Tuesday, April 28. 2015
Via BLDGBLOG
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Image: "RAM House" by Space Caviar].
An interesting new project by Space Caviar asks, "Does your home have an airplane mode?"
Exploring what it could mean to design future homes so that they offer an optional state of complete electromagnetic privacy, they have put together a "domestic prototype" in which the signal-blocking capabilities of new architectural materials are heavily emphasized, becoming a structural component of the house itself.
[Image: "RAM House" by Space Caviar].
In other words, why just rely on aftermarket home alterations such as WiFi-blocking paint, when you can actually factor the transmission of signals through architectural space into the design of your home in the first place?
[Image: "RAM House" by Space Caviar].
Space Caviar call this "a new definition of privacy in the age of sentient appliances and signal-based communication," in the process turning the home into "a space of selective electromagnetic autonomy."
As the space of the home becomes saturated by “smart” devices capable of monitoring their surroundings, the role of the domestic envelope as a shield from an external gaze becomes less relevant: it is the home itself that is observing us. The RAM House responds to this near-future scenario by proposing a space of selective electromagnetic autonomy. Within the space’s core, Wi-Fi, cellphone and other radio signals are filtered by various movable shields of radar-absorbent material (RAM) and faraday meshing, preventing signals from entering and—more importantly—escaping. Just as a curtain can be drawn to visually expose the domestic interior of a traditional home, panels can be slid open to allow radio waves to enter and exit, when so desired.
The result is the so-called "RAM House," named for those "movable shields of radar-absorbent material," and it will be on display at the Atelier Clerici in Milan from April 14-19.
Friday, January 16. 2015
Note: we didn't found enough time last December to document an interview of fabric | ch that was publish in the French design magazine Étapes. So let's do it in early 2015... The magazine itself has been recently revamped under the direction of a new editorial board. It is now a quite exciting magazine, interested in transverval approaches to design questions, including interaction design, architecture, etc. even so its main and historical focus remains graphic design.
The interview that took place between Christophe Guignard (fabric | ch) and Isabelle Moisy (editor in chief, Étapes) concerns the specific approach to architectural design that fabric | ch has adopted through times. This approach has taken into account since our foundation (1997) the networked and digital natures of contemporary space and territories (landscapes) combined with the physical one. This last point was particularly evident in the fact that since the start, our group was composed of architects and computer scientists. Our work has of course evolved since 1997, but this "coded/data dimension" of space has obviously gained importance in our work and in general since then, it has also proved itslelf to become a major element in the conceptualization of spaces in our still early century.
By fabric | ch
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From the "Édito":
"(...). En l'absence d'horizon précis, les supports de communication se superposent, et les designers débordent sans complexe des pratiques restrictives auxquelles ils ont été formés. Les qualificatifs se multiplient. Designer pluriel, transdiciplinaire. (...)". Isabelle Moisy
Paranoid Shelter (2012) on the left, used as a "theatrical/architectural device" during Eric Sadin's Globale Surveillance theatrical.
Gradientizer (2013) on the right. A competition project realized in collaboration with spanish architects Amid.cero9.
A recent project, Deterritorialized Living (2013) an almost geo-engineered troposhere delivered in the form of data flows. Installed here during Pau's Festival Accè(s) (cur. Erwan Chardronnet).
Wednesday, November 12. 2014
Note: an interesting new publication and project by Space Caviar (Joseph Grima --former Storefront for Art & Architecture, Domus, Adhocracy exhibition, etc.--, Tamar Shafir, Andrea Bagnato, Giulia Finazzi, Martina Muzi, Simone C. Niquille, Giulia Grattarola) about the changing nature of "home" under the pressure of "multiple forces" (if domesticity does, indeed, still exists as the authors state it). Interestingly, some data files and charts used in the books are made oublicly available via a Github. Reminds me somehow of recorder data about a public project we made available on the site of the project (Heterochrony), back in 2012.
Via Space Caviar
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The way we live is rapidly changing under pressure from multiple forces—financial, environmental, technological, geopolitical. What we used to call home may not even exist anymore, having transmuted into a financial commodity measured in square meters, or sqm. Yet, domesticity ceased long ago to be central in the architectural agenda; this project aims to launch a new discussion on the present and the future of the home.
SQM: The Quantified Home, produced for the 2014 Biennale Interieur, charts the scale of this change using data, fiction, and a critical selection of homes and their interiors—from Osama bin Laden’s compound to apartment living in the age of Airbnb.
With original texts by: Rahel Aima, Aristide Antonas, Gabrielle Brainard and Jacob Reidel, Keller Easterling, Ignacio González Galán, Joseph Grima, Hilde Heynen, Dan Hill, Sam Jacob, Alexandra Lange, Justin McGuirk, Joanne McNeil, Alessandro Mendini, Jonathan Olivares, Marina Otero Verzier, Beatriz Preciado, Anna Puigjaner, Catharine Rossi, Andreas Ruby, Malkit Shoshan, and Bruce Sterling.
The book is published by Lars Müller, and will be available for sale worldwide from November 2014. The dust jacket is screen-printed on wallpaper in 22 different patterns, randomly mixed.
Download the table of contents
Tuesday, September 30. 2014
Via Open Culture
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Think of the name Buckminster Fuller, and you may think of a few oddities of mid-twentieth-century design for living: the Dymaxion House, the Dymaxion Car, the geodesic dome. But these artifacts represent only a small fragment of Fuller’s life and work as a self-styled “comprehensive anticipatory design scientist.” In his decades-long project of developing and furthering his worldview — an elaborate humanitarian framework involving resource conservation, applied geometry, and neologisms like “tensegrity,” “ephemeralization,” and “omni-interaccommodative” — the man wrote over 30 books, registered 28 United States patents, and kept a diary documenting his every fifteen minutes. These achievements and others have made Fuller the subject of at least four documentaries and numerous books, articles, and papers, but now you can hear all about his thoughts, acts, experiences, and times straight from the source in the 42-hour lecture series Everything I Know, available to download at the Internet Archive. Though you’d perhaps expect it of someone whose journals stretch to 270 feet of solid paper, he could really talk.
In January 1975, Fuller sat down to deliver the twelve lectures that make up Everything I Know, all captured on video and enhanced with the most exciting bluescreen technology of the day. Props and background graphics illustrate the many concepts he visits and revisits, which include, according to the Buckminster Fuller Institute, “all of Fuller’s major inventions and discoveries,” “his own personal history in the context of the history of science and industrialization,” and no narrower a range of subjects than “architecture, design, philosophy, education, mathematics, geometry, cartography, economics, history, structure, industry, housing and engineering.” In his time as a passenger on what he called Spaceship Earth, Fuller realized that human progress need not separate the “natural” from the “unnatural”: “When people say something is natural,” he explains in the first lecture (embedded above as a YouTube video above), “‘natural’ is the way they found it when they checked into the picture.” In these 42 hours, you’ll learn all about how he arrived at this observation — and all the interesting work that resulted from it.
(The Buckminster Fuller archive has also made transcripts of Everything I Know — “minimally edited and maximally Fuller” — freely available.)
Parts 1-12 on the Internet Archive: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12
Parts 1-6 on YouTube: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Related Content:
Better Living Through Buckminster Fuller’s Utopian Designs: Revisit the Dymaxion Car, House, and Map
Arthur C. Clarke Predicts the Future in 1964 … And Kind of Nails It
750 Free Online Courses from Top Universities
Tuesday, June 10. 2014
First Rem,
then Peter...
Via Dezeen
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Venice Architecture Biennale 2014: curator Rem Koolhaas has used the biennale to announce the end of his "hegemony" over the profession, according to architect Peter Eisenman (+ interview).
"He's stating his end," said Eisenman, adding: "Rem Koolhaas presents the Biennale as la fine [the end]: 'The end of my career, the end of my hegemony, the end of my mythology, the end of everything, the end of architecture'."
The 81-year old American architect, who helped the Dutch architect at the start of his career, said that Koolhaas, 70, was "the totemic figure" of the last 50 years and compared him to Le Corbusier's dominance of the first half of the twentieth century.
"I think it's very important to have lived in the time of Rem, like to have lived in the time of Corbusier," said Eisenman, recalling the day he turned up outside Le Corbusier's Paris atelier in 1962 but felt too intimidated to ring the doorbell: "I think that students today feel the same way about the mythology of Koolhaas."
Called Fundamentals, the biennale opened to the public on the weekend and includes a central exhibition called Elements, which focuses on parts of buildings such as stairs, escalators and toilets rather than buildings.
The Elements exhibition focuses on individual aspects of buildings.
Eisenman said the Elements show was like language without grammar: "Any language is grammar," he said. "So, if architecture is to be considered a language, 'elements' don't matter. So for me what's missing [from the show], purposely missing, is the grammatic."
Koolhaas "doesn't believe in grammar," he added.
Giving a tour of the show last week, Koolhaas said he hoped Elements would lead to "a modernisation of the core of architecture and architectural thinking itself."
Eisenman, head of Eisenman Architects, has known Koolhaas since the 70s, when the Dutch architect studied at Eisenman's Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS) in New York.
"I helped publish his first book," said Eisenman. "I got the money to publish Delirious New York, I was on the jury that gave him the first prize he ever won for his architecture. I gave him an office where to write Delirious New York, so I know Rem from the beginning."
Eisenman made the comments in Venice on Friday, where he was attending the opening of an exhibition about the Yenikapi Project, a vast new development in Istanbul he designed in collaboration with Aytaç Architects.
A section of the Elements exhibition dedicated to the toilet.
See all our stories about the Venice Architecture Biennale 2014 »
Portrait of Peter Eisenman is courtesy of Vanderbilt University.
Here's a transcript of the interview:
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Valentina Ciuffi: Let's talk about Elements [the exhibition occupying the Central Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale]. You've known Rem from the very beginning – what do you think of the core show at his biennale?
Peter Eisenman: First of all, any language is grammar. The thing that changes from Italian to English is not the words being different, but grammar. So, if architecture is to be considered a language, 'elements' don't matter. I mean, whatever the words are, they're all the same. So for me what's missing [from the show], purposely missing, is the grammatic.
Look, 50 years ago, we knew that Modernism was dead. Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright: all dead. We didn't know what the future was but we knew all this was dead.
In '68 we found out what the future was going to be: the revolution in '68 in the schools, in culture, in art etc: all was changed. We are now 50 years from '64 and the totemic figure of these 50 years, the symbolic figure? Rem Koolhaas, right?
Rem Koolhaas presents the Biennale as la fine [the end]: "The end of my career, the end of my hegemony, the end of my mythology, the end of everything, the end of architecture." Because we don't have architects [in the biennale]. We have performance, we have film, we have video; we have everything but architecture.
So Rem is saying: "You know, I want to say: I don't do this, I don't do this, I don't do this, but I also want to tell you that I don't want you to tell me my end. I'm telling you the end." He makes the point, bonk, like that.
Valentina Ciuffi: He's stating his end?
Peter Eisenman: He's stating his end. And he's finished. And we don't know what's coming in four five years. 2018, like 1968, could be a revolution. Who knows?
Valentina Ciuffi: So this end is the start of something new?
Peter Eisenman: Always. History always goes like this.
Valentina Ciuffi: But when he says no to archistars, yes to architecture…
Peter Eisenman: He is the archistar! He is the origin of the archistar. He was there at the beginning.
Valentina Ciuffi: You taught all the archistars. They all came from your academy [the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York].
Peter Eisenman: He is the archistar and now he is the curator star. He's killed all the archistars, and now he is going [to be the] single curator star.
Valentina Ciuffi: You are one of the few people able to be so straight with him because…
Peter Eisenman: I know him very well. We started together way back. I helped publish his first book. I got the money to publish Delirious New York, I was on the jury that gave him the first prize he ever won for his architecture. I gave him an office where to write Delirious New York, so I know Rem from the beginning.
Valentina Ciuffi: So you think this idea of taking elements and not thinking about the grammar is totally…
Peter Eisenman: Well it's Rem. It's Rem because he doesn't believe in grammar. That's Rem, and that's good. Look, when he was at the Architecture Association School in 1972, in the spring of '72 when he quit – because he never finish school, you have to understand – because he went to the new director and he said, quote: "I want to learn fundamentals. Where can I learn fundamentals?"
And the director looked at him and said: "We don't teach fundamentals here. We teach language." And then he quit. So there is a relationship between quitting the school in 1972 and Fundamentals today. Okay?
Valentina Ciuffi: You are perhaps one of the the few people who can be so direct about Rem.
Peter Eisenman: I love Rem. I think it's very important to have lived in the time of Rem, like to have lived in the time of Corbusier. In '62 I went to Paris and I stood on the doorstep of Le Corbusier's atelier at 35 rue de Sèvres with my mentor Colin Rowe. He said, "Ring the doorbell!" And I said: "What I'm going to say to this guy? What am I doing here?"
And I think that students today feel the same way about the mythology of Koolhaas: "What am I going to say to him?" So very few people would challenge him. If you ask him questions; yesterday at the press conference people were asking him questions and he said: "I don't answer questions like this. You should stop asking questions."
So he's a very, very clear and a good person to put this biennale on. And sarà la fine dell'architecttura [it will be the end of architecture].
Friday, May 02. 2014
Via Stuff
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Atmosferas sonoras en Villa Mairea
Javier Janda
Wednesday, March 12. 2014
Via ArchDaily
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More images, and texts, HERE.
Tuesday, March 11. 2014
Note: a low-fi, unautomated responsive house, where residents still have to take actions, make decisions that are not delagated to a badly designed algorithm... When it comes (or will soon come) to smart houses, smart cities, etc., we (designers, architects, ...) will have to design algorithms and behaviors that matters and that continue to trigger decisions among people. This is obviously not only an engineer's job. It also is (profund respect), just not only. So, do they teach algorithms and processes design (which remains different than "generative design" commonly taught) in architecture schools? Rarely, I'm afraid...
Via Dezeen
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The resident of a compact apartment in Madrid demonstrates how she can rearrange walls and pull furniture out of the ceiling in this movie by photographer and filmmaker Miguel de Guzmán.
Designed by Spanish studio Elii Architects, the Didomestic apartment occupies the loft of an old building, so it was designed to make optimal use of space by creating flexible rooms that can be adapted for different activities.
Sliding pink partitions allow the main floor to be either opened up or divided into a series of smaller spaces, while a new mezzanine loft provides a bedroom where floor panels hinge open to reveal a vanity mirror, toiletry storage and a tea station.
The architects also added several fun elements to tailor the space to the resident's lifestyle; a hammock, playground swing and disco ball all fold down from the ceiling, while a folding surface serves as a cocktail bar or ironing board.
"Every house is a theatre," explained the architects. "Your house can be a dance floor one day and a tea room the next."
The movie imagines a complete day in the life of the apartment's inhabitant, from the moment she wakes up in the morning to the end of an evening spent with a friend.
"The idea was to show all the different spaces and mechanisms in a narrative way," said De Guzmán.
Getting dressed in the morning, the resident reveals wardrobes built into one of the walls. Later, she invites a friend round for a meal and they dine at a picnic table that lowers down from the kitchen ceiling.
A rotating handle on the wall controls the pulleys needed to bring this furniture down from overhead, while other handles can be used to reveal shelving and fans.
A metal staircase connecting the two levels is contained within a core at the centre of the apartment and is coloured in a vivid shade of turquoise.
A shower room lined with small hexagonal tiles is located to the rear of the kitchen, plus there's a bathroom on the mezzanine floor directly above.
Photography is also by Miguel de Guzmán.
More about if HERE.
Monday, December 16. 2013
Via Architizer
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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.
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).
Monday, December 02. 2013
Note: Dubai pre-booted by Mr Wright?
Via Stuff
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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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