Hundreds of spinning blades reveal the invisible patterns of the wind in American artist Charles Sowers’ kinetic installation on the facade of the Randall Museum in San Francisco.
Tomas Saraceno is an artist and architect whose utopian visions for cities that float in the air has led him to create a series of experimental structures such as balloons or inflatable modular platforms that can be inhabited and exploit natural energies.
Poetic Cosmos of the Breath was an experimental solar dome created by Tomas Saraceno. It was launched at dawn on 22 September 2007 at Gunpowder Park, Essex, UK, commissioned by The Arts Catalyst. The project was inspired by the dome created by Dominic Michaelis in 1975, for the film Hu-Man.
In the morning with the sunrise, Saraceno and his team filled the foil with air (video into the post) giving form to this huge colorful ephemeral space which was pinned to the ground at the edges with sand bags. The connection/reflection between the sun-light and the synthetic material di this magical environment.
IMAGE: Gut flora redesign, using a yogurt vehicle, is already a commonplace activity at breakfast tables around the world.
For many, the consumption of probiotic supplements is already a daily routine — a regular, intentional, and frequently yogurt-based effort to re-design our intestinal flora. This makes sense: the five hundred (or so) different species of bacteria living inside our guts have an important influence on everything from our ability to digest certain foods to our emotional well-being and behaviour.
Doses of “friendly” bacteria have already been shown to cure chronic digestive illnesses, and, according to Professor John Cryan of the Alimentary Pharmabiotic Centre at University College, Cork, it’s highly likely that they will soon be used to treat “stress-related psychiatric disorders such as anxiety and depression.” These beneficial microbes are typically consumed orally, either dried and encapsulated in supplement form or cultured in a dairy base, although in extreme situations they can also be introduced directly to the colon using the somewhat horrifying-sounding technique of fecal transplant.
IMAGE: Probiotic bacteria.
Last month, however, scientists at the University of Toronto announced the results of a study that examined both babies’ gut bacteria and the bacteria present in dust samples from their homes. To their surprise, they found a significant overlap, suggesting, as Jessica Hamzelou writes in New Scientist, that babies “may be sharing their gut bacteria with the environment and vice versa.”
Extrapolating from this, public health researcher Pilar Francino goes on to speculate that “people living in the same dusty house may also share health and behavioural characteristics.”
In other words, just as the colour of your walls has been shown to affect your heart rate and blood pressure, your home’s bacterial biome may be making you obese and anxious — or, of course, healthy and happy.
Forget yogurt or fecal transplants — it seems to be only a matter of time before we are able to intentionally inoculate our homes with custom blends of bacteria in order to redesign our gut flora. Designer dust will take its place alongside formaldehyde-free furniture polish and low VOC paint for the responsible homeowner.
Perhaps, given the rising cost of obesity-related diseases combined with the increasing occurrence of allergies, environmental bacteria supplementation will come to be seen as a public health issue, with sanitation crews spraying down pavements and gutters with a fine layer of dried lactobacilli each week.
Meanwhile, somewhere, someday, the Bazalgette of urban probiotics will install a city-wide enteric enhancement program, combining a biotic sensor network and precision bifidobacteria crop-dusting drones in order to transform the city’s streets, transit network, and shared spaces into a giant, shared digestive supplement.
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.
Sometimes, particle animations work. Perpetual Ocean by NASA This visualization shows ocean surface currents around the world during the period from June 2005 through Decmeber 2007.
Interestingly, the visualization does not include any narration or annotations. Instead, the goal was to use ocean flow data to create a simple, visceral experience. The data was based on a high resolution model of the global ocean and sea-ice, that is able to capture ocean eddies and other narrow-current systems which transport heat and carbon in the oceans.
You can either hit your bandwidth allowance by downloading the 2GB versions at the NASA website, or watch the somewhat smaller, yet still HD version, below.
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.
American Airlines’ filing for bankruptcy protection last week provoked surprisingly little reaction from the media or regular travelers. Perhaps we've grown immune to the whims of the rapidly changing airline industry, where the past three decades have seen the merging and dissolution of countless carriers.
Yet it wasn’t so long ago that air travel was synonymous with Americans’ visions of the future, when purchasing a boarding pass meant participating in the ever-expanding dreams of post-war America. Somewhere along the way, the optimistic glow surrounding air travel faded away, leaving a beleaguered industry that causes stress and frustration, not awe, for American travelers. And the dissolution of the industry was reflected in airports, where architectural innovation was quickly pushed aside to make room for quick, easy fixes.
The TWA Flight Center at John F. Kennedy International Airport was designed in 1962 by Eero Saarinen as a crown jewel of Modernist architecture that is still referred to as the ultimate symbol of the jet era. Forty years later, as parts of Saarinen's terminal were being demolished, construction began on Lord Norman Foster's new Terminal 3 at Beijing's Capital International Airport. Airport innovation has fled to developing countries, where the promise of travel is only beginning to achieve its glow.
Airport architecture of the jet era was defined by modernism, intended to be the stylistic cure-all for the world with its beautiful, clean structures that shunned ornament. At first, airports and modernism made perfect bedfellows—the hippest style in the world intertwined with the optimistic, promising future of air travel, which was first coming of age in the late 1950s. Together, the two created the jet era, the vision of air travel propagated through the Pan Am mystique and still recounted by baby boomers today. For those who traveled during this time, the luxury of the jet era cannot be understated.
But the hype didn't last long—by the 1970s, the jet era was over, and modernist architecture was increasingly labeled sterile, cold, and elitist. The post-war halo faded, taking modernism, World's Fairs, and futuristic visions with it. The country was mired in an energy crisis, causing nearly every teetering U.S. airline to tip into the red. Flights were hovering at 40 percent passenger capacity, while Pan Am sought a bailout from the Shah of Iran. Adding a few hijackings created perhaps the darkest days of the American airline industry, with Big Brother intruding into the austere, modernist terminals. "Terminals sprouted long tunnels, corridors, and labyrinthine extensions,” Janna Eggebeen writes in Airport Age: Architecture and Modernity in America. “Formerly open interiors were now darkened, partitioned and cordoned off. Choke points and security cameras further regulated but also deteriorated the airport experience. The air terminal now exuded the oppressiveness, dehumanization, authoritarianism, and tedium of late modern life."
As the airlines hurtled toward bankruptcy, the federal government watched nervously. In 1976, Congress had sunk billions into consolidating the failing railroad companies to create Conrail, and representatives realized that an intervention would be necessary to avoid the same costly fate for the airlines. So in 1978, Congress introduced the Airline Deregulation Act, allowing carriers to engage in competitive pricing for the first time—previously, the government had approved all airfares and flight schedules, which kept fares high and ridership low. Deregulation democratized air travel: Even with inflation adjusted, airfares of have fallen 25 percent since 1991, and planes now fly at an average 74 percent of capacity.
Airports struggled to adapt to the skyrocketing number of passengers. Like patching a flat tire, they tacked on satellite terminals and endless hallways replete with confusing signage. The architect and his optimistic visions were lost in the shuffle. "As airports grew in size and complexity… the architect became part of an expert team,” Eggebeen writes. Design was relegated to a supporting role in favor of a "make do and mend" approach.
Designers remain on the fringes of the air travel industry, attacking the symptoms of the problem one by one: Mobile apps to address boarding passes, checked luggage, and airport maps, for example, create a sort of traveler's ibuprofen that temporarily alleviates stress. Creating an app or renovating a terminal can’t solve the root problems. But with such a large and diverse cast of characters—air carrier employees, TSA officers, retail cashiers, baggage handlers—a complete overhaul is daunting.
And that’s exactly the problem: Design thinking, the phrase that so boldly offers itself in blogs and newspapers as the answer to all of our problems, becomes timid when faced with large, established systems. Design thinking can easily resolve the problem of getting water from one village to the next, but what if the two villages are already connected by a massive, faulty sewage system, controlled by scores of companies who have declared bankruptcy and switched ownership more than once, and are further thwarted by the objectives of third parties?
Our once-optimistic vision of the future of flight still permeates the terminals of America's oldest airports—seen in side-by-side people movers, revolving luggage carousels, and lounge chairs made in the by-gone modern era. They serve as reminders of air travel’s golden age and offer hope of a brighter future. The construction of Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport’s Terminal D in 2005 breathed life back into the system, proving that American air travel could once again have some semblance of opulence. The air travel industry may not have bottomed out yet, but Terminal D might represent the still-tiny light at the end of the tunnel. With 2 million square feet of open, sunny hallways adorned with fascinating art installations, Terminal D is a respite from DFW’s older, musty corridors, where the stress of lost luggage and delayed departures hangs in the air. Any airport that can bring even a sliver of joy back to the journey of the traveler is a step in the right direction.
Visitors can climb onto the sculpture where it meets the ground, but a loop-the-loop at the centre prevents anyone being able to walk a full circuit.
Photography is by Heike Mutter and Ulrich Genth, apart from where otherwise stated.
Here’s some more information from the artists:
Since 13th of November the large-scale sculpture “Tiger and Turtle – Magic Mountain” by Heike Mutter and Ulrich Genth is accessible for the public. Lately, the sleek curved shape of a rollercoaster highlights widely visible the highest peak of the park-‐like designed Heinrich Hildebrand Höhe in the South of Duisburg.
The dynamic sweeps and curves of the construction inscribe themselves like a signature into the scenery and soar till the height of 21 meters. From a distance the metallic glossy track creates the impression of speed and exceeding acceleration. Viewed from close up, the supposed lane turns out to be a stairway which, elaborately winding, follows the course of the rollercoaster.
The visitor can climb the art work by foot. Although the course describes a closed loop, it is impossible to accomplish it as the looping emerges to be a physical barrier. On top, at the highest point of the sculpture – 45 meters above ground – the visitor is rewarded with an extraordinary view over the landscape of the Western Ruhr.
“Tiger and Turtle” refers with its immanent dialectic of speed and deadlock to the situation of change in the region and its turn towards renaturation and restructuring. While the sculpture conveys an absurd twist regarding the inherent expectation of the image created by a rollercoaster, it reflects its own role as potential trans-‐regional lanmark which will be inevitably pocketed as image.
It counters the logic of permanent growth with an absurd-‐contradictory sculpture that refuses a definite interpretation.With 44 x 37 meters base and 21 meters construction height the sculpture is not only one of the largest in Germany, but also a masterpiece of engineering. Especially the draft of the stairs (developed in collaboration with Arnold Walz) consequentially and elegantly winds along the three-‐ dimensional shape that is in every spot different and therefore harbours a so far never accomplished challenge.
Heike Mutter and Ulrich Genth create together artistic projects in public space and exhibition venues since eight years. Their works are site-‐ specifically and contextually developed and reflect in a magnifold way the conditions of publicness. Since 2007 the artist duo lives and works in Hamburg where Heike Mutter holds professorship at the Hochschule für bildende Künste.
Researchers are developing hacking drones that could build a wireless botnet or track someone via cell phone.
By Robert Lemos
Hacking on high: The SkyNet drone, built from a toy quadricopter and a small computer, can fly for up to 13 minutes, or land and then operate for nearly two hours.
Credit: Stevens Institute of Technology
The buzz starts low and quickly gets louder as a toy quadricopter flies in low over the buildings. It might look like flight enthusiasts having fun, but it could be a future threat to computer networks.
In two separate presentations last month, researchers showed off remote-controlled aerial vehicles loaded with technology designed to automatically detect and compromise wireless networks. The projects demonstrated that such drones could be used to create an airborne botnet controller for a few hundred dollars.
Attackers bent on espionage could use such drones to find a weak spot in corporate and home Internet connections, says Sven Dietrich, an assistant professor in computer science at the Stevens Institute of Technology who led development of one of the drones.
"You can bring the targeted attack to the location," says Dietrich. "[Our] drone can land close to the target and sit there—and if it has solar power, it can recharge—and continue to attack all the networks around it."
Field test by British academics marks first step towards recreating an artificial volcano that would inject particles into the stratosphere and cool the planet
It sounds barmy, audacious or sci-fi: a tethered balloon the size of Wembley stadium suspended 20km above Earth, linked to the ground by a giant garden hose pumping hundreds of tonnes of minute chemical particles a day into the thin stratospheric air to reflect sunlight and cool the planet.
But a team of British academics will next month formally announce the first step towards creating an artificial volcano by going ahead with the world's first major "geo-engineering" field-test in the next few months. The ultimate aim is to mimic the cooling effect that volcanoes have when they inject particles into the stratosphere that bounce some of the Sun's energy back into space, so preventing it from warming the Earth and mitigating the effects of man-made climate change.
Hacking the planet - potential geo-engineering solutions
Ocean nourishment
Billions of iron filings are deposited in the ocean to stimulate a phytoplankton bloom. The aim is to enhance biological productivity to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Many experiments have been conducted, including fertilisation of 900 square kilometers (350 sq miles) of the Atlantic. Results so far are disappointing.
Space mirrors
Giant "mirrors", made of wire mesh, could be sent into in orbit to deflect sunlight back into space. But the scale needed, the expense and the potential unintended consequences are so great that it is widely considered unrealistic. In the same league as the idea to mine the moon to create a shielding cloud of dust.
Cloud whitening
The idea is to increase the water content in low clouds by spraying sea water at them. This makes them reflect more sunlight. It would be pretty harmless, and cheap but would have to be done on an immense scale to have any global effect. Backed by Bill Gates.
Artificial trees
Proposed by climate scientist Wallace Broecker who imagines 60m artificial "trees" dotted around the world, "scrubbing" the air by capturing CO2 in a filter and then storing it underground. The trees could remove more carbon dioxide than an equivalent-sized real tree.
Carbon dioxide is collected from coal or other fossil fuel power plants and is then pumped underground. Works in principle but it is expensive and increases the fuel needs of a coal-fired plant by 25%-40%. More than 40 plants have been built with many others planned.
This 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.
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