Wednesday, April 08. 2009Postopolis! Reprocessed - Part 1[Dubai comes to Los Angeles / photo: Dan Hill] I'm still trying to make sense of the whirlwind that was Postopolis! LA. The event provided the most wonderful kind of sensory overload and reveled in variety, contradiction and cognitive dissonance. Between jetlag, academic administration and a nasty fever I've been tied up since arriving back in Toronto late Sunday night but my mind still hasn't stopped racing. What follows is a personal highlight reel from the multitude of architects, interface designers, geographers, activists and vampire fiction/gentrification experts (!!) that presented during the first half of the event. I'll share my notes for the remainder of the proceedings sometime over the next several days. fabric | ch / Atmospheric Relations / 2008 Fritz Haeg of Fritz Haeg Studio gave an overview of his landscape architecture, and park and garden design. Haeg highlighted his Gardenlab project and positioned garden design as a "counterpoint to the spectacle of architecture". Over the last several years Haeg has produced a series of Edible Estates that reconsider "green" space in both public and private contexts. Thus far eight prototype gardens have been developed in cities including Salina, Kansas, Los Angeles and London (as part of the Tate Modern's Global Cities exhibit in 2007). Patrick Keller of fabric | ch delivered a fascinating presentation on their work in developing and considering micro-climates. Fabric | ch describes itself as an "architecture, interaction & research" based practice and browsing their portfolio reveals some very exciting thinking (I'm definitely going to investigate and post about one of their earlier projects in the coming weeks). Keller discussed design projects such as their "informatic facade" for Atmospheric Relations and the interface for Philippe Rahm's Météorologie d'intérieur which was exhibited at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in 2006. A large portion of the presentation revolved around Real Rooms, a 2005 proposal that breaks down climates into discrete, modular units that play out across a larger "programmable" complex. Fabric | ch is an edgy, precise practice experimenting on archi-fundamentals (time, space) with very sophisticated considerations of the environment and information systems - exciting stuff! [See Dan Hill's detailed summary of this presentation] Next up was Yo-Ichiro Hakomori of wHY Architecture who was interviewed by David Basulto and David Assael. This meandering conversation touched on a number of projects by the firm including the Grand Rapids Arts Museum and an Art Bridge. The latter project is an infrastructural intervention that provides pedestrian movement across the L.A. River while framing views of the water below and an expansive public mural. Midway through the discussion Hakomori mentioned that he considered Louis Kahn's Salk Institute one of his favourite project and this makes sense as wHY Architecture has developed a similar restrained monumentality. The next session featured Dwayne Oyler and Jenny Wu of Oyler Collaborative, also fielding questions from Basulto and Assael. This experimental practice has executed some stunning installation work and the studio was commissioned by Ai Wei Wei to produce a residence as part of the Ordos 100 Villa project. As evidenced by projects like their 2008 Live Wire exhibit at SCI-Arc, it wasn't too surprising to learn that Oyler has collaborated with Lebbeus Woods in the past. Daivd Gissen / Reconstruction - Smoke / 2006 Mary-Ann Ray of StudioWorks kicked off the second day of talks with a presentation on Chinese urbanism entitled "Towards Ruralpolitanism". Ray is working on an illustrated lexicon that indexes the intersection of massive Chinese cities with villages as there is no North American or European point of reference for understanding how cities and villages engage and interpenetrate one another in China. This research also extended into the cultural realm as Ray discussed a variety of principles pertaining to land ownership and management that roughly translated as "stir fried land" or "illegal mess" - she's trying to catalog these phenomena and engage them critically. Since there is no "suburbia" in Urban China, how do rural and urban systems respond to industrialism and agriculture? How does the population float back and forth between these urban typologies? The next presenter was David Gissen of the excellent HTC Experiments blog. A historian and theorist at the California College of the Arts, Gissen expressed frustration with the gap between theory and and the practice of everyday life. He highlighted work such as Michael Caratzas' proposed preservation of the Cross-Bronx Expressways as being emblematic of ways that architectural historians might more directly engage the systemic nature of the city rather than just cordoning off specific buildings. Urban Ice Core - Indoor Air Archive, 2003-2008 is a "fantasy archive" in which Gissen proposed to collect and store indoor air for future analysis. Gissen closed his presentation with an utterly fascinating anecdote about his neighbour's parrot, and how it functioned as a mimetic device and imitated the ambient soundscape of the city - perhaps historians need to operate in a similar manner? Robert Miles Kemp of Variate Labs presented a stellar body of work that blurred the lines between interface design, robotics and architecture. Kemp highlighted the impending fusion of physical and informational systems and identified an interest in thinking of software as "artifact" rather than control and robots as "systems" rather than anthropomorphic entities. Kemp showed a flurry of interfaces, dashboards and a homebrew multitouch display but what struck me the most was his 2006 thesis project Meta-morphic Architecture which proposed not just parametric design, but parametric space. Kemp maintains a research blog Spatial Robots - interactive systems fans take note. Next up was an overview of Polar Intertia, the self described "journal of nomadic and popular culture" as edited by Ted Kane. Los Angeles is an idiosyncratic city full of storefront churches, mobile taco trucks, cell towers masquerading as palm trees and the like. Rather than homogenize discourse about the city (and urbanism in general) Kane parses the logic of these networks and phenomena. He presented an exciting overview of the politics of RV parked residences in Santa Monica and Venice and detailed how local legislation was creating a migrant population within these municipalities. Kane's journal looks quite exciting and I look forward to digging into it further. The final presentation on Tuesday was Stephanie Smith of Ecoshack. Smith presented Wanna Start a Commune? which, by my reading, applies a veneer of revolutionary thinking and social activism from the 1960s (she identified The Diggers as a key influence) on top of a generic technology startup. The project aspires to monetize the toolkit required for microcommunity building, but I couldn't get past Smith's marketing rhetoric and ascertain a tangible position on what community was, let alone any kind of political stance. I wasn't at all surprised to learn she studied under Rem Koolhaas but her take on the intersection of capital, space and utopia seemed more crass than nuanced. Stay tuned for my notes on the second half of Postpolis! LA. I'm also planning to provide some commentary on the organization and context of the event in relation to online media.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in fabric | ch, Architecture, Interaction design
at
15:54
Defined tags for this entry: architects, architecture, artificial reality, climate, conditioning, fabric | ch, globalization, interaction design, monitoring, publications, publications-fbrc, talks-fbrc, variable, weather
Tuesday, April 07. 2009G33 CON - JODIG33 CON, a solo exhibition by the artist duo JODI JODI have developed the outskirts of their computer-based practice to channel the dirt style animus of technological amateurism and participatory-media. JODI’s personal anthropology runs parallel to and thru the wealth of folk-practices on the world’s networks, from fax-phreaking and list-spamming to web-crashing and youtubing. until 23 may 2009 ----- Via manystuff Personal comment: Une expo de JODI en Allemagne (le retour!). J'aime assez l'expression de "folk art" ou plutôt "folk electronic art" pour qualifier le travail de JODI. Assez intéressant que le design électronique rentre dans le champ du folk et du vernaculaire... Monday, April 06. 2009The Immersive EdgeStarting just a few hours from now down at SCI-Arc, on a cloudless 73º day, "seven distinguished architects and theorists" whose designs straddle "the intersection of physical and virtual worlds" will be presenting their work at the Mediascapes Symposium, led by Ed Keller. -----
Via BLDBLOG Personal comment: Some names... actifs dans la région de LA autour de thématiques qui ne nous sont pas étrangères! Des "usual suspects" (comme Marcos Novak ou Eric Owenn Moss) et des nouveaux suspects (Ed Keller, Benjamin Bratton, etc.)
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture, Interaction design, Science & technology
at
10:47
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, conferences, interaction design, research, science & technology, theory
Patrick Keller / Fabric (Postopolis! LA)Via City of Sound ----- By Dan Hill Patrick Keller’s talk was so up my strasse it’s ridiculous. Keller is from the Swiss architecture practice Fabric, originally from Geneva and now in Lausanne (I’m not sure why he was in LA.) He’s interested in the collaboration between information designers and architect, and works in the space between these disciplines, interested in creating responsive architectures (As am I.) He notes wryly that most of his projects are as yet un-built, “like most architecture”. (As are mine.) He runs through a few projects in quick succession, each a progression of the other. There’s a lot more to his projects than we were able to get through in 30 minutes. All concern the interplay between the environmental characteristics of spaces, in terms of the idea of conditioned environments (somewhat apposite, given Banham’s ideas of Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment (see my own spin on that) and as LA must be home to as much air conditioning as anywhere.) The first project is from a few years back as evidenced by the title. ‘Real Rooms’ (2005) takes its name from Real Player, then one of the de rigeur streaming media players. The idea being that instead of streaming media you could stream actual environments into spaces. This project, for Swiss giant Néstle, was situated in the world HQ of Néstle, a late-modern building with large areas of transparent glass on the outside but an almost hermetically sealed series of interior spaces (corridors, offices, cubicles, boxes etc.) which had precisely controlled environments in terms of internal artificial climates, artificial lighting etc. So given the building had lost a relationship with climate, at least on the interior, Fabric proposed a series of container-like interior ‘boxes’ which could be altered in terms of temperature and lighting to ‘stream’ artificial climates into those spaces, representative of climates and time zones from across the world (playing up Néstle’s global reach, perhaps) - that you could “invite a climate into the box” in Keller’s words. So you could make one environment always 8am, staying on the same latitude. Some could be “always dark, some always daytime - some very cold and some very hot”. The building looked particularly beautiful at night, when only some part of it is lit, forming the shape of daylight across the globe. This shape would then change slightly varying with season. The second project Keller showed also concerns internal atmospheres, but instead of controlling, this is about “letting climate go by itself”. A competition entry for a tower in San Jose, containing a huge volume of air. This building would also communicates climate around the globe, but using the natural processes of convection, albedo effect and so on within the volume of air. As opposed to the former project, this would just enable a climate within the structure, articulated by the volume of air, and then communicate the performance of that air volume via boxes with sensors on the exterior, linking it to climates worldwide. Keller says it’s a sort of test tube environment for climatic variation: “In the morning you’d have cold air at bottom and warmer air at the top remaining from the day before … During the day, it gets warmer, and goes to the top, then cooler air is present at the bottom. Humidity collects at the top, condensates on the facade and runs down. Pollution particles are more dense at the bottom than at the top (as they’re heavier)”. And so on … So the form triggers a natural atmospheric variation into building, which is then captured by the sensors. These sensors then feed information displays on part of building (essentially on each floor), enabling a comparison at each moment of the performance of the building itself, and then “related atmospheres” to other places on the globe. (A fascinating idea, and really close to my own ideas of building as urban dashboard.) The third and final project was ‘Environ(ne)ment’ for the CCA, working with Philippe Rahm. This was both a form of “test environment and representation“ concerning an ‘artificial sun’ (as per Eliasson's Weather Project?) triggering differences in heat, light etc. within the gallery space. These phenomena then sampled by sensors, and feed projections about what’s going on in the space. Moving the ideas forward, Keller described how this exhibit then offered suggestions about how you could inhabit these spaces with differing climates - “propositions generated through software”, such as cooking on floor, sleeping on carpet, wearing clothes or not, furniture, activity and relationships all changing function in response to the different environmental characteristics. (This is an intriguing step forward for the ideas, moving into behavioural relationships as a result of changing environments quite directly, rather than the previous two projects with their more subtle but potentially ignorable approach of prompting.) So Keller sums up by noting how the first project concerned a “conditioned environment” which is then questioned and reopened. The second was a “let go” environment, which is “more natural and costs nothing to trigger variation”. The third concerns “some new way of inhabiting those climates”. He believes this third is interesting as neither totally conditioned nor totally free, but somewhere in between … Keller responds that it could theoretically “go large scale, though it is hard to trigger it at this scale. At urban scale you have to deal with natural conditions as well”. Having said that, in a sense the cities have already changed our climate at this planetary scale of course - and we could do so again, he suggests, say by “painting the cities all white and replace polar caps” accordingly. (There are many more fascinating projects at Fabric’s website, as well as details of the projects noted above, and it’ll be worth watching the work of this practice. This kind of work is at the most interesting junction with architecture and urbanism, to my mind, and perhaps the most potentially fruitful.)
Related Links:Personal comment: This was a really great and challenging event with sharp interventions. I hope we'll be able to organize one in Europe sooner or later (but rather sooner).
Posted by Patrick Keller
in fabric | ch, Architecture, Interaction design
at
10:33
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, conferences, fabric | ch, interaction design, publications, publications-fbrc, research, talks-fbrc, theory
Virtual Electronic Poem (1958, Bruxelles)The Poème électronique was a unique experience, originated from the request made by Philips to Le Corbusier for the design of the company’s pavilion at the Brussels World Fair in 1958. The whole project was initiated and directed by Le Corbusier, who also created and/or selected the images for the audiovisual show, with the organized sound composed by Edgar Varèse, and the stunning surfaces of the building designed by Iannis Xenakis. The result was a ground breaking immersive environment, since the space of the Pavilion hosted the audio and the visual materials as integral parts of the architectural design. Unluckily, such a visionary synthesis of innovative ideas could not stand with its times, and the paradigm was never repeated, or even attempted, again: the Pavilion, notwithstanding the incredible number of spectators (2 millions), was turned down a few months after its inauguration, at the end of the Exposition. The disappearance of the Pavilion makes the Poème électronique a destroyed masterpiece. What we stl have today are only fragments of the various components (i.e. photos and drafts of the architecture, the projected video in videotape from the Philips archives, a stereo reduction of Varèse’s and Xenakis’ musical pieces). Virtual Electronic Poem (VEP) is a project realized as a virtual reality (VR) environment that reproduces the experience of the dismantled masterpiece through an accurate philological reconstruction of the original installation. The website looks a bit out of date but the first of two films in this post shows the results of the work. The second shows the Poème électronique as a film rather than in its architectural context. Perhaps someone out there would be good enough to bring the building into a public setting on Second Life? Entry Filed under: Devices, Events, Furniture, New Materials, Scuplture/Installation, Visual ----- Personal comment: Le Corbusier à l'origine (aussi) des architectures immersives, "média" et interactives? ;)
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fabric | rblgThis blog is the survey website of fabric | ch - studio for architecture, interaction and research. We curate and reblog articles, researches, writings, exhibitions and projects that we notice and find interesting during our everyday practice and readings. Most articles concern the intertwined fields of architecture, territory, art, interaction design, thinking and science. From time to time, we also publish documentation about our own work and research, immersed among these related resources and inspirations. This website is used by fabric | ch as archive, references and resources. It is shared with all those interested in the same topics as we are, in the hope that they will also find valuable references and content in it.
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