Wednesday, May 23. 2012Architecture Fiction: continuous partial everywhere in the urban aspace-----
by Bruce Sterling
*In contemporary practice, I guess this Vurb verbiage from FutureEverywhere boils down to “my pocket keeps beeping all the time,” but, well, of course in a network society you can take everyone you know and everyone you own, and scatter them across the planet’s surface. Especially if they already did that with you.
http://juhavantzelfde.com/post/23506562343/the-aspatial-city (…) “In the background there are at the same time deeper, more systemic developments taking place: high-speed internet access, ubicomp, cloud computing, sensor networks, big data, etc.. And out of these, some weird, boutique threads that are relevant to spatial practice, like the 3D printing of rooms, robots weaving buildings, self-driving cars, domestic drones, urban operating systems and nonhuman cities. “A few weeks ago, my dear friend Ben Cerveny stopped over in Amsterdam for a weekend on his way to Geneva. For a few years, Ben had been living in Amsterdam for some months a year, traveling back to San Francisco and Los Angeles after summer and returning to Amsterdam after winter. (((No wonder I keep running into that Cerveny guy all the time.))) “It had almost been two years since we last saw each other, but because we have constantly been in touch via Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Instagram and iChat, I felt like it had been only yesterday. When I explained this to Ben, he immediately said, without stopping to think about what he was saying, ‘oh of course: the continuous partial everywhere.’ “And that is exactly it. The continous partial everywhere is the aspatial experience of simultaneity in immediate media. I am in the city where my friends are at the same as the one where I am myself. The city for me is no longer only a city in space, but now also a city in time. An aspatial city, without distances, in a kind of aspace….”
Wednesday, February 15. 2012Mud, Asphalt and Entropic Formlessness in Robert Smithson’s WorkVia The Funambulist
-----
de Léopold Lambert
King Kong meets the Gem of Egypt / Partially Buried Wood Shed. Image from Field Trips: Bernd and Hilla Becher / Robert Smithson. Porto: Museu Serralves
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:
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:
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.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture, Art, Territory
at
11:23
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, art, artists, energy, form, history, landscape, photography, territory, theory
Wednesday, January 25. 2012Gardens as Crypto-Water-ComputersVia Pruned
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de Alexander Trevi
In the front right corner, in a structure that resembles a large cupboard with a transparent front, stands a Rube Goldberg collection of tubes, tanks, valves, pumps and sluices. You could think of it as a hydraulic computer. Water flows through a series of clear pipes, mimicking the way that money flows through the economy. It lets you see (literally) what would happen if you lower tax rates or increase the money supply or whatever; just open a valve here or pull a lever there and the machine sloshes away, showing in real time how the water levels rise and fall in various tanks representing the growth in personal savings, tax revenue, and so on. “It’s a network of dynamic feedback loops,” Strogatz further writes. “In this sense the Phillips machine foreshadowed one of the most central challenges in science today: the quest to decipher and control the complex, interconnected systems that pervade our lives.”
Filling up not just a corner but the entire room, inside not one but several structures that resemble large cupboards with a transparent front, is a Rube Goldberg collection of tubes, tanks, valves, pumps and sluices. You could think of it as a hydraulic computer. Water flows through a series of clear pipes, mimicking the production line of concrete blocks. It lets you see (literally) what would happen if you change the type of cement used or increase the load capacity of the concrete or whatever; just open a valve here or pull a lever there and the machine sloshes away, showing in real time how the water levels rise and fall in various tanks representing material properties, curing time, temperature, and so on. Changes to the water level in the “measuring tube” would be marked on a graph paper — “a kind of curve,” and “these marks build schedule, which was the solution of the problem.”
Embedded in the earth is a Rube Goldberg collection of tubes, tanks, valves, pumps and sluices. You could think of it as a hydraulic computer. Water flows through a series of clear pipes, mimicking the way that money flows through the empire. It lets you see (literally) what would happen if you lower the price of bread or increase the construction of palaces or whatever; just open a valve here or pull a lever there and the machine in the garden sloshes away, showing in real time how the water levels rise and fall in various tanks representing colonial trade supplies, food riots, and so on. Attached to the measuring tube is a series of fountains that gurgles the solution to the equation.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture, Science & technology, Territory
at
10:16
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, design (interactions), ecology, landscape, science & technology, territory
Monday, November 21. 2011Exhibit in Tokyo: Architectural Environments for Tomorrow: New Spatial Practices in Architecture and ArtHaruka Kojin, Contact Lens; Photo © DAICI ANO
The computerization and urbanization of the 21st century is creating new lifestyles and forms of public space. Architectural Environments for Tomorrow presents the spatial experiments of 23 architects and artists from around the world responding to the transformation of their surroundings. “The metaphors of the world-views suggested by the artists resonate with the practical proposals of the architects, presenting images of future humanity from a variety of different angles.” Architects featured include Toyo Ito, Frank O. Gehry, Sou Fujimoto and many more. Continue reading for a complete list of the participants and more information on the exhibit.
The creative minds participating in the exhibit react to natural disasters, such as the 3.11 earthquake or current political and social unease felt throughout the world. The exhibit will “present the discoveries that are made when universal architectural expression, inspired by the diverse experiences and ideas of people, nature and society, both in Japan and around the world, are fused with local wisdom and technology.”
Architects + Artists Participating: The exhibit will conclude on January 15th, 2012.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture, Art
at
15:24
Defined tags for this entry: architects, architecture, art, artists, computing, design (environments), exhibitions, landscape
Wednesday, November 02. 2011The Archipelago as a Territorial ManifestoManhattan Archipelago by Leopold Lambert, Oct 2011. It would have probably not escaped to my regular readers that I am very much interested with the notion of archipelago. After celebrating the philosophy of Edouard Glissant, the poet of the archipelagos, after having created a metaphorical map representing the effective Palestinian territory under occupation as an archipelago, and after having launched a series of events external to the Academia with the same name, I would like to address the spatial implications of Occupy Wall Street via a similar filter. It is true that this movement has been using the new technological tools of communication in order to spread its existence which was ignored by the Press; however it would be absolutely incorrect to assume that the “occupation” concerned here does not fund its principle on the presence of physical bodies on a given space in order to be effective. The practice of direct democracy exercised on this space registers the latter as a territory within a broader system, an heterotopia as Michel Foucault would describe this type of space, or more simply an island. Occupations started on Liberty Square, then on Washington Square Park, in Harlem, in the Bronx, in Brooklyn but also all over the American territory, thus composing an archipelago of “liberated” islands functioning in a precarious yet effective autonomy. This idea is fundamental in the construction of the movement as it differs from “traditional” revolutions that aim to conquer the centralized power’s territory but rather to propagate by the constitution of those islands that applies a form of society only for the bodies present on their territories. Of course, this territorial mean of acting is more difficult and requires more time than the traditional ones; however this seems to be the way to achieve an aware implication of each person on a given territory. This model of the archipelago also helps us not to necessarily think in terms of totality but to accept the fragmentation of a territory in smaller ones on which it is easier to approach consensus. The very principle of the archipelago is to construct a collective essence with various individual -for each island- identities. The image of the interstitial water also allow to imagine a fluctuation of each island’s borders that can continuously evolve through time. In a general matter the archipelago spatializes a political system that diverse to be experienced. The Occupy Wall Street movement is a good opportunity to attempt such thing.
Related Links:Personal comment: As we are also very intersted into Glissant's work and writings, as well as the applied social experience and contestation in Liberty Square, we take the occasion to republish another post from Léopold Lambert. Tuesday, September 06. 2011Polygon Sublime[Image: Via Jim Rossignol/Big Robot].
"Having stripped everything out of game two, except the terrain," game developer Jim Rossignol recently tweeted, "we again are left with a geometric painterliness. I am actually happy just wandering around these spaces, discovering extraordinary formations and unexpected floating mesas." Related Links:Wednesday, July 27. 2011Explore the Kanagawa Institute of Technology Workshop by Junya Ishigami in Google MapsVia ArchDaily ----- by David Basulto
Kanagawa Institute of Technology Workshop © Iwan Baan
The Kanagawa Institute of Technology Workshop by Junya Ishigami is an elegant rectangular box with with floor-to-ceiling glass, enclosing an interesting interior space with 305 columns of various sizes supporting the stripped roof of skylights. The columns, although seemingly random, are specifically placed to create the sensation of zoned spaces, but their nonrestrictive quality provides a flexible layout to suit the changing needs of students.
Now you can get a better sense of this space by using Google Streetview to navigate the interior, as seen on the above image (just drag it). For a larger view just follow this link.
Related Links:Personal comment: One of our favourite architects. But the center was looking much better without those posters or robots all over the place... And with flower or tree plants. Anyway, the "power user" (or rather the participant) is always right isn't it? Monday, July 25. 2011Double Positive(Shawn Patrick Landis, Air Check, 2003. Air, nylon-reinforced plastic, clear vinyl, blue tarpaulin, and blower. Photo by Petter Alexander Goldstine; used with permission from the artist.) We have not come here for a rendezvous. (Shawn Patrick Landis, Air Check, 2003. Photo by Petter Alexander Goldstine; used with permission from the artist.) We have come here simply to rest. (Shawn Patrick Landis, Air Check, 2003. Photo by Petter Alexander Goldstine; used with permission from the artist.) We are refugees, en route to less troubled terrains with only a thin film protecting our caravel from the fallout. Thinking this ancient swimming pool a safe harbor, we berthed our diaphanous spaceships within its partitioned terminal. (Shawn Patrick Landis, Air Check, 2003. Photo by Petter Alexander Goldstine; used with permission from the artist.) Our stay will be brief, but the vaseline landscape might just convince us to strike our Utopia here. Related Links:Tuesday, July 19. 2011The Weather BankVia BLDGBLOG ----- A slideshow over at National Geographic features this image by photographer Ian Wood, showing, in the magazine's own words, "what might be called extreme Inca landscaping." Wednesday, July 06. 2011Coal warehouseVias TreeHugger ----- Just a picture extracted from this article. A huge building for (coal) hills!
The article on TreeHugger is also interesting as it stipulates that intensification of coal extraction in China not only contributed to more CO2 emssions during the last 10 years, but also to the rejection of a lot of thin particles in the air. As a sort of side effect geoengineering technique, guess what? it also contributed to the cooling of the atmosphere...
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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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