Monday, September 28. 2009Animated Facade :The Non-Existence of ArchitectureI found this video on the web today. AEC Facade Visualization from Claus Helfenschneider on Vimeo. Personal comment: I quite agree with Mr. Jargon! That's the least I can say even if we just collaborated with a media facades company. Hopefully for a more architectural result! (if it gets built... ;)) Teaching computers to read: Google acquires reCAPTCHAThe image above is a CAPTCHA — you can read it, but computers have a harder time interpreting the letters. We tried to make it hard for computers to recognize because we wanted to give humans the scoop first, but we're happy to announce to everybody now that Google has acquired reCAPTCHA, a company that provides CAPTCHAs to help protect more than 100,000 websites from spam and fraud. ----- Personal comment:
Après la fonte créée spécifiquement pour pouvoir être lue par les machines (on pense ici bien entendu à l'OCR), le CAPTCHA est apparu bien plus récemment avec l'objectif exactement contraire: ne pas pouvoir être lu par les machines... (pour les raisons que l'on sait d'éviter les logins automatiques et autres spams de listes ou siztes divers). MAD Unveils Taichung Convention Center With Solar Skin
Beijing-based MAD Architects recently recently unveiled their design for a new convention center in Taiwan with a �skin� that will naturally ventilate the structure and generate energy from solar power. The Taichung Convention Center center is intended to become a new local landmark and help redefine the cultural landscape of the city, while also drawing attention to sustainable development and growth. Inhabitat. ----- Via Archinect Personal comment: Etonnant comme les idées se croisent... En continuant à lire les articles dans mon rss reader, voilà que je tombe sur un Convention Center ventilé naturellement et qui ressemble à une construction de (grosses) cheminées... Greener Computing in the CloudCustom datacenters can help lower energy consumption, experts say.
By David Talbot
Cloud computing may raise privacy and security concerns, but this growing practice--offloading computation and storage to remote data centers run by companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo--could have one clear advantage: far better energy efficiency, thanks to custom data centers now rising across the country. "There are issues with property rights and confidentiality that people are working out for mass migration of data to the cloud," says Jonathan Koomey, an energy-efficiency expert and a visiting professor at Yale University. "But in terms of raw economics, there is a strong argument," he adds. "The economic benefits of cloud computing are compelling." The issue of surging worldwide IT-related energy consumption is both a bottom-line concern to the companies involved and, increasingly, an environmental worry. Energy consumption from data centers doubled between 2000 and 2005--from 0.5 percent to 1 percent of world total electricity consumption. That figure, which currently stands at around 1.5 percent, is expected to rise further. According to a study published in 2008 by the Uptime Institute, a datacenter consultancy based in Santa Fe, NM, it could quadruple by 2020. "Having energy consumption go from one to three percent in five to ten years, if that goes on, we are in big trouble," says Kenneth Brill, Uptime Institute executive director. Unless this growth is checked, greenhouse gas emissions will rise, and "the profitability of corporations will deteriorate dramatically," he adds. Cloud-computing companies hope to offer a solution by focusing on energy efficiency within massive data centers. Yahoo, for example, broke ground on a data center near Buffalo, NY, last month that will use as little as one-quarter the electricity of older data centers, says Scott Noteboom, senior director of data center engineering at the company. Once finished, the servers inside this data center will be more efficient from a computational standpoint--using less power when they are performing fewer computations--and the building itself will mainly exploit natural air flows to keep hot servers cool. On days above 27° C, managers will switch on air conditioning, which in this case employs evaporative cooling, that should only need to be used 212 hours per year. The design echoes those found in derelict Buffalo-area manufacturing facilities that were built in pre-air-conditioning days and take advantage of prevailing winds coming off Lake Erie. In these facilities, heat sources were placed in the center of the building, where they acted as a natural pump to move air up and out of cupolas and draw cooler air in from the sides. This is very similar to how Yahoo designed its state-of-the-art cloud-computing center, Noteboom says. "If you want to build systems without chillers, a lot of the lessons can be found in the history before people had them," said Noteboom, who described the project at Technology Review's EmTech@MIT conference yesterday. Even as IT usage surges, the efficiency of computer devices is getting better, with each successive generation of chips performing more operations with the same amount of energy. "We are raising performance levels with the same power footprints," says Jon Haas, director of the Eco-Technologies Program at Intel. Koomey adds that moving data to the Internet has helped reduce overall energy consumption. When people surf the Web--downloading pictures from sites like Facebook and videos from YouTube--they guzzle energy as datacenters serve that content. But if you isolate the act of downloading a CD's worth of music, it turns out to be between 40 percent and 80 percent more efficient than acquiring a physical CD, if you take into account the energy inputs involved in manufacturing and transporting the CD, Koomey says. "Moving bits is inherently environmentally superior to moving atoms," he says. "People worry about energy use of data centers, but they forget that IT enables structural transformation throughout the economy." Copyright Technology Review 2009. ----- Personal comment:
Il serait intéressant de voir quel "design des circulations d'air" yahoo a utilisé pour son data center. Y retrouverait-on des influences vernaculaires pour refroidir les "data centers" (p.ex. une architecture de hautes cheminées, chauffées dans leurs parties hautes afin de créer un mouvent de convection d'air vers le haut)? Networked urbanism: From constant to variableThere’s a slide in my current presentation deck asserting that one of the transitions cities can expect to undergo in the turn toward a fully robust networked urbanism is that from “constant” to “variable.” I’m often asked just what I mean by this, and I’d like to use the following example – first suggested to me by Kevin Slavin – as a jumping-off point for the discussion. Nestled at the intersection of two autobahnen some five miles north-northeast of central Munich lies an enormous torus whose surface is quilted with thousands of silvery facets set in a diamond grid – 2,874 of them, to be precise. The street on which the torus sits is named for Werner Heisenberg, the legendary 20th Century physicist who first articulated the principle of formal uncertainty often associated with his name, and as we shall see, this turns out to be curiously apropos. This is the Allianz Arena, a football stadium designed by the highly-regarded Swiss architectural firm of Jacques Herzog & Pierre de Meuron, and the facets might be taken as something of a minor motif in the firm’s output. Superficially, at least, Allianz appears to employ a vocabulary of form similar to that the partnership had previously used to great effect on their exquisite, jewel-like building for Prada in the Aoyama district of Tokyo. But where the latter is a structure designed for low traffic and a single, very specific type of user, the Allianz is a building meant from the very beginning for the masses. At least two masses, actually, and those starkly different from one another. For as it happens, Munich is home to not one but two football clubs: TSV 1860 München, whose at-home uniform is blue, and FC Bayern München, who wear red. Nor are these the only teams who might plausibly claim Allianz as home ground: the German national team also occasionally plays matches there, and their color is white. Responding to the diverging requirements of 1860 and FCB, as they alternate possession on a near-daily basis during the Bundesliga season, is a nontrivial exercise for any structure the size of a stadium. And as anyone even slightly acquainted with a football supporter can imagine, this is if anything even truer as regards the two teams’ respective followers. Most arenas facing a similar situation might acknowledge the alternation of teams and audiences by some superficially convincing means – perhaps by swapping out the banners and flags hung about the peristyle. But the remarkable thing about Allianz is that the building itself has been given a way to address this change in conditions. The structure’s exoskeleton is wrapped with a lightweight foil of ethylene tetrafluoroethylene, or ETFE. And where ordinarily, one of ETFE’s notable properties is its very high degree of transparency, in this case each panel has been stippled with a fritting of miniscule dots. The result is a milky semi-opacity that, when backlit by tunable LEDs, causes each panel to emit a highly-saturated glow of whatever color desired. Now intensely red, now a truly uncanny blue: one structure, but two very different buildings. For anyone in the crowd, the effect – on mood, on sense of presence, on awareness of the surrounding space, on perception of belonging to some larger community – is nothing less than total. Change some settings, and you change the kind of person who will feel at home in the building, the range of things they will feel comfortable expressing and doing there, and more generally the possibilities for collective action. A thought experiment: take things one simple step further. Open those settings up; plug them into the global data network in such a way as to close a feedback loop between the building and all the people currently using it. And by so doing, couple the building’s radiant color to spectators’ average heart rate, level of activity or emotional state. Connect those parameters to outside control, and you can think of that entire building, its affect and meaning, as an asset of the network. At a crucial moment, the opposing team scores a telling goal. Suddenly you’ve got the ability to modulate and dampen the crowd’s disappointment or, if you so choose, heighten and exacerbate it. Write a few lines of code mapping different patterns of illumination to various contingencies that may arise, and the building becomes a subtler tool, one you can use to settle and reassure, to tweak and goad, even to urge a swift and orderly flow to the exits. What’s going on here? This is new-media theorist Lev Manovich, describing a very different building – Lars Spuybroek’s Water Pavilion – in a 2002 essay: “Its continuously changing surfaces illustrate the key effect of a computer revolution: substitution of every constant by a variable.” In this case, Manovich is specifically referring to the effect of computational design on the contours of a single building, but it’s a profoundly insightful comment, and it points directly at the question of interest. Driven by networked computation, architecture – that slowest-moving and stateliest of arts – is learning to dance. What’s at stake is nothing less than the basic phenomenology of buildings, and of the cities composed of buildings: how they exist in the world, how we encounter them, what possibilities they afford us. We’re used to buildings being one color or another, confronting us with this shape or another, holding one consistent form and aspect for as long as we care to engage them, and all of these verities are now coming into question. I hardly need to point out that cities are infinitely more than collections of buildings. By the same token, though, the exterior surfaces of buildings, and the negative spaces and voids they define, constitute primary conditions for urban experience. And when these envelopes and hollows – thanks to their investment with computational sensing and response – become subject to change over time scales far shorter than those to which we’ve become accustomed, it’s clear to me that we’re talking about a new and very different set of prospects and potentials for the city. ----- Related Links:Personal comment:
Evidemment, je rementionne dans le contexte de l'article d' A . Greenfield notre projet de recherche terminé il y a deux ans sur la question de la variabilité. Nous avions alors entièrement thématisé cette idée de la "ville variable" ou des "environnement variables" (voir lien ci-dessus), en réalité vieux "serpent de mer" de l'architeture.
Posted by Patrick Keller
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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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