Sean Lally is educated & trained as an architect and landscape architect. Lally’s work is a synthesis of two intense pressures on society today: humanity’s manipulation of the environment and the bio engineering of the human body. Lally’s design works are experiments that report on potential futures ahead and embrace the belief that for humanity to live sustainably and responsibly, earth’s environments, as well as the human body, will just have to artificially evolve together. Lally’s work speculates on the shapes and aesthetics of space including the social and political dynamics that will emerge when both the design of the environment and the human body are recognized as necessarily elastic for humanity to move forward. Lally received his Bachelor’s degree in Landscape Architecture from UMASS Amherst, his Masters in Architecture from UCLA and is a tenured associate professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago in the School of Architecture. Lally is the author of the The Air from Other Planets: A Brief History of Architecture to Come and recipient of the Prince Charitable Trusts Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome in Landscape Architecture.
Creating the boundaries that define and separate activities is an essential act in architectural ... more Creating the boundaries that define and separate activities is an essential act in architectural design. A boundary distinguishes a change that allows two separate activities to exist adjacent to each other. The material characteristics that create these boundaries inform the shapes that architecture can take, influencing spatial organizations, conglomerations and subdivisions, and typologies, while simultaneously providing a measure of value, whether aesthetic or monetary. The characteristics and behaviors of the boundaries on which architects have relied for so long (stone, steel, or glass) could be best described as solid-state materials; the boundaries that these materials create are static. But architects have worked with another range of materials with boundary edges that are anything but static— instead continently in flux and in a feedback relationship with their climatic context, requiring different standards for the value placed on the shapes they produce. These materials are the electromagnetics, thermodynamics, acoustic waves, and chemical interactions that surround us constantly, yet have largely resisted becoming architectural material to build with. Generally grouped together as energy associated with fuel or dismissed as simply air that fills architecture's volumes, these materials can be controlled and deployed to meet the spatial and organizational requirements needed to become their own architecture. In doing so, they become a set of building materials known as material energies that give the architect access to new types of boundary edges that move from points, lines, and surfaces to gradients of intensities and fallouts. The physical properties of material energies will influence the core understanding of how a geographic edge condition is defined. Therefore this discussion of shape as it pertains to energy has much more at stake than simply replacing one material system (solid state) with another (material energies). Before these proclivities can be witnessed or embraced by architecture, they must first be given shape. Understanding the importance of giving shape to architecture through building materials might appear so fundamental as to not require clarification. Yet this is precisely what has been evading the architect as it pertains to working with energy. If asked to identify the shapes of energy in architecture today, an individual would point to the technologies that harness it (photovoltaic cells, wind turbines, generators) or the devices that release it
A fictional response to an actual question, by Sean Lally
“If you had $50 million, what would you... more A fictional response to an actual question, by Sean Lally “If you had $50 million, what would you spend it on? Tell me what we should be doing.” —Larry Page
While undeniably efficient for certain things, architecture has monopolized our worldview of shel... more While undeniably efficient for certain things, architecture has monopolized our worldview of shelter. According to Sean Lally, shelter doesn’t separate bodies from their environment but actually the exact opposite: it brings them together. Architecture then stands to completely redefine the terms of environmental responsibility by crafting new environments and conditioning bodies to live in them.
The Air from Other Planets: A Brief History of Architecture to Come , 2014
In The Air from Other Planets, Sean Lally introduces the reader to an architecture produced by de... more In The Air from Other Planets, Sean Lally introduces the reader to an architecture produced by designing the energy within our environment ( electromagnetic, thermodynamic, acoustic, and chemical ). This architecture exchanges the walls and shells we have assumed to be the only type of attainable architecture for a range of material energies that develops its own shapes, aesthetics, organizational systems, and social experiences. The book is a story in which energy emerges as more than what fills the interior of a building or reflects off its outer walls. Instead, energy becomes its own enterprise for design innovation: it becomes the architecture itself. The Air from Other Planets is a book nostalgic for the future, rooted in the belief that the architect's greatest attributes lie not only in harnessing the latest technologies and advancements in building materials, but also in exercising our imaginations through speculation and the projections of worlds and environments yet to exist. The book shows us that some of our greatest discoveries come not from seeking something new but from re-examining what we already have around us.
Creating the boundaries that define and separate activities is an essential act in architectural ... more Creating the boundaries that define and separate activities is an essential act in architectural design. A boundary distinguishes a change that allows two separate activities to exist adjacent to each other. The material characteristics that create these boundaries inform the shapes that architecture can take, influencing spatial organizations, conglomerations and subdivisions, and typologies, while simultaneously providing a measure of value, whether aesthetic or monetary. The characteristics and behaviors of the boundaries on which architects have relied for so long (stone, steel, or glass) could be best described as solid-state materials; the boundaries that these materials create are static. But architects have worked with another range of materials with boundary edges that are anything but static— instead continently in flux and in a feedback relationship with their climatic context, requiring different standards for the value placed on the shapes they produce. These materials are the electromagnetics, thermodynamics, acoustic waves, and chemical interactions that surround us constantly, yet have largely resisted becoming architectural material to build with. Generally grouped together as energy associated with fuel or dismissed as simply air that fills architecture's volumes, these materials can be controlled and deployed to meet the spatial and organizational requirements needed to become their own architecture. In doing so, they become a set of building materials known as material energies that give the architect access to new types of boundary edges that move from points, lines, and surfaces to gradients of intensities and fallouts. The physical properties of material energies will influence the core understanding of how a geographic edge condition is defined. Therefore this discussion of shape as it pertains to energy has much more at stake than simply replacing one material system (solid state) with another (material energies). Before these proclivities can be witnessed or embraced by architecture, they must first be given shape. Understanding the importance of giving shape to architecture through building materials might appear so fundamental as to not require clarification. Yet this is precisely what has been evading the architect as it pertains to working with energy. If asked to identify the shapes of energy in architecture today, an individual would point to the technologies that harness it (photovoltaic cells, wind turbines, generators) or the devices that release it
A fictional response to an actual question, by Sean Lally
“If you had $50 million, what would you... more A fictional response to an actual question, by Sean Lally “If you had $50 million, what would you spend it on? Tell me what we should be doing.” —Larry Page
While undeniably efficient for certain things, architecture has monopolized our worldview of shel... more While undeniably efficient for certain things, architecture has monopolized our worldview of shelter. According to Sean Lally, shelter doesn’t separate bodies from their environment but actually the exact opposite: it brings them together. Architecture then stands to completely redefine the terms of environmental responsibility by crafting new environments and conditioning bodies to live in them.
The Air from Other Planets: A Brief History of Architecture to Come , 2014
In The Air from Other Planets, Sean Lally introduces the reader to an architecture produced by de... more In The Air from Other Planets, Sean Lally introduces the reader to an architecture produced by designing the energy within our environment ( electromagnetic, thermodynamic, acoustic, and chemical ). This architecture exchanges the walls and shells we have assumed to be the only type of attainable architecture for a range of material energies that develops its own shapes, aesthetics, organizational systems, and social experiences. The book is a story in which energy emerges as more than what fills the interior of a building or reflects off its outer walls. Instead, energy becomes its own enterprise for design innovation: it becomes the architecture itself. The Air from Other Planets is a book nostalgic for the future, rooted in the belief that the architect's greatest attributes lie not only in harnessing the latest technologies and advancements in building materials, but also in exercising our imaginations through speculation and the projections of worlds and environments yet to exist. The book shows us that some of our greatest discoveries come not from seeking something new but from re-examining what we already have around us.
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Papers by Sean Lally
“If you had $50 million, what would you spend it on? Tell me what we should be doing.”
—Larry Page
Books by Sean Lally
The Air from Other Planets is a book nostalgic for the future, rooted in the belief that the architect's greatest attributes lie not only in harnessing the latest technologies and advancements in building materials, but also in exercising our imaginations through speculation and the projections of worlds and environments yet to exist. The book shows us that some of our greatest discoveries come not from seeking something new but from re-examining what we already have around us.
“If you had $50 million, what would you spend it on? Tell me what we should be doing.”
—Larry Page
The Air from Other Planets is a book nostalgic for the future, rooted in the belief that the architect's greatest attributes lie not only in harnessing the latest technologies and advancements in building materials, but also in exercising our imaginations through speculation and the projections of worlds and environments yet to exist. The book shows us that some of our greatest discoveries come not from seeking something new but from re-examining what we already have around us.