Friday, October 08. 2010
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by rholmes
[Screenshot from "Magnasanti"]
Vincent Ocasla’s “Magnasanti” is a SimCity with six million inhabitants, which Ocasla argues represents the maximum possible stable population achievable within the game. A winning solution, he says, to a game without any programmed conditions for winning. Ocasla, a Filipino architecture student, spent four years constructing the SimCity — building the SimCity itself, but also studying the game systems, wading through equations, and working out optimal spatial solutions on graph paper. I was reminded of Magnasanti by Super Colossal’s post on it today, which you should read:
This is the kind of archiporn that I am a sucker for; gamespace urbanism exploited to its extreme condition. Can you ‘win’ urbanism? Is this even urbanism? If not, can we take anything from its construction? The primary move that the city makes is to remove cars altogether and base transport purely on subways. I suspect this is a method to exploit the space otherwise taken up by roads for real estate allowing for an increased population per tile, however, it is a strategy that many cities—Sydney included—are seriously looking into. Remove motor vehicles, increase public transport. Seems like a sound idea. But ultimately, Magnasanti has little to do with urban design and everything to do with gaming systems for maximum reward.
This, of course, is exactly right — the construction strategy for Magnasanti tells us very little about how to construct a city, but a great deal about how to manipulate the internal logic of SimCity (and that is instructive as to the distance between the logic of the city and the logic of SimCity, which results from SimCity being the embodiment of a particular set of assumptions about how cities are planned). Having been reminded, though, I should also link to this interview with Ocasla at Vice. Fascinatingly, Ocasla argues that he constructed Magnasanti as a critique of urban conditions, inspired by Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi. Magnasanti, he says, is not a blueprint for how to build a city. It’s an intentionally hellish vision which exploits the game’s internal logic as commentary:
There are a lot of other problems in the city hidden under the illusion of order and greatness: Suffocating air pollution, high unemployment, no fire stations, schools, or hospitals, a regimented lifestyle – this is the price that these sims pay for living in the city with the highest population. It’s a sick and twisted goal to strive towards. The ironic thing about it is the sims in Magnasanti tolerate it. They don’t rebel, or cause revolutions and social chaos. No one considers challenging the system by physical means since a hyper-efficient police state keeps them in line. They have all been successfully dumbed down, sickened with poor health, enslaved and mind-controlled just enough to keep this system going for thousands of years. 50,000 years to be exact. They are all imprisoned in space and time.
Given mammoth’s professed interest in finding overlap between gameworlds and cities, it’s probably not surprising that this leads me to wonder: what other games might be used to produce critiques of cities, or buildings, or landscapes? I’m particularly interested in this question because of a minor pet theory, which is that one of the most important futures for video games — if they are to become as important a venue for cultural expression as they have the potential to be — is less about the design of spectacularly complex linear (or even branching) narratives for video games, and more about the sharing, re-telling, discussion, and celebration of emergent narratives and objects created by players. Pro Vericelli or Oil Furnace, in other words, not Mass Effect.
A little while ago I spat out a series of tweets for “#idiosyncraticallyarchitecturalvideogames”, some of which (Love, Detonate, Mirror’s Edge) would seem to be excellent fodder for this sort of thing. If, for instance, as Geoff Manaugh has argued, “the bank heist and the prison break together might form the architectural scenario par excellance“, then surely a game like Subversion — “a Mission Impossible-style spy thriller” set within an infinite array of procedurally-generated cities, neighborhoods, buildings, and bank vaults — could be played with the intent of exploring such scenarios (and, if the player is particularly clever, played with the intent of expressing a certain set architectural ideas). What happens, basically, when architects play video games as architects?
[Thanks to Tim Maly for the tip on Subversion.]
Personal comment:
This is extreme "Plan voisin"!
Wednesday, October 06. 2010
Via Manystuff
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Evil People in Modernist Homes in Popular Films
“Evil People in Modernist Homes in Popular Films (Vol. 1) is a combination viewing list, star map, and catalogue, begat from a series of screenings held at the Yale School of Art during the Spring of 2010. The publication suggests the formation of a tentative filmic canon in which modernist homes are used by filmmakers as containers for immorality and vice. Essays by John Yoder and Joseph Rosa are paired with several illustrations as well as highlights from eight films that employ the trope, including The Damned Don’t Cry (1950), Diamonds are Forever (1971), Blade Runner (1982), Body Double (1984), Lethal Weapon 2 (1989), L.A. Confidential (1997), The Big Lebowski (1998), and Twilight (2008).”
Benjamin E. Critton
Printed in a tabloid format in red and yellow ink, Evil People in Modernist Homes in Popular Films offers a serious but lighthearted investigation of the representation of Modernist architecture in popular film, reflecting on the convention of associating evil characters and events with Modern buildings, and also, more generally, on the relation between cinema and architecture. A series of texts point to examples in the James Bond films, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm, and many others, accompanied by plentiful film stills.
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For its new virtual museum, Adobe wanted more than a website designer: It wanted a forward-thinking architect who could make the space feel "physical." It turned to Filippo Innocenti, co-founder of Spin+ and an associate architect at Zaha Hadid Architects. via Arch Record
Personal comment:
11 years after La_Fabrique and 6 after MIX-m (for MIXed museum, at the MAMCO and later at CAC), Adobe is lauching its digital museum designed by Filippo Innocenti & Zaha Hadid. Thank you the "avant-garde" ;) ...
Is this the time of the "slope of enlightment" for digital museums, opened 24/7 worldwide and dedicated to digital content?
Monday, October 04. 2010
Via BLDGBLOG
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By now, you've no doubt heard of the Las Vegas death ray: "The tall, sleek, curving Vdara Hotel at CityCenter on the Strip is a thing of beauty," the Las Vegas Review-Journal reports. "But the south-facing tower is also a collector and bouncer of sun rays, which—if you're at the hotel's swimming pool at the wrong time of day and season—can singe your hair and melt your plastic drink cups and shopping bags."
"Hotel pool employees call the phenomenon the 'Vdara death ray'," we read.
[Image: The "Vdara death ray"; illustration by Mike Johnson for the Las Vegas Review-Journal].
The surface of the building acts like a parabolic reflector, concentrating solar heat into a specific target area. It's the future of urban thermal warfare, perhaps: hotels armed against other hotels in a robust defense posture defined by pure heat.
Of course, Frank Gehry's Disney Concert Hall here in Los Angeles had its own "microclimatic impact," as this PDF makes clear. Back in 2004, USA Today explained that "the glare off the shimmering stainless steel curves at the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall is so bad, it's heating up nearby condos at least 15 degrees and forcing owners to crank up their air conditioners."
Oddly, though, this same heat-reflection effect came up recently in a course I'm currently teaching; a student and I were looking at a project by Sean Lally, Andrew Corrigan, and Paul Kweton of WEATHERS (previously documented on BLDGBLOG here).
That project proposed not really building anything at all but simply tapping the geothermal energy available beneath the Icelandic capital of Reykjavik to create "microclimates" around the city. "Heat is taken directly from the ground," they explain, "and piped up across the landscape into a system of [pipes and] towers."
[Image: By Sean Lally, Andrew Corrigan, and Paul Kweton of WEATHERS].
However, the question here would be: could you deliberately design an architecture without walls, using only thermal gradients—defining areas of public use and congregation solely based on heat? Could these and other parabolic reflections of solar energy be deliberately used as a tactic of architectural intervention and urban design? CTC™: Controlled Thermal Concentration.
Minneapolis-St. Paul, for instance, gets a series of strange pavilion-like stands topped with polished reflectors—and they're ugly as hell, and they make no sense at all except as bad public art, until you stand right next to them. All the snow around them has melted, you first notice, and you can actually stand there without a jacket on even in the depths of winter.
They are "buildings" without definable perimeter, shimmering with daily changes in heat—not a blur building, we might say, but a mirage. Which, I suppose, brings us back to Las Vegas...
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