Monday, December 16. 2013Crazy-Radical Soft Architecture, From The 1950s To Today | #architecture #soft
Via Architizer -----
Article by Neeraj Bhatia, an architect, urban designer, and assistant professor at CCA. Neeraj is the director of The Open Workshop and co-director of InfraNet Lab. He is the co-editor of Bracket 2, focusing on soft architecture, the second edition of an annual journal. Find out more here.
The term "soft" is expansive in its meanings. Soft material, soft sound, soft-mannered, soft sell, soft power, soft management, soft computing, soft politics, software, soft architecture. It describes material qualities, evokes character traits. It defines strategies of persuasion, models of systems thinking and problem-solving, and new approaches to design. But the most obvious associations with soft have been material characteristics—yielding readily to touch or pressure; deficient in hardness; smooth; pliable, malleable, or plastic. And this is the definition of "soft" that came to define some of the most exciting design motives of the 1960s and '70s. These new design approaches were skeptical of modernism; soft was deemed to enable individualism, responsiveness, nomadism, and anarchy. Archigram, Buckminster Fuller, Cedric Price, and Yona Friedman were among soft architecture's forerunners. Archigram’s investigations into pods, Price’s inflatable roof structures, and Fuller’s research into lightness were all literally soft, and often scaled to the material properties of human occupation. However, larger urban visions such as Plug-In City, Ville Spatiale, or Potteries Thinkbelt can equally be understood as soft. What connects these projects is their attempt to develop design strategies that shifted from the malleability of a material to the flexibility of a system. In so doing they developed new characteristics of "soft." Here, we take a look at some of "soft" architecture's most radical ideas, structures, and concepts.
Cedric Price, Price Potteries Thinkbelt, 1964
North Staffordshire's pottery industry was suffering an economic crisis in the 1950s and 1960s, leaving the entropic landscape with underused infrastructure and industry. Price published his Potteries Thinkbelt in 1966, converting the railway and facilities into a vast educational network for 20,000 students. The network was malleable and involved scheduling/time into the process of design.
Reyner Banham and Francois Dallegret, Environmental Bubble, 1965
The Environmental Bubble proposed a domestic utopia with all the basic amenities of modern life (food, shelter, energy ... television), but without the binds of permanent buildings and structures of earlier human settlements. The transparent plastic dome is inflated by air conditioning and rejects the archetypal home icon. Instead it is defined by the individual and his or her subjective yearnings.
Hans Hollein, Mobile Office, 1969
Before the era of mobile communication, Hans Hollein derived the mobile office. The design transformed the office into an inflatable, transportable, and weather-proof spectacle!
Coop Himmelb(l)au, Basel Event: the Restless Sphere, 1971
Mechanical motion generated from pressurized gas is a realm of technology called pneumatics, which manifested itself in the design culture of the 1960s. The Basel Event was a public demonstration of pneumatic construction, showcasing a Restless Sphere, four meters in diameter, put in motion by its occupant. Coop Himmelb(l)au sought to create an architecture as light as the sky; it had political ramifications through its manipulations.
Philippe Rahm, Interior Weather, 2006
Philippe Rahm's meteorological architecture incorporates soft typologies and data sets otherwise invisible to the human eye. Interior Weather is an installation with two sets of spaces: "objective" rooms with temperature, light intensity, and humidity in flux; and "subjective" rooms with occupants being observed for physiological values and social behavior. Territory is defined here through the senses, not walls.
Walter Henn, Burolandschaft, 1963
The era of paternalism and strict, fixed, hierarchical office space has transitioned into a new typology of malleability and modularity. The idea of "the cubicle" was novel in its modularity and non-hierarchical form. Henn's Burolandschaft, literally "office landscape," launched a movement based on an open plan freed from partitions. It has heavily influenced contemporary projects that create flexible space through the (re)organization of furniture.
Conrad Waddington, Epigenetic Landscape, 1957
Waddington's formalized epigenetic landscape offers a metaphor for cell differentiation and proliferation, demonstrating how a marble would gravitate toward the lowest local elevation. The resulting Boolean network is an example of visualizing a problematic data set that is constantly reorganizing itself through feedback mechanism. Writer Sanford Kwinter famously appropriated Conrad Waddington’s "Epigenetic Landscape" as a topological model with which to envision a new conception of form-making (the second picture above)—a concept explored in this "Reverse of Volume RG" installation, Japanese artist Yasuaki Onishi.
Yona Friedman, Villa Spatiale, 1970
The Spatial City articulated Friedman's belief that architecture should only provide a framework, in which the inhabitants had freedom to articulate space for specific needs. The design is "free from authoritarianism" and is a multi-story, spatial space-frame-grid, which implements mobile, temporary, and lightweight infrastructure.
Michael Webb (Archigram), Magic Carpet and Brunhilda's Magic Ring of Fire, 1968
Proposed during the 1970s culture of indeterminacy and the dissolution of buildings, the Magic Carpet and Brunhilda's Magic Ring of Fire is a "reverse hovercraft" facility holding a body suspended in space using jets of air.
Rod Garrett, Black Rock City
One of the principles of the Burning Man Festival is to leave no trace: "We clean up after ourselves and endeavor, whenever possible, to leave such places in a better state than when we found them." Black Rock City originated as tabula rasa in the Nevada desert; its population fluxes to 50,000 during the festival beginning on the last Monday of August every year. It is urbanism made of a soft framework, that is temporary and adjusted each year.
Want more avant-garde architecture? Check out radical inflatable structures of the '60s and Buckminster Fuller's dymaxion drawings.
Related Links:Personal comment: Many projects and references that we know here (the usual suspects somehow --Archigram, Michael Webb, Cedric Price, Hans Hollein, etc.), some projects on which we've been working (Interior Weather, the exhibition by Philippe Rahm at CCA started as a workshop during a research project that I was heading --Variable Environments-- at the ECAL, then we continued the development of the interfaces, programs, etc. with ), and some others I didn't know (Walter Henn's Burolandschaft looks like a prequel of Junya Ishigami's Kanagawa Institute of Technology). Wednesday, December 04. 2013Another City is Possible - Alternatives to the Smart City | #smart?city
Via The Architectural League NY -----
Another City is Possible: Alternatives to the Smart City
1.5 AIA and New York State CEUs
The idea of the “smart city” enjoys considerable intellectual currency at the moment, in the popular media as well as conversations in architecture, urban planning, and local government. In this talk, Adam Greenfield argued that these discourses offer a potentially authoritarian vision of cities under centralized, computational surveillance and control: overplanned, overdetermined, driven by the needs of enterprise. What might some more fruitful alternatives look like? How can we design urban technology that responds to our needs, demands, and desires? Above all, how might we inscribe a robust conception of the right to the city in the technological systems that will do so much to define the urban experience in the twenty-first century?
Adam Greenfield is a New York City-based writer and urbanist. This talk will present material from his new pamphlet “Against the smart city” (available for purchase here), the first part of his forthcoming book The City Is Here For You To Use, which will explore the intersection of emerging networked information technologies with urban place. He is also the author of Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing; “Urban Computing and Its Discontents,” a pamphlet co-authored with Mark Shepard for The Architectural League’s Situated Technologies series; as well as two features on the League’s Urban Omnibus, “A Diagram of Occupy Sandy” and “Frameworks for Citizen Responsiveness: Towards a Read/Write Urbanism.”
Time & Place Wednesday, November 6, 2013
Related Links:
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture, Interaction design
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Defined tags for this entry: architecture, interaction design, research, smart, thinkers, thinking, urbanism
Tuesday, December 03. 2013Smart cities vs smart citizens | #smart?city
Via The Mobile City ----- PBL expert meeting on Smart Cities with Dan Hill
Over the last few years the South Korean New Town of Songdo has emerged as the epitome of the ‘smart city’ of the future – a city that uses software and sensor-driven feedback loops to optimize all kinds of infrastructural city functions. Songdo, planned to be completed by 2015, was heralded as a city with ‘smart DNA’, a showcase of what could be done in urban development if new media technologies were tightly integrated in the urban planning. However, according to Fabrica CEO Dan Hill something is missing in this picture. In these scenario’s new technologies are used to solve old world problems such as traffic congestion. And while of course it’s nice to have an adequately managed urban infrastrcuture, the real issue is that the world itself is changing, partly due to the uptake of new technologies such as social media. What we really need is a new vision on how our traditional city making institutions themselves should adapt to this newly emerging network society. At an expert meeting organized by the Dutch Planbureau voor de Leefomgeving (The Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency), Dan Hill explained that there are several reasons why he thinks the vision of Sondgo will never be a real model for smart city development. Primarily, we cannot trust cities that are exclusively based on algorithms. Would we really want to deliver ourselves to a system of Automatic Urban Processing that resembles the computer systems involved in High Frequency Trading on the stock market? We are all experiencing the lasting effects of the stock market collapse and we definitely don’t want to have that happening to our cities. Secondly, one cannot install smart technologies in the way you would install plumbing and other building infrastructure. The fundamental difference is that in the case of holistic smart city systems, one company takes control over all the urban processes. To optimize the city’s performance, it is necessary that every urban process feeds information into the others. And that works best if one company can manage the whole system. In the case of Songdo, Cisco would be responsible for the waste collection, the energy production, the water management, the traffic control;. Undoubtedly, no city government wants to put all their eggs in one basket by trusting just a single company with their entire infrastructure. The third reason why a smart city like Sondgo would not work is because we simply don’t make cities in order to build infrastructure. Buildings and infrastructure are just the enablers for us to come together and exchange, create cultures, communities and conviviality. The things that we actually look for in our cities are often about inefficiency. There is a clear tension between these two poles and we have to decide where we want our cities to be efficient and where not. Using technology to solve urban problems is not a new idea; in his 1966 book New Movement in Cities, Brian Richards was already imagining contemporary technologies addressing all folds of urban life. Even the conventional infrastructure built in the ‘50s and ‘60s was all about efficiency in urban living and it’s also facing a lot of problems. As Cerdic Price put it in 1960’s «Technology is the answer, but what is the question?» We do currently have all the technologies we need to build a 21rst century resilient city, so why is it impossible to it? One of the answers lies in the nature of our institutions. Not only they are old, but they are also responsible for creating the problem. This creates a clear tension between society and institutions, which is expressed, for example, in the widespread riots that have become a common condition in many countries in the last few years. In this framework the design challenge is not the one of the technological development but the redefinition of the culture of public decision making. Referring to the recent example of a design academy graduate who developed a 3d printed gun, Dan Hill questioned how institutions expect to regulate gun use with policies when guns will be printed at home? It is simply impossible to address this problem with the same tools we have been doing it so far. This issue extends into the use of public space, which has been increasingly regulated in the past decades. This created a vicious circle of narrowing down publics that have access to it and the activities that can be performed there which leads to public spaces’ deterrioration which is usually addressed with more policies controling activities and so on. But we need to understand what public space can be, what one can do in public spaces. The reason, according to Hill, that Beppe Grillo’s party Movimento 5 Stelle did so good in the last italian elections was that they completely rejected all institutional media in promoting their program. Instead, they focused on two things: social media and appearances in public spaces. Beppe Grillo, a devoted blogger, has been talking in a different square every night throughout his electoral campaign, bringing back the public space of the city in the heart of politics. Similarly, there is a widespread rise of active citizens. This new type of «hipster urbanism» as many call it, creates competition for local governments in running cities. In many cases people take care of public green because the municipality cannot afford it any more, so undoubtebly these initiatives are good, even though they are not stricktly legal and are also not really efficient. However, this is also problematic. These processes are not democratic and these citizens can not be held accountable for their actions. In addition to this, they are fundamendaly based on social media, which provide a very individualistic view of the world and promote a «like-minded» mentality, loosing sense of the civic. So self organising systems are quick and direct but they are also temporary and have no real impact on legal structures. Simply stated: pop ups tend to pop down. Crowdfunding, another very popular concept, also doesn’t come without downsides. It only works for people who can pay anyway, making it impossible to be used in cities and to replace the state. So to get back to the issue of smart cities, Dan Hill concluded that it is impossible to keep up with the speed of social developments, using an infrastructure-lead mindset. But it could make a real difference to address the nature of the institutions, as policy changes can have a bigger impact. Undoubtedly, we need strong institutions, they just need to be redesigned from scratch. So for him the real question is whether institutions can appropriate the dynamics of social media without inheriting their ideology, to become more agile, project based and able to maintain a central role in city management. Simple information feedback doesn’t change behaviors. Open Data is a starting point but data alone is not enough, it is the people who make the algorithms that have the connection to the public. On the other hand, this connecting position cannot be left to private companies. There lies a potentially new position for governments, according to Hill. Governments should regulate the technologies market and create the interfaces to create coherent platforms bringing together many providers. Dan Hill, is the CEO of Fabrica, a communications research centre and transdisciplinary studio based in Treviso, Italy, which is part of the Benetton Group. In the past, Hill has been part of Sitra’s (the Finish Innovation Fund) Strategic Design Unit. He was also an Urban Informatics leader for Arup. He is also an Adjunct Professor in the Architecture department at University of Technology in Sydney (UTS) and a member of the Integrated Design Commission Advisory Board in South Australia. In 2012 Hill was a keynote speaker at Social Cities of Tomorrow, a conference organized by The Mobile City with Virtueel Platform and Arcam.
Related Links:Monday, December 02. 2013Frank Lloyd Wright, Reveals ... | #architecture
Note: Dubai pre-booted by Mr Wright?
Via Stuff -----
Frank Lloyd Wright, Reveals the Design for his Mile-High Skyscraper, Chicago, Illinois, 1956
Personal comment: Even the image is big!
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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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