Monday, March 14. 2011Workshop: Pervasive Urban Applications, 12 June 2011, San FranciscoVia The Mobile City ----- by admin
This workshop is organized by MIT’s Senseable City Lab, Newcastle Culture Lab, and IBM. Deadline for paper has already passed…:
The First Workshop on Pervasive Urban Applications (PURBA) will take place in conjunction with the Ninth International Conference on Pervasive Computing in San Francisco, CA, USA on June 12-15, 2011. Over the past decade, the development of digital networks and operations has produced an unprecedented wealth of information. Handheld electronics, location devices, telecommunications networks, and a wide assortment of tags and sensors are constantly producing a rich stream of data reflecting various aspects of urban life. For urban planners and designers, these accumulations of digital traces are valuable sources of data in capturing the pulse of the city in an astonishing degree of temporal and spatial detail. Yet this condition of the hybrid city – which operates simultaneously in the digital and physical realms – also poses difficult questions about privacy, scale, and design, among many others. These questions must be addressed as we move toward achieving an augmented, fine-grained understanding of how the city functions – socially, economically and yes, even psychologically. This workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners to discuss and explore the research challenges and opportunities in applying the pervasive computing paradigm to urban spaces. We are seeking multi-disciplinary contributions that reveal interesting aspects about urban life and exploit the digital traces to create novel urban applications that benefit citizens, urban planners, and policy makers. Organizers:
Related Links:
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture, Interaction design, Territory
at
10:53
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, artificial reality, conferences, interaction design, interferences, mobility, monitoring, territory, urbanism, wireless
Friday, March 11. 2011Seadromes… On Islands and MegastructuresVia dpr-barcelona -----
A seadrome, concept developed by Edward Robert Armstrong, is an enormous floating islands of steel and concrete, to cover 100 or more acres and be anchored at intervals across the Atlantic. According to Armstorng’s design, it would be rise 70 feet (21 m) or more above the surface of the ocean by tubular columns that would allow waves to pass underneath. We can read the following description:
We can see how engineer had influenced the avant-garde and radical architecture. If now we can see proposals to reuse abandoned oil rigs or some other that are based on the idea of recycling ships and marine structures, some of the designs of the 1960s and 1970s were based on this idea of seadromes as floating islands orfloating cities. That’s why we found really provocative to talk about the seadromes and how they have been “adopted” by different disciplines, including architecture.
Time magazine wrote on November 27, 1933:
The seadrome idea was also the starting point of another utopian project, the Habakkuk by Geoffrey Pyke, based on a scheme to assemble an elite unit for winter operations in Norway, Romania, and the Italian Alps, which is basically an aircraft carrier out of pykrete [a mixture of wood pulp and ice]. Pyke envisioned ships as vast and solid as icebergs. But, as we can read at Cabinet Magazine, the Habbakuk was never built anyway. Land-based aircraft were attaining longer ranges, U-boats were being hunted down faster than they could be built, and the US was gaining numerous island footholds in the Pacific—all contributing to a reduced need for a vast, floating airfield. The idea of the seadrome as a floating island just takes us to analyze how they were part of the inspiration of some floating megastructures. Reyner Banham pointed on his book Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past that mostly all of the first megastructure designed on the first years of the avant-garde movement were inspired by piers and freight platforms, such as the Scheveningen pier in the Netherlads or the Santa Monica pier in Los Angeles. So we can see that the relationship with the idea of floating cities was there, since the earlymegastructuralist projects. But talking about more recent projects, we can see the evident similarities from this airport designed by M. Lurcat for the middle of the river Seine, in the midst of Paris in 1932: To the Megafloat project in Japan, currently under construction: So, the interesting idea here is to discuss if all this seadromes and floating islands can become new territories to be inhabited. Hernán Diáz recently wrote for the issue Islands on Cabinet Magazine an interesting article called A Topical Paradise. Here he quoted the poem “islands” written by W. H. Auden, pointing:
After this reflections, we just think: What will come next… Islands in space inspired by seadromes? It seems that we’re going on that way:
“Far off like floating seeds the ships —– Related readings: “I will walk around the island. Look to see if there is something to eat. Build a house from straw and wood. Carve a bow and arrow to hunt wild pigs and tigers. Look for a man to fall in love with. If I don’t find him, I’ll make one from clay and mud [...] I don’t think I will make art on a desert island.”
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture, Territory
at
15:35
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, engineering, infrastructure, mobility, speculation, territory
Thursday, March 10. 2011Storefront for Art and Architecture ArchiveVia Rhizome ----- Ceci Moss
Thanks to iheartphotograph, I just discovered the online archive of downtown non-profit art space the Storefront for Art and Architecture. Founded in 1982, their programming examines the intersections between architecture, design and art. The archive provides press releases from previous exhibitions and scans of printed documents from those shows, as well as photo documentation. Very cool!
Thursday, March 03. 2011Other Little Magazines # 17 – One Short History----- by pedrogadanho While in Montreal, I had the opportunity to browse through some of the classics that made the notion of the “little magazine” so dear to us all. And so, from the exquisite CCA library I picked a few challenging inaugural issues on which to expand in this unending section of Shrapnel C. (Soundtrack here.) Utopie, subtitled Sociologie de l’urbain, is probably most referential nowadays because in its editorial board was a bright sociological mind – one who became a reference for architects and other cultural producers: Jean Baudrillard. As today one flips through this little French revue’s número un – brought out in May 1967 – one again realizes how some important architecture futures first crystallize in settings that are distant from architecture’s specialized media. Indeed, it is sometimes in other media that the first attempts to synthesize a particular moment in architecture comes about. As such, along the “critical thinking” on urbanism, or timely notes on “marxisme et esthétique” and the consumption of objects, it is also in this outsider’s publication that one suddenly discovers early discussions on the ephemeral in architecture – with topics ranging from the boutiques and the emergency habitats to Cedric Price or Archigram. How more up-to-date can you be? And while Utopies dwelled on the imagination of the villes de papier – with unexpectedly early insights of the role of graphic novels in the visualization of urban futures – on the other side of the channel or the ocean, architects themselves were still clipping photocopies in the fashion of Corbusier, or desperately clinging to classicize modernism in the fashion of Mies. About the same time as Utopie was coming out in revolutionary Paris, in swinging London the conceptual grandfather of Clip, Stamp, Fold and other contemporary adventures, a small black-and-white assemblage of photocopies by the name of clip-kit again got together Cedric Price, Mike Webb, and Reyner Banham, with all of them trying to pin down their references outside architecture – from cars and industrial caravans to gas tanks and the machine logic. While trying to legitimize new languages in the realm of popular production, and even if self-proclaiming their own revolutionary promise or the concern “with progressive architectural ideas,” architects somehow seemed unaware of the true impact of their images and concepts in other cultural realms of their time. On the other hand, half a dozen years later in New York, such “progressive” images were being subsumed to the archive by an enduring intellectual attempt to institutionalize modernism as the true and only rule of the architectural field.
Oppositions 1, brought out in September 1973 as a “Journal for Ideas and Criticism in Architecture” by the guiding hands of Peter Eisenman, Keneth Frampton and Mario Gandelsonas, was to dictate where the tectonic avant-garde really lied – from Colin Rowe’s reading of neoclassicism in Modern Architecture, down to Anthony Vidler’s analysis of utopia or Diana Agrest and Mario Gandelsonas’ “Semiotics and Architecture: Ideological Consumption or Theoretical Work”. From then on, one could succinctly and polemically say that it took three decades for architectural media to again try and go “beyond architecture” – and its self-referential academic theories –as it happened with my last pick from the CCA’s collection: Volume #01, out in 2005 as a radical transformation of previous Archis magazine lead by Ole Bouman. In this instance, blending AMO, the C-Lab and mysterious graphic insertions such as the Rive Gauche’s “Total Intellectual Freedom”, Volume was again to reset the coordinates of where the post-critical avant-garde should be – by fiercely committing to strong statements, visual liveliness and the notion of architecture as an expanded cultural field. As Ole Bouman optimistically stated at this instance, architecture was again “a universal access code”, “a powerful kind of strategic intelligence”, “a medium for developing cultural concepts.” And yet, Beatriz Colomina funnily added elsewhere in the mag that as “our dentists suddenly think that architecture is important,” maybe it was about time “we should embrace its irrelevance.” As architecture was strongly mediatized through other cultural media – from Time magazine to Wallpaper, you name it – so its theory and its specialized media had to move into the realm of communication, to again ground architecture’s relationship to a fast-moving society. And in this respect – as in the respect of the stuff that makes magazines historically relevant – it is pretty amazing for me to realize as half a dozen years ago, in Volume’s pages one could already discern some of the questions that we are still currently enjoying to debate – from “unsolicited architecture” to “fiction,” and from “experimental writing” to all of today’s cherished “beyonds.” Cloud City / ALA ArchitectsVia ArchDaily ----- by Hank Jarz Courtesy ALA Architects Finnish design team, ALA Architects has shared with us their latest commission, a mixed use project in Helsinki, Cloud City. Seeking to take advantage of available space within the urban core, this unique project brings density to a underutilized courtyard within a large existing factory block. Additional images, including a full set of detailed floor plans and a description by the architects after the break.
Courtesy ALA Architects Helsinki is currently developing new sustainable methods for building the city. Primarily these projects aim at increasing density at the expense of urban sprawl. One question is how to make existing built areas denser, another where and how to build high risers. The Cloud City project is one possible answer. Courtesy ALA Architects This project aims at increasing diversity in the central design quarters of Punavuori. As its site, it uses the large courtyard of the 1930’s Nokia cable factory block, Merikortteli. It aims at combining a single family house typology with central location and high rise views. This is achieved by using an office tower to elevate the residential building above the surrounding ridge line. The building is literally two different architectures piled on top of each other. These two identities are never present simultaneously so they can be completely optimized for their own use and conditions. Both sections have adopted a type of camouflage relating to their specific situations. Courtesy ALA Architects The lower office section has a façade literally reflecting the surrounding brick walls, becoming a distorted reflection of its container. Its form and reflective facade direct additional light into the yard in the winter, while in the summer it provides shade against overheating. Courtesy ALA Architects The apartments above are made up of one room sized units, creating a small scale, detached house feel. The private terraces and greenhouses give a sense of having your own garden. Each apartment has magnificent views to the sea and across central Helsinki. On the city scale the pixelated shape, lined by reflective glass railings and conservatories, makes the building blend into the skyline. Courtesy ALA Architects The courtyard will be built into a lush green garden, which receives its sunlight evened out by the reflective façade of the new office building. The ground level contains public functions, spilling out through the large arcades. Above the ridgeline Cloud City has recreated the intimate scale of the old wooden houses which used to inhabit the site, whilst renewing the courtyard below into a surreal playground for the design district. Courtesy ALA Architects Architect: ALA Architects
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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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