Friday, April 15. 2011
Via dpr-barcelona
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The relationship between architecture and photography is so old as both disciplines. While Anne Elisabeth Toft asks “Is it possible to capture, translate and transmit architectural experience via representations?” we can recall to the most recent work of the filmmaker and artist Wim Wenders, called Places, strange and quiet which is based on a fascinating series of large-scale photographs taken in countries around the world from Salvador, Brazil; Palermo, Italy; Onomichi, Japan to Berlin, Germany; Brisbane, Australia, Armenia and the United States. Wenders pointed on his latest publication:
When you travel a lot, and when you love to just wander around and get lost, you can end up in the strangest spots. I have a huge attraction to places. Already when I look at a map, the names of mountains, villages, rivers, lakes or landscape formations excite me, as long as I don’t know them and have never been there … I seem to have sharpened my sense of place for things that are out of place. Everybody turns right, because that’s where it’s interesting, I turn left where there is nothing! And sure enough, I soon stand in front of my sort of place. I don’t know, it must be some sort of inbuilt radar that often directs me to places that are strangely quiet, or quietly strange.
But what about photographing not buildings, but landscape, urban voids and ruins? Can we talk about the same relationship as in between architecture and photography?
Most of Wim Wenders‘ photographs are created during his personal travels and while location-scouting for his films. From his iconic images of exteriors and buildings to his panoramic depictions of towns and landscapes, it’s not strange to find some of his movies accompanied by photo exhibitions and publications such as The Heart is a Sleeping Beauty as part of The Million Dollar Hotel or his 1999 film Buena Vista Social Club which was featured with the companion book by Wim Wenders and Donata Wenders.
Wim Wenders was a painter before he started working on film and photography, and he talked about this in an interview with Michael Coles:
I was heavily influenced by the so-called New American Underground. A lot of American painters made movies in the mid to late ’60s, Warhol being the most famous one. There was a whole retrospective traveling through Europe at the time. I saw these films in ’66 or ’67, and that was very important for me. I wrote about them, too. I wrote about Michael Snow especially, and a film that he had made called Wavelength (1967). It was the first article I wrote. Wavelength was a painter’s film. It was actually only one shot, a painstakingly slow zoom across a room toward the windows. Day and night were passing. Nothing much happened. It was very painterly. My first films were basically landscape paintings, except that they were shot with a movie camera. I never moved the frame. Nothing ever happened in them. Each scene lasted as long as a 16-millimeter daylight reel, which was about four minutes. There was no editing involved, other than attaching one reel to the other.
Wenders photographic work is obviously very cinematic. His approach to catch the right moment and the right place, his sensibility to transmit with images what a urban place can mean and the way he freezes different urban context is widely poetic and full of literary references.
Wenders points that he doesn’t think that any photographer has anything else in mind than that particular moment he is capturing. This is the main guideline of the photo-work of the exhibition that will take place at the Haunch of Venison, in London.
“…but a story,
from that story came a script,
and from the script a film -
which never wanted to conceal
that it might just as well have become a song:
a song about a different America
beyond that great big Dream,
where truly
everyone
is
equal.”
- Wim Wenders
As he said, “discovering the story that a place wants to tell. That’s my main concern, my attitude. Listening to the place. For me, taking a picture is more an act of listening, so to speak, than of seeing.” Now, the questions hidden in every picture are always the same:
What happened to that place? What happened to those people? How does this house or this street or this landscape look now, 10 or 30 years later?
—–
Image credits:
[1] Ferris Wheel, Armenia 2008, C-Print, 151,3 x 348 cm © Wenders Images GbR
[2] Open Air Screen, Palermo 2007, C-Print, 186×213 cm © Wenders Images GbR
[3] The Red Bench, Onomichi, 2005, C-Print, 186 x 200,6 cm © Wenders Images GbR
[4] Cemetery in the City, Tokyo 2008, C-Print, 132×133 cm © Wenders Images GbR
[5] Moscow Backyard, Moskau 2006, C-Print, 125×139 cm © Wenders Images GbR
[6] Ferris Wheel (Reverse Angle), Armenia 2008, C-Print, 151,3 x 348 cm © Wenders Images GbR
The book Places, strange and quiet has been published by Hatje Cantz Verlag. More info at their web-site
Thursday, April 14. 2011
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by admin
Finalist
2011 Skyscraper Competition
Park soon young, Lee chang hee, Lee ki joon
South Korea
The idea behind this skyscraper proposal is to harvest the energy within clouds in regions where more than 200 days per year are cloudy and rainy such as Scotland, North western United States, and South American rain forests.
According to studies, a single lightning produces comparable energy to 100,000 household bulbs for an hour. It is estimated that the world’s population currently needs 14 trillion of kilowatts per year but almost 33% of the electricity is lost during its distribution.
The Cloud and Electricity Generator Skyscraper seeks to tackle these problems by collecting the cloud’s electricity at heights that surpass more than 1 kilometer. The skyscraper is designed with a series of super-tall antennas that collect lightning and stores the energy in a series of battery-like structures distributed along the entire building.
A series of these skyscrapers could provide enough clean energy to a medium-size city. There will be very little energy lost in its distribution as the skyscraper will be located within the cities.
Monday, April 11. 2011
Via information aesthetics
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Next to their established offices in Boston and Milan, MIT Senseable Lab is now also active in Singapore, where they just launched an impressive exhibition [senseable.mit.edu] with five different graphical perspectives into Singapore's social, economic and mobility patterns. The five visualizations are all based on real-time data recorded and captured by a vast system of communication devices, microcontrollers and sensors.
What seems to be in the pipeline is an open API to allow others access to the rich data streams: "The exhibition is just the beginning of something that aims to develop into an open platform for the management of urban real-time data and the engagement of developer communities in writing innovative applications for the city."
"Hub of the World" shows the ships and containers arriving and leaving Singapore. "Isochronic Singapore" deformes a street map of the city proportional to its travel time. "Raining Taxis" combines taxi and rainfall data to establish the experience of not finding any taxis when it rains. "Urban Heat Islands" combines ambient temperature and energy usage to investigate whether cities are indeed warmer than the surrounding environment. "Formula One City" conveys the impact of the sports competition, for instance in terms of geo-located text messaging behavior. Lastly, "Real Time Talk" indicates the level of cellphone network usage throughout the city.
The exhibition runs from April 8th until May 1st at Singapore Art Museum.
Friday, April 08. 2011
Via MIT Technology Review
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The social network breaks an unwritten rule by giving away plans to its new data center—an action it hopes will make the Web more efficient.
By Tom Simonite
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The new data center, in Prineville, Oregon, covers 147,000 square feet and is one of the most energy-efficient computing warehouses ever built.
Credit: Jason Madera |
Just weeks before switching on a massive, super-efficient data center in rural Oregon, Facebook is giving away the designs and specifications to the whole thing online. In doing so, the company is breaking a long-established unwritten rule for Web companies: don't share the secrets of your server-stuffed data warehouses.
Ironically, most of those secret servers rely heavily on open source or free software, for example the Linux operating system and the Apache webserver. Facebook's move—dubbed the Open Compute Project—aims to kick-start a similar trend with hardware.
"Mark [Zuckerberg] was able to start Facebook in his dorm room because PHP and Apache and other free and open-source software existed," says David Recordon, who helps coordinate Facebook's use of, and contribution to, open-source software. "We wanted to encourage that for hardware, and release enough information about our data center and servers that someone else could go and actually build them."
The attitude of other large technology firms couldn't be more different, says Ricardo Bianchini, who researches energy-efficient computing infrastructure at Rutgers University. "Typically, companies like Google or Microsoft won't tell you anything about their designs," he says. A more open approach could help the Web as a whole become more efficient, he says. "Opening up the building like this will help researchers a lot, and also other industry players," he says. "It's opening up new opportunities to share and collaborate."
The open hardware designs are for a new data center in Prineville, Oregon, that will be switched on later this month. The 147,000-square-foot building will increase Facebook's overall computing capacity by around half; the social network already processes some 100 million new photos every day, and its user base of over 500 million is growing fast.
The material being made available - on a new website - includes detailed specifications of the building's electrical and cooling systems, as well as the custom designs of the servers inside. Facebook is dubbing the approach "open" rather than open-source because its designs won't be subject to a true open-source legal license, which requires anyone modifying them to share any changes they make.
The plans reveal the fruits of Facebook's efforts to create one of the most energy-efficient data centers ever built. Unlike almost every other data center, Facebook's new building doesn't use chillers to cool the air flowing past the servers. Instead, air from the outside flows over foam pads moistened by water sprays to cool by evaporation. The building is carefully oriented so that prevailing winds direct outside air into the building in both winter and summer.
Facebook's engineers also created a novel electrical design that cuts the number of times that the electricity from the grid is run through a transformer to reduce its voltage en route to the servers inside. Most data centers use transformers to reduce the 480 volts from the nearest substation down to 208 volts, but Facebook's design skips that step. "We run 480 volts right up to the server," says Jay Park, Facebook's director of data-center engineering. "That eliminates the need for a transformer that wastes energy."
To make this possible, Park and colleagues created a new type of server power supply that takes 277 volts and which can be split off from the 408-volt supply without the need for a transformer. The 408 volts is delivered using a method known as "three phase power": three wires carry three alternating currents with carefully different timings. Splitting off one of those wires extracts a 277-volt supply.
Park and colleagues also came up with a new design for the backup batteries that keep servers running during power outages before backup generators kick in—a period of about 90 seconds. Instead of building one huge battery store in a dedicated room, many cabinet-sized battery packs are spread among the servers. This is more efficient because the batteries share electrical connections with the computers around them, eliminating the dedicated connections and transformers needed for one large store. Park calculates that his new electrical design wastes about 7 percent of the power fed into it, compared to around 23 percent for a more conventional design.
According to the standard measure of data-center efficiency—the power usage efficiency (PUE) score—Facebook's tweaks have created one of the most efficient data centers ever. A PUE is calculated by dividing a building's total power use by the energy used by its computers - a perfect data center would score 1. "Our tests show that Prineville has a PUE of 1.07," says Park. Google, which invests heavily in data-center efficiency, reported an average PUE of 1.13 across all its locations for the last quarter of 2010 (when winter temperatures make data centers most efficient), with the most efficient scoring 1.1.
Google and others will now be able to cherry pick elements from Facebook's designs, but that poses no threat to Facebook's real business, says Frank Frankovsky, the company's director of hardware design. "Facebook is successful because of the great social product, not [because] we can build low-cost infrastructure," he says. "There's no reason we shouldn't help others out with this."
Copyright Technology Review 2011.
Personal comment:
Will efficient and sustainable ways to organize architectural climate as well as to use energy become a by product of data centers? Might be.
Thursday, April 07. 2011
Via MIT Technology Review
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A novel approach to design and construction could save materials and energy, and create unusually beautiful structures.
By Kevin Bullis
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Model maker: Neri Oxman works on “Cartesian Wax: Prototype for a Responsive Skin,” a model that is now part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Credit: Mikey Siegel |
In conventional construction, workers piece together buildings from mass-produced, prefabricated bricks, I-beams, concrete columns, plates of glass and so on. Neri Oxman, an architect and a professor at MIT's Media Lab, intends to print them instead—essentially using concrete, polymers, and other materials in the place of ink. Oxman is developing a new way of designing buildings to take advantage of the flexibility that printing can provide. If she's successful, her approach could lead to designs that are impossible with today's construction methods.
Existing 3-D printers, also called rapid prototyping machines, build structures layer by layer. So far these machines have been used mainly to make detailed plastic models based on computer designs. But as such printers improve and become capable of using more durable materials, including metals, they've become a potentially interesting way to make working products.
Oxman is working to extend the capabilities of these machines—making it possible to change the elasticity of a polymer or the porosity of concrete as it's printed, for example—and mounting print heads on flexible robot arms that have greater freedom of movement than current printers.
She's also drawing inspiration from nature to develop new design strategies that take advantage of these capabilities. For example, the density of wood in a palm tree trunk varies, depending on the load it must support. The densest wood is on the outside, where bending stress is the greatest, while the center is porous and weighs less. Oxman estimates that making concrete columns this way—with low-density porous concrete in the center—could reduce the amount of concrete needed by more than 10 percent, a significant savings on the scale of a construction project.
Oxman is developing software to realize her design strategy. She inputs data about physical stresses on a structure, as well as design constraints such as size, overall shape, and the need to let in light into certain areas of a building. Based on this information, the software applies algorithms to specify how the material properties need to change throughout a structure. Then she prints out small models based on these specifications.
The early results of her work are so beautiful and intriguing that they've been featured at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Museum of Science in Boston. One example, which she calls Beast, is a chair whose design is based on the shape of a human body (her own) and the predicted distribution of pressure on the chair. The resulting 3-D model features a complex network of cells and branching structures that are soft where needed to relieve pressure and stiff where needed for support.
The work is at an early stage, but the new approach to construction and design suggests many new possibilities. A load-bearing wall could be printed in elaborate patterns that correspond to the stresses it will experience from the load it supports from wind or earthquakes, for instance.
The pattern could also account for the need to allow light into a building. Some areas would have strong, dense concrete, but in areas of low stress, the concrete could be extremely porous and light, serving only as a barrier to the elements while saving material and reducing the weight of the structure. In these non-load bearing areas, it could also be possible to print concrete that's so porous that light can penetrate, or to mix the concrete gradually with transparent materials. Such designs could save energy by increasing the amount of daylight inside a building and reducing the need for artificial lighting. Eventually, it may be possible to print efficient insulation and ventilation at the same time. The structure can be complex, since it costs no more to print elaborate patterns than simple ones.
Other researchers are developing technology to print walls and other large structures. Behrokh Khoshnevis, a professor of industrial and systems engineering and civil and environmental engineering at the University of Southern California, has built a system that can deposit concrete walls without the need for forms to contain the concrete. Oxman's work would take this another step, adding the ability to vary the properties of the concrete, and eventually work with multiple materials.
The first applications of Oxman's approach will likely to be on a relatively small scale, in consumer products and medical devices. She's used her principles to design and print wrist braces for carpal tunnel syndrome. They're customized based on the pain that a particular patient experiences. The approach could also improve the performance of prosthetics.
Oxman, 35, is developing her techniques in partnership with a range of specialists, such as Craig Carter, a professor of materials science at MIT. While he says her approach faces challenges in controlling the properties of materials, he's impressed with her ideas: "There's no doubt that the results are strikingly beautiful."
Copyright Technology Review 2011.
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