resistance of the matter towards the constraints which were imposed to it.

From these simulations, it’s the reading of these evolutions of the process over time, rather than a snapshot which registered the deformations and their intersections.

Water, algae and their movements were used as generating elements of  architectural forms. They generated a fluid and homogeneous architecture, where the space hierarchies, programms and structures unroll with the fluctuations.  

Matter 
The algae omipresent in the vegetable reign, oxygen resources in the marine ecosystems are in Venice like elsewhere the key of biological balance.  Some are endemic like Posidonies,to preserve, and others like TaxiFolia exogenic and unhealthy, to tear off.  Nevertheless they  are constitutives of watery life.  Their undulation, their movement and their matter are at the same time the refering support of this “lagoonary” project but also the support of the layout (the plans express it). The functions unroll in multiple crossings, streaked, like the body of a jellyfish, in a “thick” transparency.

3) The Project 
a chronophotographic reading of the water and algae aspiration creates a topographic architecture of layers (horizontal and vertical) in which the programmed spaces as well as the empty ones interpenetrates to form a fluid and homogeneous unit.  

Program 
It unroll in between the constitutive layers resulting from the movement of algae on several criteria.  
Transparency: from the lagoon to Cadoros in a movement of ground in interface of the auditorium and restaurant.  
Proximity of water:  coffee, restoration, interior channel of lifting.  
Thickening:  in the north of the building to welcome the offices and the rooms of conferences in connection with the architecture school
The evolution: the intersticial and lamellar definition of space does not fix the positioning of all the programmatic elements.

Circulations 
a channel unfold in one of the layers, in order to access public space by inland waterway, Gondolas or Vaporetto. Lamellar circulations unroll in the direction of the layers.  

Materials 
the materials of the project serve this feeling of complexity, between reflection and transparency, symbolized by a refering image : the body of the jellyfish. A temporary system of occulation will be developed for spaces to be darkened.  The materials of the project thus consist of plastic, glass, watery vegetation, water as steam or liquid.  

Urban plan 
On the docks level, the ground trifles with the Acqua Alta, the tides and there amplitudes.  Zones in towards, hollow, being able to give place to plantations of watery vegetations, Zones on the contrary with constant altimetry, like places of unloading and circulation.

Project team:  ammar eloueini, r dsv sie p