Tuesday, July 13. 2010Velcro made from metal holds 35 tons per square meterVia designboom ---
Hook and loop fasteners have become commonplace features of both industry and households. photo credit: TUM spring steel hook elements deform elastically under light pressure to glide into openings in a perforated tape, once inserted, they return to their original form and resist back pull like an expanding rivet. Numerous steel hooks can attach at any angle to the loops in the perforated metal loop tape.
Clip/Stamp/Fold - The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X-197XVia WMMNA ----- Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196x-197x is a traveling exhibition that started its journey at Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York City back in 2006, flew to Montreal, Oslo, Kassel, Murcia, Vancouver and London. It has now landed at NAiM/Bureau Europa in Maastricht (NL.)
Clip/Stamp/Fold chronicles the eruption on the architecture scene of the 1960s and 1970s of architectural little magazines that challenged the discipline and saw it as a space for experimentation and debate. The term "little magazine" doesn't refer to the size of the publications. It was coined in the mid-twentieth century to designate progressive literary journals, produced without concern for immediate commercial gain.
The exhibition was conceived by architectural historian Beatriz Colomina whose fantastic work i discovered 2 years ago through one of her books Domesticity at War. She researched the Clip/Stamp/Fold show together with her architecture students at Princeton University. More recently, Colomina sent some of them to Playboy's archives in Chicago to investigate the critical role that the magazine played in promoting modern architecture and design in the '50s, '60s and '70s. I wouldn't mind a book or exhibition describing the result of that exploration.
Many of the radical magazines featured in the exhibition were self-published and short-lived, they were written by dissatisfied student, architects who championed a more political approach to buildings and cities, theoretician, etc. Others are commercial and professional magazines still printed today that, at some point in their history, were influenced by the graphics and discussions of their avant-garde contemporaries. In addition to a selection of rare originals displayed inside plastic bubbles, and a timeline following the evolution of little magazines over two decades, the exhibition screens video interviews with some of the editors involved. The covers and names of the magazines have a punk attitude that still attracts the eye, their content ranged from the presentation of experimental architecture to dry theory and articles akin to political pamphlets. Some critics have claimed that the energy and inventiveness of that era has long been glamored away by swanky design and glittering starchitects. I'm not so sure of that, sometimes i have the feeling that blogs such as BLDGBLG bring a new spin on the architecture discourse by the way they constantly and often unexpectedly go back and forth from past and future and introduce in the discussion ideas from different disciplines and perspectives.
It was interesting to see how much Archigram popped up throughout the exhibition. Not only because they had some of the most flamboyant and catchy graphics but also because of the way other magazines would refer to their work.
From Ron Herron's 1964 Walking City advancing onto the cover of both Aujourd'hui: Art et Architecture and Design Quarterly in 1965....
To the photomontage on a cover of ARse from 1971. Much more critical, this one stars Peter Cook commenting a drawing of Archigram's first commissioned project, the Monte Carlo Entertainments Centre, to other members of Archigram. The sub-title "Archigoon Wins at Monte Carlo" implicates Archigram as part of contemporary architecture's fixation on consumer culture at the expense of social issues, during a time, ARse argued, that demanded architects' political engagement.
By the way, the elegantly-named title ARse was the acronym for a variety of words that changed from issue to issue - "Architects for a Really Socialist Environment," or "Architectural Radicals, Students & Educators" - but was always followed by the invitation, "Or Whatever You Want to Call Us."
Every new installation brings a local or regional addition to the core of the exhibition. The stopover in Maastricht extended the focus to Dutch magazines published from the 80s up to the present, in an attempt to investigate how little magazines continued to act as vehicles of critical expression after the '70s. Volume reviewed the opening of Clip/Stamp/Fold in Maastricht. The images i took are on flickr. Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196x-197x is at NAiM/Bureau Europa in Maastricht until September 26, 2010.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture
at
09:28
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, design (graphic), history, magazines, research, speculation, theory, thinkers
Is Symbian re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic?Via Gartner --- by Nick Jones
I’ll be in South Africa at the end of August at the Gartner Symposium in Cape Town, which means I am just finishing some updates to the presentations I’ll be delivering. If any of my South African colleagues are reading this, there’s no need to remind me that my presentations are late; I’m painfully aware of that fact. My only excuse is that I worked for many years as a software developer, and everyone knows that software people never deliver on time. However, I digress. I just updated a slide on future smartphone market share which makes depressing reading for Symbian fans. The rate at which Symbian is losing share is accelerating. Our new forecasts will be published at the end of July, but I doubt anyone will be surprised. That’s not to say that Symbian won’t remain the dominant platform for a few years more, but it does mean that the competition – especially Android – is catching up very fast. Market share is an existential threat to Symbian, it imperils the very existence of the platform. And the main reason Symbian is losing share is the user experience which isn’t competitive with Apple or Android. Based on the early previews I’ve seen Symbian 3 looks to have polished a few of the rough edges, but doesn’t fix the problem. So if the weak UI is threatening Symbian’s very survival the Foundation ought to be seriously worried, right? Wrong. I just looked on the Foundation web site and blogs at the roadmap and features for future releases. What I see is too much effort on stuff that really doesn’t matter. For example: Audio policy packages for Symbian, WIFi direct, support for an “open cloud manifesto”, an accredited Symbian developer program for China, better multitasking, multiple personalised home screens, HDMI connection to external TVs, better web runtime support, better internal architecture and so on. Forget elegant architecture, forget better multitasking, forget Chinese developers, forget release schedules that don’t deliver S4 devices with a new user experience until 2011. None of these matter. People will never use the features if they don’t buy the phone. The situation is now serious enough that any developer who isn’t working on something directly related to a new UI is wasting their time. The S4 UI is a “bet the platform” project. For any organisation to be in a situation where its survival depends on one project is very dangerous, especially when their track record in the area isn’t outstanding. I think the Foundation needs a contingency plan in case the planned S4 interface isn’t radical enough or good enough. Maybe redirect some developers and start a couple of skunkworks projects to create new competing UIs for S4, or perhaps announce a competition with a $1M prize for a new Symbian UI to encourage some radical ideas. I think the Symbian foundation is just re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic and ignoring the Android iceberg ahead. Crossroads by Garvin NolteVia NOTCOT --- Crossroads by Garvin Nolte “The video installation “crossroads (what to do)” deals with the influence of others onto one’s own path of life in an abstract way.” Ever feel like everyone is pulling you in so many different directions? or telling you where to go and what to do? Is your technology dictating your life… literally? Lovely video/installation piece!
Why Our Universe Must Have Been Born Inside a Black Hole---
A small change to the theory of gravity implies that our universe inherited its arrow of time from the black hole in which it was born.
"Accordingly, our own Universe may be the interior of a black hole existing in another universe." So concludes Nikodem Poplawski at Indiana University in a remarkable paper about the nature of space and the origin of time. The idea that new universes can be created inside black holes and that our own may have originated in this way has been the raw fodder of science fiction for many years. But a proper scientific derivation of the notion has never emerged. Today Poplawski provides such a derivation. He says the idea that black holes are the cosmic mothers of new universes is a natural consequence of a simple new assumption about the nature of spacetime. Poplawski points out that the standard derivation of general relativity takes no account of the intrinsic momentum of spin half particles. However there is another version of the theory, called the Einstein-Cartan-Kibble-Sciama theory of gravity, which does. This predicts that particles with half integer spin should interact, generating a tiny repulsive force called torsion. In ordinary circumstances, torsion is too small to have any effect. But when densities become much higher than those in nuclear matter, it becomes significant. In particular, says Poplawski, torsion prevents the formation of singularities inside a black hole. That's interesting for a number of reasons. First, it has important implications for the way the Universe must have grown when it was close to its minimum size. Astrophysicists have long known that our universe is so big that it could not have reached its current size given the rate of expansion we see now. Instead, they believe it grew by many orders of magnitude in a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, a process known as inflation. The problem with inflation is that it needs an additional theory to explain why it occurs and that's ugly. Poplawski's approach immediately solves this problem. He says that torsion caused this rapid inflation. That means the universe as we see it today can be explained by a single theory of gravity without any additional assumptions about inflation. Another important by-product of Poplawski's approach is that it makes it possible for universes to be born inside the event horizons of certain kinds of black hole. Here, torsion prevents the formation of a singularity but allows a HUGE energy density to build up, which leads to the creation of particles on a massive scale via pair production followed by the expansion of the new universe. This is a Big Bang type event. "Such an expansion is not visible for observers outside the black hole, for whom the horizon's formation and all subsequent processes occur after infinite time," says Poplawski. For this reason, the new universe is a separate branch of space time and evolves accordingly. Incidentally, this approach also suggests a solution to another of the great problems of cosmology: why time seems to flow in one direction but not in the other, even though the laws of physics are time symmetric. Poplawski says the origin of the arrow of time comes from the asymmetry of the flow of matter into the black hole from the mother universe. "The arrow of cosmic time of a universe inside a black hole would then be fixed by the time-asymmetric collapse of matter through the event horizon," he says. In other words, our universe inherited its arrow of time from its mother. He says that daughter universes may inherit other properties from their mothers, implying that it may be possible to detect these properties, providing an experimental proof of his idea. Theories of everything don't get much more ambitious than this. Entertaining stuff! Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1007.0587: Cosmology With Torsion - An Alternative To Cosmic Inflation Personal comment: When science catches up to fiction (or not...)
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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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"Accordingly, our own Universe may be the interior of a black hole existing in another universe." So concludes Nikodem Poplawski at Indiana University in a remarkable paper about the nature of space and the origin of time."
Wow. The only thing remarkable about Nikodem Poplawski's paper is that such pseudoscientific hogwash can originate from an institution of higher learning in this day and age. I say, shame on the University of Indiana. The very idea of a black hole is based on the concept of continuity, an idea that is not only illogical (it leads to an infinite regress), but is not even scientific in the Popperian sense of falsification. Even Einstein, Mr. Continuity himself, had doubts about continuity.
Worst of all is the idea that somehow time has a direction of flow, i.e., an arrow. The idea that we are moving in time in one direction or another is a conceptual disaster. Why? Because time cannot change by definition. This is the reason that Karl Popper called spacetime "Einstein's block universe in which nothing happens" (source: Conjectures and Refutations). Absolutely nothing can move in spacetime for this reason. Why isn't Poplawski aware of this fact and how did his Star-Trek voodoo physics paper pass peer review? This is truly a sad commentary on the state of modern physics. This stuff is not even wrong.
The problem with the physics community is that theirs is an incestuous science that has been spawning hideous monstrosities for some time now. Their bunker mentality (the public is stupid and is the enemy) prevents them from considering other points of view, especially views that contradict their worldview. They have completely abandoned the search for a foundational understanding of nature and they insist on building up on their erroneous assumptions. Physicists do not even understand motion and yet they feel confident enough to create all sorts of silliness like wormholes, multiple universes and time travel. How dare they think that they are qualified to teach us about the origin of the universe when they are wallowing in ignorance about the most basic aspects of the universe?
Ask a physicist to explain why two bodies in relative inertial motion remain in motion and you'll come face to face with abject ignorance. Vast and profound ignorance is the norm in the physics community.
Let me add that I am deeply disappointed that publications like TR are still printing such pseudoscientific fairy tales under the banner of legitimate science. Paul Feyrabend was right when he wrote in Against Method, "[...]the most stupid procedures and the most laughable results in their domain are surrounded with an aura of excellence. It is time to cut them down in size, and to give them a more modest position in society." He might as well have been writing about physicists like Nikodem Poplawski.
Who will rise up to deliver us from this mountain of crap?