Thursday, November 17. 2011Should Scientists Seed the Sky With Chemicals?Via GOOD ----- by Sarah Laskow
Photo via (cc) Flickr user dcysurfer/Dave Young
Personal comment:
While I agree with the fears of Sarah Laskow about geo-engineering the planet, I want also to add this comment: we've already geo-engineered the planet for decades! Even so it was not an intended one (or was it?), 7 billion humans with their food production systems, architectures and travel infrastructures, energy production, factories, etc. are a very strong geo-engineering force, especially in the developed countries! It is no more a natural Earth we are living in, but a man transformed one (the famous "anthropocene" described by some), in its very essence (up to the quality of the air we are breathing).
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Science & technology, Sustainability, Territory
at
10:27
Defined tags for this entry: conditioning, engineering, geography, science & technology, sustainability, territory
Wednesday, November 16. 2011Project Ice Shield[Image: "L.A. Ice" by Victor Hadjikyriacou, produced for Unit 11 at the Bartlett School of Architecture, part of last year's Landscape Futures Super-Workshop].
The project aims to artificially create "naleds"—ultra-thick slabs of ice that occur naturally in far northern climes when rivers or springs push through cracks in the surface to seep outwards during the day and then add an extra layer of ice during the night. Unlike regular ice formation on lakes—which only gets to a metre in thickness before it insulates the water below—naleds continue expanding for as long as there is enough water pressure to penetrate the surface. Many are more than seven metres thick, which means they melt much later than regular ice. Fascinatingly, naleds have already been used as foundations for infrastructural projects elsewhere; in North Korea, for instance, the Guardian reports, the military has utilized naleds "to build river crossings for tanks during the winter and Russia has used them as drilling platforms." The ideal site has the following characteristics: deep, narrow, slow flow in a single straight channel with gradual approaches to the ice; no tributary streams, creeks or lakes immediately upstream; and it is located near an existing road network. The site should also be free of warm springs and sand bars and not subject to major snow drifting. Being downstream of riffles/rapids may be conducive to supercooling and frazil ice formation that might accelerate ic e formation and growth at the bridge site. (...) Once natural ice cover has progressed across the channel thick enough to bear the weight of personnel and light equipment, existing snow cover is removed to accelerate ice growth at the bottom of the ice sheet. Variation exists in whether snow is removed or just compacted. Snow removal is recommended on upstream and downstream sides of the road for a distance of 23-30 meters (75-100 feet) as well as on the road itself. Subsequent to ice growth in response to snow removal, surface flooding is recommended to build up ice thickness on the road surface. (...) Lateral barriers of snow, logs or boards are used to contain floodwater on the road surface. Water should be applied by layering, allowing full freezing of previous water applications before the next. Conflicting recommendations exist as to whether brush or logs should be incorporated into the ice. One study did document the increase in ice strength after incorporating geo-grid material during the ice buildup process. A regular regime of ice drilling and monitoring of ice thickness is recommended. If you want something a little more hi-tech, on the other hand, the U.S. Army Cold Regions Test Center has slowly been amassing insight into the construction of ice roads and ice bridges.
The engineers built field-expedient water tanks, berms of snow and crushed ice, to keep the water in designated areas for freezing. They move about 70,000 gallons of water per day using a gas-powered water pump and water lines. Once the bridge is capable of holding the weight, they will use 5,000 gallon water trucks to help speed up the process by delivering water faster than the pump. The frames and techniques used for building with frozen water, then, are very similar to those used when dealing with concrete; in either case, it is the architecture of hardened liquids.
C-Lab 2005-2011 ExhibitionVia ArchDaily ----- de Alison Furuto
The work of C-Lab, Columbia University’s experimental urban and architecture think tank, is on display in Tokyo. Conceived as a temporary occupation, the exhibition presents C-Lab’s work alongside magazines from Yoshioka Library’s archive of international architecture journals from the 1960s to today. Images of C-Lab analyses, planning projects, installations, and publications are positioned on the gallery’s shelves next to vintage issues of A+U, Japan Architect, Shinkenchiku, Space, Architectural Review, Domus, Abitare, and Casabella. More information on the exhibition after the break. The exhibition is the first survey of C-Lab’s entire output and shows how the group gives form to content. With all the works, design is used to shape disparate facts into urban and architectural speculations, constructing information into findings about the patterns of urban development. Each project offers an urban proposition, the most overt being the master plans for Chengdu, China; Research Triangle Park, USA; and Saemangeum, South Korea. Also displayed are illustrated geographical and cultural case studies, and publications like the book World of Giving, issues of Volume Magazine, and C-Lab’s bootleg edition of Urban China. They too are designed to clarify urban conditions and outline planning strategies. As such, the diagrams, texts, and publications are forms that like the master plans activate an understanding of spatial relationships, and can be thought of as a kind of architecture. Accompanying the exhibition is a tabloid-format publication that highlights four reappearing themes in the lab’s studies. The first involves processing mounds of cultural data to identify unexpected patterns of urbanization. With each project urban occurrences are harnessed into a visual matrix to convey a hypothesis about the operations of cities. Its supporting text articulates unforeseen consequences affecting urban design and policy. The second describes the bonding of unrelated typologies into new, practical sensibilities for development. Conceptual readymades are mashed up into urban morphologies that re-imagine city environments. The familiar shape of the readymades lends an immediate legibility to the plans and affords an economy of means for transmitting their emergent character. The third focuses on the communication of architectural ideas. Each one of the included illustrations is a unique design that telegraphs a C-Lab insight on urbanism. The drawings, modified photographs, analytical diagrams, curated data comparisons, and animations all function as communication instruments that express concepts about the city through a visual means rather than a text explanation. Typically appearing at the start of a publication, they are a condensation of the narrative that foretells the story about to unfold in words. At the same time, each graphic figure is a construction in its own right. The designs are presented here without their accompanying text to feature the logic that went into their making. Collectively, they represent the dimension of media used by C-Lab to leak information into the architectural subconscious. The last method addresses the power of scale. Since architectural thinking can be applied to contexts of various size (furniture, exhibition, building, district, city, and media landscape), it is valuable to know the power of operating at each one. Sometimes, to achieve an intended result it may be more effective to work at a different scale than the one initially assumed or requested, or to work at multiple scales and leverage the effects of the forms across them. C-Lab believes that for the architect to be productive in the most beneficent sense requires understanding the power that lies in exercising architectural thinking at all registers of experience. In this spirit, the publication itself functions at several scales of experience. It can be read in a standard tabloid format where projects of each category occupy a spread. Half pages can also be joined to make a single large image of one representative project from each category. And multiple copies of the publication can be assembled to create even bigger text and image compositions, such as the one arranged at the center of the exhibition that spells out, “C L A B.” Friday, November 11. 2011Didier Faustino and his Bureau des Mésarchitectures
Living in New York for quite a while now, I regularly noticed that only few people here knew the work produced by Didier Faustino and his Bureau des Mésarchitectures back in Paris. I therefore decided to introduce a small collection extracted from a long list of projects since 1996.
In this introductory Manifesto of the Design Document dedicated to the Bureau des Mésarchitectures (2006), Didier Faustino expresses the common link of all his projects. Influenced by Deleuze and Foucault as much as more popular references (see each project’s title), his practice refuses a Cartesian vision of the world that separates the mind from the body. On the contrary, his projects, whether they belong to architecture, industrial design or art, engage the body as a whole and explore its limits, its fragility, its flexibility, and more generally its ability to sense its environment. This is just a very short introduction to this work which would deserve to be the object of a more precise and developed article:
Fight Club Casa Nostra Silent Hill Concrete Islands Domestic Stage Sympathy for the Devil Home Palace Love Me Tender Doppelganger
Related Links:Personal comment: Didier Faustino is certainly not a new comer and probably most people following this blog already know his works. But anyhow, as we appreciate his work too, this is just a fine occasion to reblog it! Live Stage: Tracing Mobility [Berlin]Tracing Mobility: Cartography and Migration in Networked Space — Exhibition, Symposium and Open Platform :: November 24 - December 12, 2011; Opening: November 23; 7:00 pm :: Haus der Kulturen der Welt, John-Foster-Dulles-Allee 10, 10557 Berlin. Tracing Mobility sets out to examine the shifting terrain of global versus individual mobility and how its hand in hand development with networked infrastructure is transforming our conceptions of time, space and distance.
Where can we escape to when online- and offline worlds converge? What does the movement of a body in a landscape indicate when every point of the earth is within reach through the aid of digital technology? How do mobile devices and media alter our mindset and change our perception of time and space? With installations, videos, performances and paintings, but also iPhone Apps, maps and open-source collaborations, we see artists developing strategies in order to position themselves within this dynamic topography. A Symposium and the Tracing Mobility Open Platform offer further explorations of these themes via lectures, talks and workshops. Exhibiting artists: Frank Abbott (UK), Aram Bartholl (DE), Neal Beggs (UK/FR), Heath Bunting (UK), Janet Cardiff / George Bures Miller (CAN), Miles Chalcraft (UK/DE), Simon Faithfull (UK/DE), Yolande Harris (UK/NL), Folke Köbberling & Martin Kaltwasser (DE), Landon Mackenzie (CAN), Open_Sailing, plan b (Sophia New & Dan Belasco Rogers) (UK/DE), Esther Polak & Ivar yan Bekkum (NL), Gordan Savicic (AT/NL), Mark Selby (UK), Michelle Teran (CAN/DE) Programme: November 23 November 26 December 12 High-res pictures are available on request: presse [at] trampoline-berlin.com Tracing Mobility is a project by Trampoline - Agency for Art & Media, in cooperation with Haus der Kulturen der Welt and Radiator Festival Nottingham, curated by Miles Chalcraft and Anette Schäfer.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Art, Territory
at
10:08
Defined tags for this entry: art, artists, dimensions, exhibitions, interferences, mediated, mobility, territory
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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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