Wednesday, March 23. 2011Inside Barack Obama's Top Secret Tent
This particular SCIF has been set up in the middle of a hotel room in Brazil—you can see the carpet pattern on the floor. Obama was on a pre-arranged trip to Brazil when airstrikes in Libya began on Saturday, and needed a secure facility from which to talk to his Secretaries of State and Defense, as well as fellow coalition leaders. While the tent material looks like fairly standard blue tarpaulin, it is actually completely soundproof, windowless, and "made from a secret material which is designed to keep emissions in and listening devices out." The BBC quotes Phil Lago, whose company, Command Consulting Group, regularly supplies SCIFs to government agencies, who explains that a "ring of electronic waves" ensures that only signals from an encrypted satellite phone can get in and out. Apparently, the President never travels without his SCIF, which is surprisingly portable. According to Lago, "You can usually fit them into two large foot lockers and that's most of the equipment you need." The exact specifications of these mobile security pods are top secret, and for most of us, this photo will be the closest we ever get to a SCIF. James Bond, eat your heart out! Image: Barack Obama and advisers inside his SCIF, via the BBC; story via @bldgblog
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture, Science & technology
at
13:30
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, communication, design (environments), science & technology, security, wireless
Norman Foster Recreates Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion CarVia ArchDaily ----- by Kelly Minner
“I was privileged to collaborate with Bucky for the last 12 years of his life and this had a profound influence on my own work and thinking. Inevitably, I also gained an insight into his philosophy and achievements,” shared Lord Norman Foster. Recreating the legendary futuristic Dymaxion Car, Foster’s No. 4 version was a lengthy and expensive two year project, but was obviously a labor of love. Buckminster Fuller’s futuristic three wheeled car was brief, with a mere three actually built. Incredibly efficient the streamlined body with long tail-fin averaged 35 miles to the gallon and could achieve 120 mph. The Zeppelin inspired design with a V8 Ford engine was intended to fly as well, Fuller’s vision of revolutionizing how people traveled.
Referencing some 2,000 photographs as a starting point, Foster was also able to borrow the only surviving Dymaxion Car (No. 2) from the National Automobile Museum in Reno, Nevada, with the promise of creating a much needed new interior for the car. Recreating the interior for the new car (as well as for No. 2) ended up being more of a historic approximation relying primarily on images of the original Dymaxion Car, tracking down (if any) original components, and building replicas from scratch.
Norman Foster driving his Dymaxion Car
The completed Dymaxion Car was featured in an exhibition of the work of Buckminster Fuller curated by Foster in Madrid last September. Our coverage of the exhibition can be found here. Foster shared that, “driving the Dymaxion is a revelation. There’s something in that feel as you wind the steering wheel and increase the power. The horizon just kind of spins around the cockpit. It’s quite extraordinary. And it’s a showstopper. Even now, seventy-eight years later, it still has the power to stop people in their tracks.” © Gregory Gibbons, Courtesy Ivorypress
Metropolis Mag Q&A: Norman Foster and the Dymaxion Car What inspired you to recreate Bucky’s famous Dymaxion Car? Bucky is never far from my thoughts. We collaborated on projects for the last twelve years of his life. When I was awarded the Royal Guild Gold medal in London, he gave the talk. At that point we had decided to do houses for each other. So he came over and we talked about the project. He gave the talk and then he left for America, off to see his terminally ill wife, Ann, in the hospital. On arrival, he had a fatal heart attack at her bedside and she died thirty six hours later. Curiously, on that trip to England, he said to me, “You know, Norman, anytime, I can pull the plug.” I guess that’s when he pulled the plug. He got there and realized that his wife wasn’t going to recover. Why remake the Dymaxion now? It was an interesting exercise for us. Like everything else he did, the car was pure Bucky. He was a friend of Henry Ford, which insured that he would get Ford parts for 30 percent of their true cost. So he took the flathead v8 engine, the wheels, the steering wheel, the transmission, and turned it 180 degrees. So you can make a like-by-like comparison between the Dymaxion car and Fords from 1913 to 1933. But the Dymaxion was three times the volume. It had the potential of taking up to eleven rather than four. It was significantly faster, and consumed half the fuel. It was truly doing more with less. In recreating the new car, where did you draw the line between faithfully executing those original plans and drawings, and making improvements to them? The #4 car is not a replica of the #3 car, but we did replicate the engine, the Studebaker ignition, the Ford wheels and steering wheel. The only thing that’s not completely authentic and original is the hand break. The original didn’t have one, for some strange reason. I saw the surviving Dymaxion at the Whitney show a few years back. The interior had badly deteriorated. Your team must have done a great deal of detective work to recreate the interior. Yes, unbelievable. Fortunately, we know the people at Stanford well, where the archive is. And the people we chose to do the restoration work were also extraordinarily incredible at research. We generated a huge body of knowledge. People would email and call in. We developed a great archive and out of that produced a book on the car. The book is tiny, tiny tip of the iceberg on all the material we generated. It took two years to complete this. How much did the project cost? I’d rather not talk about that. The true answer is an arm and a leg, a lot of money. It took twice as long and cost significantly more than I had budgeted for it. Of course, that’s everybody’s story with any classic restoration. Everyone underestimated the task. But then, it was a group of perfectionists involved, and it’s an absolutely stunning vehicle. What is the car’s relevance to automobiles today? First of all, the maxim of doing more with less is more urgent and imperative today than it’s ever been. In a way the Dymaxion was the classic people-mover before its time. The three wheel configuration caused a lot of debate. Was it a stable configuration? Not withstanding the size. It does produce this extraordinarily dramatic turning circle. There is a vintage movie of Bucky pirouetting the car around this policeman. It just nudges the policeman as it circles around him. I’ve driven it in an airfield and explored exactly that capability. There’s something in that feel as you wind the steering wheel and increase the power. The horizon just kind of spins around the cockpit. It’s quite extraordinary. And it’s a show stopper. What’s the ride like aerodynamically? It’s not soft, but it’s amazingly cushioned. It’s more like a boat. Of course it was co-designed with Sterling Burgess, the America’s Cup-winning yacht designer. So the ride is quite remarkable. It has a lot of the characteristics of 1930s cars: the break pressure is quite heavy, but that’s normal for vehicles of that period. It has its British MOT and British plates. It is road legal, but since it has precious value I’m not sure that I’m about to drive it on a narrow country lane. What can it do on a straight away? You’d be very conformable on legal road speed limits. Natural caution on my part, possibly a side affect of advancing years, introduces a degree of hesitation. Would it comfortably do 100 kph [sixty miles per hour]? Oh, yes. It’s also a precursor to something called the D45. The D45 was an urban car, seating five, with the same three-wheel configuration. But the drawings of that demonstrate that it had better stability at speed because the rear wheel extends out to increase the wheel base. We did a series of studies and developed an absolutely beautiful film. We showed that as part of our Bucky exhibition in Madrid. It is quite amusing. The Dymaxion comes out of a 1930s garage in New York and drives past all these old cars. It goes past the Hearst Building, which of course was still relatively new, then crosses the river and goes into a tunnel. It comes out the other side in present day New York. It still looks like something out of a science fiction movie. It’s interesting how you and Nicholas Grimshaw and Richard Rogers were all drawn to Bucky in your formative years. What drew all of you into his orbit? It was his philosophy, his optimism, his belief in friendly clean technology that would enable the species to survive if they used their intelligence. There were other influences during that time. But I never dreamed that a few years later I’d end up being approached by Bucky to collaborate with him on projects and for it to become such a close relationship. You’ve talked about Bucky to younger audiences. Do his ideas connect with them? I think they really resonate. He empowered a generation. It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that he triggered the green movement. Whether anything has made enough of an impact can be debated, but certainly the environmental movement is rooted in Bucky. He has tremendous appeal and relevance to younger generation architects and environmentalists today and in a way, I feel that he’s not recognized the way that he should be. He’s been much more widely understood in Europe. I don’t know how you feel, but I don’t think he’s ever been truly understood in America.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture, Design
at
11:22
Defined tags for this entry: architects, architecture, design, engineering, history, mobility, research, speculation
Monday, March 21. 2011Agricultural Landscapes Seen From SpaceOn daily basis we come across images that are built using various code techniques, whether this be pixelation, glitch, particle fields, swarms, reaction diffusion, looking that these images on Wired Science, it’s amazing to see the similarities between the works we create and the environment we inhabit. Even more apparent when we consider that they bare no correlation to one another and the large gap in scale that exists between them. Likewise, the images below appear strangely “Digital”… Agriculture is one of the oldest and most pervasive human impacts on the planet. Estimates of the land surface affected worldwide range up to 50 percent. But while driving through the seemingly endless monotony of wheat fields in Kansas may give you some insight into the magnitude of the change to the landscape, it doesn’t compare to the view from above. more on Wired Science
Personal comment: Pixelated landscape! Failed Corporate Development Cuts Island in Half, on a full moon weekendAfter a really long time, I found myself in Second Life Again
at first I thought the teleport took me to the wrong place
Could this really be the same lazy suburban island I left a few years ago?
And where was everybody? The place felf like the day after an invisible bomb
I guess this was not a regular bomb, it was just an explosion of development,
it made me think of all the hype that surrounded Second Life a few years back.
Obviously made invertors placed their money here. I guess they lost it, and most probably because they promoted Second Life as a "digital revolution", and not as the niche geekfest it really is. another failed capitalist expansion, that took everybody to nowhere. I peeked at vacant spaces inside generic corporate salary-buildings
flew up to the sky, and decided to leave
I saw a bridge and another, uninhabited island, strangely cut in half.
I assumed it was the graphics setting on my pc,
and as I flew closer the rest of the island would come into view
but no, the island was indeed cut off.
The development ended abrupty at sea.
I examined the cut, it was clean
the topography sliced by the programmer who ran out of space on his server?
Was this the real City of Bits? Cloud Computing Urbanisim?
hovering above the sea,
I appreciated the new graphics settings,
where the sea soflty glistens under the moonlight,
as it would any other full moon weekend
Personal comment: Artificial cities also experience (invisible) cataclysms.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture, Territory
at
10:39
Defined tags for this entry: 3d, architecture, artificial reality, community, digital, narrative, territory, urbanism
Thursday, March 17. 2011On Ash Clouds and Snow StormsI’ve discovered this new electronic technique that creates new speech out of stuff that’s already there. Iceland is volcanically and geologically active. The interior mainly consists of a plateau characterised by sand fields, mountains and glaciers, while many glacial rivers flow to the sea through the lowlands. In this context, Eyjafjallajökull is one of the Iceland’s smaller ice caps located in the far south of the island. It covers the caldera of a volcano 1,666 metres [5,466 ft] in height that has erupted relatively frequently since the last ice age. Eyjafjallajokull most recent eruptions in 2010 were the cause of huge disruption to air travel across western and northern Europe and also caused big impact on farming, harvesting or grazing livestock. We can also read that samples of volcanic ash collected near the eruption showed a silica concentration of 58%—much higher than in the lava flows. Interesting context for an architecture and landscape course, isn’t it? Focused on understanding the complex reality of nonbuilt environments beyond poetic contemplation or scientific analysis, The Collector, On Ash Clouds is a course at the Master in Landscape Design Program from Harvard GSD with Paisajes Emergentes as visiting professors, which aims to register, interpret and draw weather and natural phenomenon with the intention of use the generated archive as raw material for the design process of any landscape project. The course was divided into three major bodies of research*, which was done between a visited site [USA] and a non visited place [Iceland]: [1] Weather and atmosphere [2] Emerging Landscapes [3] Drawings and photography The course lasted one week [in January 2011] during some of the most intense days of Boston’s winter. Within that week, the students did a quick exercise of research and then proposed an observatory project, working with unpredictable and violent natural phenomenon as the core of the research. As the instructors Luis Callejas and Sebastian Mejía [from Paisajes Emergentes] pointed: “It can be difficult to determine the boundaries of a complex natural system. The decision is ultimately made by the observer.” Luis Callejas also told us via e-mail:
Working with the ash cloud generated by 2010 eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull volcano, the group studied the conditions and effects that emerged due to this event, and its relation with issues like air navigation, the phenomenon of turbulence, and the possible effects on the island’s ecosystem, among others.
The idea of analyzing and working with issues like storms and islands also reminds us the Glacier/Island/Storm studio at Columbia GSAPP by Geoff Manaugh. As Rob Holmes pointed on mammoth:
From statements as “Building is not always edifying: designing with what is already there“, the students have worked on the perspective of investigative landscape design and its important role in history, architecture and imaginative creation. The result is a powerful intensification of emerging landscape conditions as possible solutions to design problems. If Brian Eno once said “For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.”, now we’re going to visualize geologic time by looking into the past as a way to look into the future, through the student’s eyes and their proposals to “manipulate the world”. And such as a long event as an island is, we’re going to analyze and write here a series of five post [this, the first one] to talk, using the student’s projects as study cases, about all the possibilities that are contained in the research of this kind of natural phenomena and how they can affect our architectural thinking and our response to environmental crises. …………………………………………………………… Harvard GSD Course. Master in Landscape Architecture Students: Instructors: Luis Callejas, Sebastián Mejía, Lukas Pauer
Related Links:
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture, Territory
at
10:56
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, atmosphere, geography, landscape, schools, territory, weather
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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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