Architecture

Joshua Noble’s new issue of Vague Terrain is definately worth a look. He described this issue as “an exploration of space, functionality in space, and the relationship of the body to the systems around it. All technologies reshape the body and the space around the body, from the bow and arrow to the steam engine to the telephone. It may be that we are beginning to truly see how computing and ubiquitous devices will once again reshape our bodies and our conceptions of ourselves in space. It is with this emphasis that we present a selection of thinkers, artists, architects, and designers and examine and explore how their ideas will shape art, aesthetics, design, living spaces, and social structures and how those ideas will ultimately be shaped by their users and their spaces.”

Articles have been written by Golan Levin, Jonah Brucker-Cohen, Marilena Skavara, Mark Shepard, Pierre Proske and Joshua himself.

Colombian architects Paisajes Emergentes received second prize for their proposal for the Townshift International Competition in Canada.

More images and architect’s description after the break.

The structure.

Certainly the least interesting thing that a vertical tower can do is to display a welcome sign. Vertical structures can support diverse¨and specialised functions such as communications, energy collection, weather forecasting and are always the most interesting places to experience great views over distant landscapes.

The Fleetwood marker is a dematerialized tower, it is lighter than air and it’s structure ties it to the ground instead of supporting it’s own weight: It is made with clusters of weather balloons filled with helium.

What is interesting about balloons is that with enough cubic meters of helium they can replace traditional static structures based on heavy steel. The tower ends up being lighter than air. It is not a skyscraper, it is more related with a zeppelin or the now common helium balloons used around the world to serve as viewing platforms. It is something that will be affected by the weather, like a vertical cloud, or simply something very strange happening in the sky welcoming the city´s visitors and inviting them to climb up to have a better view of Mount Baker.

The installation:
“We drive an astonishing 6.3 billion miles every day in the U.S. If the kinetic energy generated by moving vehicles was captured at any given moment, it could produce enough electricity to power over a quarter million homes each day.” Fraser highway will be covered with a kinetic carpet systems already available. It’s length will be enough to power the installation and some pilot houses in the city with completely clean energy from the pressure of the passing cars. The vertical balloon clusters of the tower will be in correspondence to the horizontal areas of the highways destined to harvest the energy. The electricity generated by the cars movement will illuminate the installation at night showing a contemplative vertical color light show of what is happening on the highway.

Today's New Scientist features a fascinating piece about termite mounds' relevance to sustainable architecture as physical interventions that achieve entirely passive means of conditioning, while also being beautiful and actively providing for the sustenance of their inhabitants. The mounds have been an oft-cited source of bio-inspired building design (see the Eastgate Center), but new knowledge suggests that much more is at work in their passive environmental controls than a simple stack effect, and that in fact their construction acts more like a giant lung for gas exchange. An excerpt from the article:

This is very different to the way ventilation works in modern human buildings. Here, fresh air is blown in through vents to flush stale air out. Turner thinks there is something to be gleaned from the termites' approach. "We could turn the whole idea of the wall on its head," he says. We should not think of walls as barriers to stop the outside getting in, but rather design them as adaptive, porous interfaces that regulate the exchange of heat and air between the inside and outside. "Instead of opening a window to let fresh air in, it would be the wall that does it, but carefully filtered and managed the way termite mounds do it," he says.

Be sure to read more here and to take a look at the links included in the article for more detailed information.
   

A mind-bogglingly awesome new project from MIT called Flyfire hopes to use large, precision-controlled clouds of micro-helicopters, each carrying a color-coordinated LED light, to create massive, three-dimensional information displays in space.

[Image: Via Flyfire].

Each helicopter is "a smart pixel," we read. "Through precisely controlled movements, the helicopters perform elaborate and synchronized motions and form an elastic display surface for any desired scenario." Emergency streetlights, future TV, avant-garde rural entertainment, and even acts of war.

Watch the video:



Instead of a drive-in cinema, in other words, you could simply be looking out from the windscreen of your car at a massive cloud of color-coordinated, precision-timed, drone micro-helicopters, each the size and function of a pixel. Imagine planetarium shows with this thing!

The Flyfire canvas can transform itself from one shape to another or morph a two-dimensional photographic image into an articulated shape. The pixels are physically engaged in transitioning images from one state to another, which allows the Flyfire canvas to demonstrate a spatially animated viewing experience.

Imagine web-browsing through literal clouds of small flying pixels, parting and weaving in the air in front of you like fireflies (or imagine training fireflies to act as a web browser). You're in a university auditorium one day when, instead of delivering her projected slideshow, your professor simply remote-controls a whirring vortex of ten thousand flying micro-dots. Digital 3D cinema is nothing compared to this murmuration of light.

Channeling Tim Maly, we might even someday see a drone-swarm of LED-augmented, artificially intelligent nano-helicopters flying off into the desert skies of the American southwest, on cinematic migration routes blurring overhead. On a lonely car drive through northern Arizona when a film-cloud flies by...

An insane emperor entertains himself watching precision-controlled image-clouds, some of which are distant satellites falling synchronized through space.