May 8, 2020
Stuart Weitzman School of Design
102 Meyerson Hall
210 South 34th Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104
Assistant Professor of Architecture Masoud Akbarzadeh received the Silver A' Design Award in Furniture, Decorative Items and Homeware Design Category by the International Design Academy.
The A'Design Award and Competition attracts submissions from designers, innovators, and companies to showcase their work for media, publishers, and buyers.
In describing his submission, Saltatur Furniture, Akbarzadeh writes:
The Saltator is a long-span structure, which is an ensemble of form, function, and aesthetics inspired by the ground-breaking works of Gaudi. The furniture extends Gaudi's designs and other conventional funicular forms, by exhibiting a unique balance of tension and compression forces in 3D space. The structure shows how to minimize the volume of construction materials and reduce the carbon footprint of a structure while preserving the necessary mass for structural performance. The Greco-Roman wrestling technique, Salto, has inspired the structural form.
The grand jury panel consisted of influential press members, established designers, leading academics, and prominent entrepreneurs worldwide.
Akbarzadeh is the Director of the Polyhedral Structures Laboratory (PSL) at the Weitzman School. His primary research focuses on Three-Dimensional Graphical Statics, which is a novel geometric method of structural design in three dimensions.
Earlier this year he received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award to extend the methods of 3D/Polyhedral Graphic Statics for Education, Design, and Optimization of High-Performance Structures.