This angular, helium-filled balloon was produced for atrium of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo by Junya Ishigami (who is too cool to have a website), for an exhibition entitled Space for Your Future. It uses an aluminium truss frame and thin reflective alumnium panels (they look almost like foil, but I think they are a bit thicker than that). Apparently it weighs about a ton! Images are from Japan Architect 72. A couple of flickr images here.
Demain jeudi 7 janvier, l’émission “Le Grand 8″ (8h-8h30 sur RSR La Première) se penche sur les villes à mauvaises réputations: Liverpool, Naples, Brême, Marseille… autant de villes qui traînent derrière elles une mauvaise réputation. Mais aujourd’hui, ces villes se sont organisées dans un réseau baptisé “villes à la marge”. Il s’agit d’un réseau d’entraide des villes “les plus détestées dans leur propre pays”!
Du coup, ces villes portuaires, rebelles, dans le marasme économique, criminelles, deviennent… tendance !
Au fait, en Suisse Romande, quelle est la ville la moins aimée ?
Invité: Francesco Della Casa, urbaniste - Rédacteur en chef de la revue Tracés et Conseiller éditorial des Urbanités.
PLAYFUL URBAN SPACE – ENERGY IN MOVEMENT Experience Denmark’s largest industrial area Avedøre Holme in a new light.
The art group Mader Stublic Wiermann transforms DONG Energy’s power station Avedøreværket into a 145 metre tall screen for spectacular light and video installations following the movement of the wind.
An extraordinary image of the energy of the future and a showcase for wind power and the highly efficient and flexible power plants, which will reduce CO2 emissions and provide everyone with sufficient energy and heating.
Travellers to and from Copenhagen will be met with a sensational sight when the 145 metre tall projections light up the dark hours. The projections will be visible from the air if flying in and out of Kastrup Airport; from Sjællandsbroen and Kalvebodbroen if travelling by car on the way to or from work; from the S-Train stations Avedøre and Friheden and in and around the Hvidovre area.
“We live in a time where everything or everyone can be upgraded or ‘pimped’. After the worldwide acceptance of plastic surgery, it was time to subject our worldly possessions (Pimp my Ride) and digital identities (Facebook) to an esthetical and/or functional upgrade. So it’s likely that eventually everything will be pimp-able. Even our own planet.”
The PIMP MY PLANET video, created the good people of Studio Smack, explores the possibilities of redesigning our planet according to ideals or aesthetic values. It is the wet dream of every modernist – I bet Mondriaan would have liked this – and then you wake up and realize that maakbaarheid is never finished and with every attempt to cultivate nature, a next nature arises that is wild and unpredictable as ever.
Farming, industrialisation and more recently tourism, mobility (goods and people), production and therefore globalization have turned our planet into an artificial environment. Built up in a way, under a partially unplanned and iterative process.
Maybe more recently has it become more planned, through globalisation: production of this item into this country (due to low costs of goods and/or human workforce, "good political conditions", good knowledge, etc.), transportation here, selling there. Headquarters in this "low taxes" country, etc.
The problem is that this "planning" (called zoning) approach has failed in cities and landscapes in the late 60ies, revealed itself depleting (due to poor flexibility, diversity and variations) and that there are no reasons why it won't fail in the exact same way at the global level (in fact, it already starts to fail).
This means: we have to start "planning" our planet and come up with fresh theories and "earth architectures" for that! This approach might have to take into account (in disorder, non-exhaustive) weather and seasons, social aspects, technologies, cities, landscapes, architecture, resources, energy, food and goods production, sustainability, tourism, consumption, politics and economy, mobility, sustainability, birth control, satellites, (protection of) fauna and flora, information & communication, networks, physics, ethics, philosophy, psychology, etc.
In a recent article about Dubai—the world's easiest architectural target, and a city whose only true believers were money launderers and U.S.-based green architecture blogs—Der Spiegel describes the soon-to-open Burj Dubai as "an impressive, supremely elegant edifice."
[Image: The Burj Dubai, photographed by Karim Sahib for the Agence France Press].
Aside from that remark, however, the magazine is far from complimentary; it includes, for instance, a laundry list of dictatorial building projects around the world (which would encompass, by extension, the Burj Dubai):
President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan had Astana, an entire city of monumental avenues, triumphal arches and pyramids built as his new capital, where marble contrasts with granite, buildings are topped by gigantic glass domes and, on the Bayterek Tower, every subject can place his or her hand in a golden imprint of the president's hand.
In the Burmese jungle, dictatorial generals had an absurd new capital, Naypyidaw, or "Seat of the Kings," conjured up out of nothing. Yamoussoukro, the capital of Côte d'Ivoire and a memorial to the country's now-deceased first president, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, is even a step closer to the brink. The city is filled with grandiose buildings, but there are hardly any people to be seen. The Basilica of Notre Dame de la Paix is a piece of lunacy inspired by the Basilica of St. Peter in the Vatican, but the African church is even bigger than St. Peter's. Indeed, it is the world's largest Catholic church.
From St. Petersburg to Macchu Picchu, the article lays out oblique evidence for an "excessive building of cities and towers" on behalf of people with political clout (and a halo of military protection).
But it is Der Spiegel's continued description of the Burj Dubai that deserves more attention here, in particular this reference to the tower's meteorological variability:
The tower is so enormous that the air temperature at the top is up to 8 degrees Celsius (14 degrees Fahrenheit) lower than at the base. If anyone ever hit upon the idea of opening a door at the top and a door at the bottom, as well as the airlocks in between, a storm would rush through the air-conditioned building that would destroy most everything in its wake, except perhaps the heavy marble tiles in the luxury apartments. The phenomenon is called the "chimney effect."
This takes on atmospherically intriguing possibilities when we read that, on June 6, 2007, "the weather service at the [Dubai] airport e-mailed" to the building's construction director "a satellite image showing a cyclone that had developed over the Indian Ocean, the biggest storm ever recorded in the region, which was heading directly for the Strait of Hormuz. 'That was the only day in five years,' says Hinrichs [the construction director], 'when we had to close the construction site.'"
But, someday, might one negate the other? The Burj Dubai becomes a James Bondian anti-cyclone device: you strategically open certain off-limits doors, with special keys and voice-recognition airlocks, and you park certain elevators at pressure-sensitive sites within their shafts, and soon you're modifying wind-flow over whole minor continents.
A vertical Maginot Line, fluted to control—and even generate—inclement weather.
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