At Chicago's Alinea restaurant, "chefs defy gravity": green apple-flavored helium-filled "balloons" have become its latest (and lightest) dessert delicacy. Diners can either pop the balloon with a pin, or devour the whole thing at once. And yes, your voice will get a few octaves higher.
In the chapter Threshole of the great book Formless: A User’s Guide, (Zone Books, 1997) Yve-Alain Bois addresses more specifically architecture to illustrates this concept created by Georges Bataille. I hope to make a review of the whole book sometimes soon, but for now I would like to focus on Robert Smithson‘s work which, along with Gordon Matta Clark’s share the focus of this chapter. Yve-Alain Bois introduces Smithson as somebody who is interested in strategies of entropization of architecture on the contrary of the latter’s pretention:
“The ideal is architecture, or sculpture, immobilizing harmony, guaranteeing the duration of motifs whose essence is the annulations of time.”
Thus the dream of architecture, among other things, is to escape entropy. This dream may be illusory on its face; but this is something that must be demonstrated nonetheless – which is to say that one must “exit the domain of the project by means of a project.” (P187)
This project that exit the domain of the project, Robert Smithson will first attempt to achieve it in 1970 with a project entitled Island of the Dismantled Building that was going to build and dramatize a ruin/island in Vancouver Bay. In the end, this project never occurred (because of local associations) but few months later, he will re-iterate such attempt with his Partially Buried Wood Shed on Kent State University campus, associating his fascination for formlessness and entropic architecture. Indeed, a year earlier, he created one of his most famous work Asphalt Rundown which dramatized the slow drip of hot asphalt on an earthly slopped. This artificial geological interaction is fascinating for a lot of reasons. The slow movement of this black matter winning over the earth is not without making us think of an anti-matter that would absorb whatever interacts with it, the asphalt drip characterizes quite convincingly a materialization of formlessness, one can also think of this fluid mass that will eventually dries-up and somehow strangle the earth below it etc.
As I wrote above, this project exit project will motivates Robert Smithson to realize a similar operation, this time with mud instead of asphalt and architecture in the place of the earth. Partially Buried Wood Shed (1970) is thus dramatizing a process of acceleration of entropy on architecture that does not seem to be able to resist to this shapeless matter winning over it. Yve-Alain Bois describes such a process with the following text:
Partially Buried Woodshed is a “nonmonument” to the process Smithson calls “de-architecturization”: a dump truck poured earth onto the roof of an old woodshed to the point where its ridge beam cracked. Architecture is the material, and entropy is the instrument. (P188)
Asphalt Rundown (1969). Image from Field Trips: Bernd and Hilla Becher / Robert Smithson. Porto: Museu Serralves, 2001.
Asphalt Rundown (1969). Image from Field Trips: Bernd and Hilla Becher / Robert Smithson. Porto: Museu Serralves, 2001.
Asphalt Rundown (1969). Image from Field Trips: Bernd and Hilla Becher / Robert Smithson. Porto: Museu Serralves, 2001.
Partially Buried Wood Shed (1970). Image from Field Trips: Bernd and Hilla Becher / Robert Smithson. Porto: Museu Serralves, 2001.
Partially Buried Wood Shed (1970). Image from Field Trips: Bernd and Hilla Becher / Robert Smithson. Porto: Museu Serralves, 2001.
Partially Buried Wood Shed (1970). Image from Field Trips: Bernd and Hilla Becher / Robert Smithson. Porto: Museu Serralves, 2001.
Asphalt Rundown (1969). Image from Field Trips: Bernd and Hilla Becher / Robert Smithson. Porto: Museu Serralves, 2001.
Asphalt Rundown (1969). Image from Field Trips: Bernd and Hilla Becher / Robert Smithson. Porto: Museu Serralves, 2001.
Asphalt Rundown (1969). Image from Field Trips: Bernd and Hilla Becher / Robert Smithson. Porto: Museu Serralves, 2001.
Conical Intersect 2. From “Conical Intersect” París, France [1975]
"A simple cut or series of cuts acts as a powerful drawing device able to redefine spatial situations and structural components”.
-Gordon Matta-Clark
The work of Gordon Matta-Clark has been deeply documented in several museums and architecture centres, the way his work changed the meaning and scope of sculpture through architectural interventions has been an undeniable influence in architects and students. He worked mostly with ephemeral interventions on buildings through cuts and extractions on floors, walls and other structures, somehow showing the possibilities of descontructing reality by transforming our consciousness and the way we perceive our world.
When thinking about the power of representation as means of architectural thinking, the way that Matta-Clark transformed real buildings into scale models 1:1 by cutting its abandoned structures is at least, provocative, because he was reverting the process of our lineal way of thinking. As Louise Désy and Gwendolyn Owens points, he was clearly interested in the built environment with all its complexity and contradictions, not just in the buildings that he could artfully cut apart. This contradictions can also be understood as a kind of architectural dissidence, when practising what he called “Anarchitecture”.
Conical Intersect 6. From “Conical Intersect” París, France [1975]
“The end of the spectacle brings with it the collapse of reality into hyperrealism, the meticulous reduplication of the real, preferably through another reproductive medium such as advertising or photography. Through reproduction from one medium into another the real becomes volatile, it becomes the allegory of death, but it also draws strength from its own destruction, becoming the real for its own sake, a fetichism of the lost object which is no longer the object of representation, but the ecstasy of the degeneration and its own ritual extermination: the hyperreal.”
The strength of Baudrillard quote lies in the human capacity of transform reality into hyperrealism. In the same way that Lebbeus Woods wonders “To what extent is destruction necessary for creation?”, when looking at Matta-Clark “building cuts” we can recognize a similar question, a need to demonstrate an alternative attitude to buildings. Darío Corbeira sumarizes this attitude at his book ¿Construir… o deconstruir? Textos sobre Gordon Matta-Clark
Matta-Clark’s architectural gestures had the potential to be statements against certain social conditions. While many architects felt that they could make a contribution to society through the structures they built, Matta-Clark felt that he himself could not alter the environment or make any significant change. His idea of Anarchitecture called for an anarchistic approach to architecture, marked physically by a process of destructuring, rather than by the creation of structure. It was thus his choice to focus on existing structures in neglected areas, to use the city’s abandoned buildings within which to execute his work.
Using his building cuts as his leitmotif, Matta-Clark tried to open a breach in the American capitalist system of the decade of the 1970s by inviting people to think about concepts such as private property, speculation, privacy, poverty, abandonment or isolation.
Circus 2. From “Circus-Caribbean Orange”, Chicago [1978]
At this point it’s also interesting to talk about entropy and this concept makes us think also on the work of Robert Smithson. While working with ruins, both of them contemplated new models of utopian design focusing in their state of deterioration, an state that can be irreversible as Smithson tried to demonstrate with his Map of Broken Clear Glass, because there’s no way you can really piece it back together again. On the exhibition Modernism as a Ruin. An Archaeology of the Present their work has been described with this words:
Smithson and Matta-Clark became deeply involved in the entropic ruinous state as proof of fleetingness. Nonetheless, Smithson also described the state of postindustrial architecture with the concept of reversed ruins, buildings which “rise into ruin before they are built”.
Matta-Clark’s work focused on a process which deals with the increase of entropy. “His cuttings stopped just short of realizing the potential entropy contained within a building; the cuts explored and displayed the structure, but did not allow the structure to pass beyond the point of irreversibility”, as Andreas Papadakis described it, a situation where the structure is shaken, but does not collapse. It is just pushed to the point where it becomes unsettling.
If the work of Matta-Clark is an object to be destroyed, as has been said, maybe we can talk here about some kind of violence implicit on his works. The 1960s cultural anxiety about temporality has driven artist and architects to ironize about time and space, and this cuts try to be a representation to expand the limits of what scares us most, a vision that can be found in the ruins and voids of this Anarchitecture. A sort of feeling captured at this part of Jorge Luis Borges’ poem “Limits”:
“If there is a limit to all things and a measure
And a last time and nothing more and forgetfulness,
Who will tell us to whom in this house
We without knowing it have said farewell?”
A startup believes combining LED technology and smart-phone apps will offer precise indoor location data.
By Rachel Metz
When you go to the grocery store, chances are you find yourself hunting for at least a couple of items on your list. Wouldn't it be easier if your smart phone could just give you turn-by-turn directions to that elusive can of tomato paste or bunch of cilantro, and maybe even offer you a discount on yogurt, too?
That's the idea behind ByteLight, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based startup founded by Dan Ryan and Aaron Ganick. ByteLight aims to use LED bulbs—which will fit into standard bulb sockets—as indoor positioning tools for apps that help people navigate places such as museums, hospitals, and stores, and offer deals targeted to a person's location.
Accurate indoor navigation is currently lacking. While GPS is good for finding your way outdoors, it doesn't work as well inside. And technologies being used for indoor positioning, such as Wi-Fi, aren't accurate enough, Ryan and Ganick say.
Ryan and Ganick feel confident they're in the right space at the right time: there's not only been a boom in location-based services, but also in smart-phone apps such as Foursquare or Shopkick that use these services. Meanwhile, LEDs are increasingly popular as replacements for traditional lightbulbs (due to their energy efficiency and long life span).
ByteLight grew out of the National Science Foundation-funded Smart Lighting Engineering Research Center at Boston University, which Ganick and Ryan, both 24, took part in as electrical engineering undergrads.
Initially, ByteLight focused on using LEDs to provide high-speed data communications—a technology referred to as Li-Fi. But Ryan and Ganick felt their technology was better suited to helping people find their way around large indoor spaces.
Here's how it might work: you're in a department store that has replaced a number of its traditional lightbulbs with ByteLights. The lights, flickering faster than the eye can see, would emit a signal to passing smart phones. Your phone would read the signal through its camera, which would direct the smart phone to pull up a deal offering a discount on a shirt on a nearby rack.
While Wi-Fi can only accurately determine your position indoors to within about five to 10 meters, Ryan and Ganick say, ByteLight's technology cuts this down to less than a meter—close enough for you to easily figure out which shirt the deal is referring to.
ByteLight is working on a functioning prototype, and hopes to have the first products available within a year. Ryan and Ganick say a number of developers are working on smart-phone apps that would include the technology, which, they feel, could also work as an additional (or smarter) location-finding feature within existing apps.
The company is talking to retailers about installing its equipment in stores, too. Ryan and Ganick think businesses will warm to ByteLight because installation mainly requires buying and screwing in their lightbulbs. Once a business installs the lights, they'll need to use a ByteLight mobile app to determine which light corresponds to which spot in their building, Ganick says. An app developer could then use that data to tag deals to different lights.
And while LED bulbs are more costly than standard lightbulbs, they've been falling in price. ByteLight says its bulbs will be only "marginally" more expensive than existing LEDs.
Jeffrey Grau, an analyst with digital marketing company eMarketer, believes ByteLight may be on to something. If the customers are already inside a store, showing them an exclusive offer makes it more likely they'll buy something.
But will shoppers find ByteLight's targeting creepy? Ryan and Ganick don't think so. They say an app on your smart phone would be "listening" for nearby ByteLights, not the other way around. So users can control their own experience. And the LED bulbs' positioning capabilities could help people inside a large building solve the common problem of figuring out where they are. "We want people to think about lightbulbs in an entirely new way," Ganick says.
Copyright Technology Review 2012.
Personal comment:
The technology of transmitting bit information through light is known and was used already with neon tubes (or if you look for older technologies, the morse code was already the same technology, but dedicated to the human eye instead of the digital and quick one of a camera), it is now just a shift to combine very rapid variations in lighting (information transmission that remain invisible --to the human eye--) with micro-geo-location.
Back to failing technologies… this piece on CNN Money from 2004 gives an intriguing snapshot of the problems encountered by “users” of the Prada building designed by Rem Koolhaas. As described in this article, this cutting-edge architecture was supposed to “revolutionize the luxury experience” through “a wireless network to link every item to an Oracle inventory database in real time using radio frequency identification (RFID) tags on the clothes. The staff would roam the floor armed with PDAs to check whether items were in stock, and customers could do the same through touchscreens in the dressing rooms”.
Some excerpts that I found relevant to my interests in technological accidents and problems:
“But most of the flashy technology today sits idle, abandoned by employees who never quite embraced computing chic and are now too overwhelmed by large crowds to coolly assist shoppers with handhelds. On top of that, many gadgets, such as automated dressing-room doors and touchscreens, are either malfunctioning or ignored
(…)
In part because of the crowds, the clerks appear to have lost interest in the custom-made PDAs from Ide. During multiple visits this winter, only once was a PDA spied in public–lying unused on a shelf–and on weekends, one employee noted, “we put them away, so the tourists don’t play with them.”
When another clerk was asked why he was heading to the back of the store to search for a pair of pants instead of consulting the handheld, he replied, “We don’t really use them anymore,” explaining that a lag between the sales and inventory systems caused the PDAs to report items being in stock when they weren’t. “It’s just faster to go look,” he concluded. “Retailers implementing these systems have to think about how they train their employees and make sure they understand them,”
(…)
Also aging poorly are the user-unfriendly dressing rooms. Packed with experimental tech, the clear-glass chambers were designed to open and close automatically at the tap of a foot pedal, then turn opaque when a second pedal sent an electric current through the glass. Inside, an RFID-aware rack would recognize a customer’s selections and display them on a touchscreen linked to the inventory system.
In practice, the process was hardly that smooth. Many shoppers never quite understood the pedals, and fashionistas whispered about customers who disrobed in full view, thinking the door had turned opaque. That’s no longer a problem, since the staff usually leaves the glass opaque, but often the doors get stuck. In addition, some of the chambers are open only to VIP customers during peak traffic times. “They shut them down on the weekends or when there’s a lot of traffic in the store,” says Darnell Vanderpool, a manager at the SoHo store, “because otherwise kids would toy with them.”
On several recent occasions, the RFID “closet” failed to recognize the Texas Instruments-made tags, and the touchscreen was either blank or broadcasting random video loops. During another visit, the system recognized the clothes–and promptly crashed. “[The dressing rooms] are too delicate for high traffic,” says consultant Dixon. “Out of the four or five ideas for the dressing rooms, only one of them is tough enough.” That feature is the “magic mirror,” which video-captures a customer’s rear view for an onscreen close-up, whether the shopper wants one or not.“
Why do I blog this? It’s a rather good account of technological failures, possibly useful to show the pain points of Smart Architecture/Cities. The reasons explained here are all intriguing and some of them can be turned into opportunities too (“otherwise kids would toy with them.”)
That said, it’d be curious to know how the situation has changed in 7 years.
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