Friday, June 15. 2012
Via Archinect
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An architectural Time Machine by architect Heechan Park explores how to create an architectural time-based event. As the machines blow vapour rings that double as ephemeral scent zones, the public not only experiences a visual performance of smoke vortices travelling through space, but they also perceive scents that are temporally spatialised and visualised.
Personal comment:
I'm not entirely convinced by the use of the term "time-machine" for this project (time-based architecture, indeed), but really interested in the materialisation of shapes through vapour, doubled with scent. It seems to give an ephemeral, evolutive and almost "molecular" nature to architecture.
Wednesday, June 13. 2012
Via Archinect
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de MAGAZINEONURBANISM
“If you go into the hardcore urban or the hardcore rural, it is quite simple to define it, but that is not so relevant. It is more significant to talk about the condition in between. And this condition is extremely difficult to define.” – Urban planner Kees Christiaanse in conversation with Bernd Upmeyer and Beatriz Ramo on behalf of MONU Magazine
MONU’s call for submissions for its latest issue (#16, Non Urbanism) asked its participants to “investigate how non-urbanism may be defined and identified today, and how non-urban areas interact with and relate to urban areas.“ Fortunately for readers, the printed compendium seems to succeed in largely refuting the very existence of its themed subject matter. Or, if it doesn’t go so far as to refute the ‘non urban’, the content demonstrates how difficult it is to call out any place as not being deeply under the influence of it.
MONU #16’s agenda fits within mounting reactions to the geographic myopia found in some of the contemporary ‘urban age’ rhetoric. ‘Non Urbanism’ explores what happens when the inventory of urban moves beyond widget counts of human bodies for its reductive definition. It asks: what is non-urbanism when we approach the ‘built environment’ in a fully relational way? What happens when we see cities in the wider geographic field of their effects, borrowin...
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by Lizzie Wade
The New York Times may have reported that Elon Musk is prepared to send people to Mars “with or without NASA,” but the CEO of Space Exploration Technologies Corporation—better known as SpaceX—was singing a different tune on Tuesday after his company launched its Dragon spacecraft into low Earth orbit and began guiding it towards the International Space Station.
(...)
Note: read more about it on GOOD, published before the mission, the nature of the collaboration between SpaceX and NASA is detailed and provides a more nuanced view about the "public" vs "private" discussion here.
Following my previous post about Arctic drones that reminded me of a project we did in 2010, Arctic Opening (pdf), this one makes me think of another one, also dating back from 2010, I-Weather as Deep Space Public Lighting (pdf). What seems interesting to me here is that the debate about the nature of space gets further away, into space (or even deep space). Until now, all manned missions to Space were public, so the (deep) space in a way, was also a public space (at the exeption of some communication satellites, paid seats by some "tycoons", etc.). So to say, we are now not only confronted to the changing nature of our "ground space" where public space decreases, but also of the space that surrounds Earth, the "Space's space", that will also become franchised, bit by bit.
Public space (public technology, fundings, etc.) is undoubtly an important sub-subject that runs through our works. Public space of Space too. Or should we consider it now an old debate? That in fact, public space, linked to the invention of the democratic state (Athenes) is an old concept, probably a too static one (and therefore the binary opposition between public and private as well) or worse: a lost battle? Should we try to migrate the idea and re-invent it, linked to new ways of organizing societies (public-participative-evolutive-creolized-space)? Many questions...
Wednesday, June 06. 2012
Because moose aren't the only thing in Canada's north.
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As it becomes increasingly clear that climate change and the race for new sources of oil and gas are going to turn Earth's poles into hotbeds of military contention, Northrup Grumman is responding by offering Canada a drone that can fly under even the harshest of conditions.
The RQ-4 Global Hawk has been used by the US military for surveillance since its introduction in 1998. And now it's going to get a second life protecting Canada from the Reds, or whoever else wants to dispute their claims on their own resource-rich northern wastes.
Fightglobal reports:
Dubbed the Polar Hawk, the aircraft is a modified version of the basic Block 30 airframe. […] To meet Canada's specific requirements, the aircraft's satellite communications system has been modified to cope with the spotty coverage found in the arctic. The aircraft would also have wing deicing and engine anti-icing capability
The Polar Hawk can survey 40,000 square miles of territory a day, which means it would take only three of them to monitor all of Canada's northern reaches. Which is good, because one Hawk plus all its support infrastructure is $215 million.
Personal comment:
Arctic is getting permanent monitoring... or rather let's say surveillance in this case. It reminds me of the project we exhibited in 2010 on the Frioul archipelago, Arctic Opening (and that is published in Bracket issue # 2 [goes soft]), where we tried to pinpoint the changes that would occur in the Arctic.
Monday, June 04. 2012
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by rholmes
[Ship tracks -- "narrow clouds... form[ed] when water vapor condenses around tiny particles of pollution that ships either emit directly as exhaust or that form as a result of gases within the exhaust” — in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California, captured photographically by a NASA satellite; the atmospheric trace of the seaborne transfer of goods and materials between East and West.]
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