Wednesday, April 27. 2011
Via The Funanbulist
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by Léopold Lambert
In 1942, after the United States entered the second world war and fearing the Japanese threat on the Pacific coast, an entire aircraft plant and airport -the Lockheed Burbank- has been camouflaged to escape from sight to potential Japanese airplanes. It is interesting to observe that, in order to do so, the US army had to ask for the help of Hollywood studios -WWII is probably the beginning of a long history of exchanges between Hollywood and the US Army- to make this industrial landscape appearing as a piece of suburbia. The very vast aircraft plant was therefore obliged to function under a porous canopy from which was emerging here and there, some chimneys disguised in trees or fountains.
Thanks Martial. (see more on amusingplanet)
Tuesday, April 26. 2011
Via BLDGBLOG
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by noreply@blogger.com (Geoff Manaugh)
The London-based architectural group ScanLAB—founded by Matthew Shaw and William Trossell—has been doing some fascinating work with laser scanners.
Here are three of their recent projects.
1) Scanning Mist. Shaw and Trossell "thought it might be interesting to see if the scanner could detect smoke and mist. It did and here are the remarkable results!"
[Images: From Scanning the Mist by ScanLAB].
In a way, I'm reminded of photographs by Alexey Titarenko.
2) Scanning an Artificial Weather System. For this project, ScanLAB wanted to "draw attention to the magical properties of weather events." They thus installed a network of what they call "pressure vessels linked to an array of humidity tanks" in the middle of England's Kielder Forest.
[Image: From Slow Becoming Delightful by ScanLAB].
These "humidity tanks" then, at certain atmospherically appropriate moments, dispersed a fine mist, deploying an artificial cloud or fog bank into the woods.
[Image: From Slow Becoming Delightful by ScanLAB].
Then, of course, Shaw and Trossell laser-scanned it.
3) Subverting Urban-Scanning Projects through "Stealth Objects." The architectural potential of this final project blows me away. Basically, Shaw and Trossell have been looking at "the subversion of city scale 3D scanning in London." As they explain it, "the project uses hypothetical devices which are installed across the city and which edit the way the city is scanned and recorded." Tools include the "stealth drill" which dissolves scan data in the surrounding area, creating voids and new openings in the scanned urban landscape, and "boundary miscommunication devices" which offset, relocate and invent spatial data such as paths, boundaries, tunnels and walls.
The spatial and counter-spatial possibilities of this are extraordinary. Imagine whole new classes of architectural ornament (ornament as digital camouflage that scans in precise and strange ways), entirely new kinds of building facades (augmented reality meets LiDAR), and, of course, the creation of a kind of shadow-architecture, invisible to the naked eye, that only pops up on laser scanners at various points around the city.
[Images: From Subverting the LiDAR Landscape by ScanLAB].
ScanLAB refers to this as "the deployment of flash architecture"—flash streets, flash statues, flash doors, instancing gates—like something from a short story by China Miéville. The narrative and/or cinematic possibilities of these "stealth objects" are seemingly limitless, let alone their architectural or ornamental use.
Imagine stealth statuary dotting the streetscape, for instance, or other anomalous spatial entities that become an accepted part of the urban fabric. They exist only as representational effects on the technologies through which we view the landscape—but they eventually become landmarks, nonetheless.
For now, Shaw and Trossell explain that they are experimenting with "speculative LiDAR blooms, blockages, holes and drains. These are the result of strategically deployed devices which offset, copy, paste, erase and tangle LiDAR data around them."
[Images: From Subverting the LiDAR Landscape by ScanLAB].
Here is one such "stealth object," pictured below, designed to be "undetected" by laser-scanning equipment.
Of course, it is not hard to imagine the military being interested in this research, creating stealth body armor, stealth ground vehicles, even stealth forward-operating bases, all of which would be geometrically invisible to radar and/or scanning equipment.
In fact, one could easily imagine a kind of weapon with no moving parts, consisting entirely of radar- and LiDAR-jamming geometries; you would thus simply plant this thing, like some sort of medieval totem pole, in the streets of Mogadishu—or ring hundreds of them in a necklace around Washington D.C.—thus precluding enemy attempts to visualize your movements.
[Images: A hypothetical "stealth object," resistant to laser-scanning, by ScanLAB].
Briefly, ScanLAB's "stealth object" reminds me of an idea bandied about by the U.S. Department of Energy, suggesting that future nuclear-waste entombment sites should be liberally peppered with misleading "radar reflectors" buried in the surface of the earth.
The D.O.E.'s "trihedral" objects would produce "distinctive anomalous magnetic and radar-reflective signatures" for anyone using ground-scanning equipment above. In other words, they would create deliberate false clues, leading potential future excavators to think that they were digging in the wrong place. They would "subvert" the scanning process.
In any case, read more at ScanLAB's website.
Thursday, April 21. 2011
Very nice edited picture by Philippe Rahm architectes on Rahm's Facebook account. It's about a publication in Hochparterre, a swiss magazine. I haven't read the article yet... but the picture describes a sort of climatically variable, imaginary "landscaped" architecture according to what I speculate. Architecture as variable landscape. I like it a lot.
To understand why the different "functions" are at different level and why you would need to use ladders to get there, you should check this project.
Friday, April 15. 2011
Via dpr-barcelona
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The relationship between architecture and photography is so old as both disciplines. While Anne Elisabeth Toft asks “Is it possible to capture, translate and transmit architectural experience via representations?” we can recall to the most recent work of the filmmaker and artist Wim Wenders, called Places, strange and quiet which is based on a fascinating series of large-scale photographs taken in countries around the world from Salvador, Brazil; Palermo, Italy; Onomichi, Japan to Berlin, Germany; Brisbane, Australia, Armenia and the United States. Wenders pointed on his latest publication:
When you travel a lot, and when you love to just wander around and get lost, you can end up in the strangest spots. I have a huge attraction to places. Already when I look at a map, the names of mountains, villages, rivers, lakes or landscape formations excite me, as long as I don’t know them and have never been there … I seem to have sharpened my sense of place for things that are out of place. Everybody turns right, because that’s where it’s interesting, I turn left where there is nothing! And sure enough, I soon stand in front of my sort of place. I don’t know, it must be some sort of inbuilt radar that often directs me to places that are strangely quiet, or quietly strange.
But what about photographing not buildings, but landscape, urban voids and ruins? Can we talk about the same relationship as in between architecture and photography?
Most of Wim Wenders‘ photographs are created during his personal travels and while location-scouting for his films. From his iconic images of exteriors and buildings to his panoramic depictions of towns and landscapes, it’s not strange to find some of his movies accompanied by photo exhibitions and publications such as The Heart is a Sleeping Beauty as part of The Million Dollar Hotel or his 1999 film Buena Vista Social Club which was featured with the companion book by Wim Wenders and Donata Wenders.
Wim Wenders was a painter before he started working on film and photography, and he talked about this in an interview with Michael Coles:
I was heavily influenced by the so-called New American Underground. A lot of American painters made movies in the mid to late ’60s, Warhol being the most famous one. There was a whole retrospective traveling through Europe at the time. I saw these films in ’66 or ’67, and that was very important for me. I wrote about them, too. I wrote about Michael Snow especially, and a film that he had made called Wavelength (1967). It was the first article I wrote. Wavelength was a painter’s film. It was actually only one shot, a painstakingly slow zoom across a room toward the windows. Day and night were passing. Nothing much happened. It was very painterly. My first films were basically landscape paintings, except that they were shot with a movie camera. I never moved the frame. Nothing ever happened in them. Each scene lasted as long as a 16-millimeter daylight reel, which was about four minutes. There was no editing involved, other than attaching one reel to the other.
Wenders photographic work is obviously very cinematic. His approach to catch the right moment and the right place, his sensibility to transmit with images what a urban place can mean and the way he freezes different urban context is widely poetic and full of literary references.
Wenders points that he doesn’t think that any photographer has anything else in mind than that particular moment he is capturing. This is the main guideline of the photo-work of the exhibition that will take place at the Haunch of Venison, in London.
“…but a story,
from that story came a script,
and from the script a film -
which never wanted to conceal
that it might just as well have become a song:
a song about a different America
beyond that great big Dream,
where truly
everyone
is
equal.”
- Wim Wenders
As he said, “discovering the story that a place wants to tell. That’s my main concern, my attitude. Listening to the place. For me, taking a picture is more an act of listening, so to speak, than of seeing.” Now, the questions hidden in every picture are always the same:
What happened to that place? What happened to those people? How does this house or this street or this landscape look now, 10 or 30 years later?
—–
Image credits:
[1] Ferris Wheel, Armenia 2008, C-Print, 151,3 x 348 cm © Wenders Images GbR
[2] Open Air Screen, Palermo 2007, C-Print, 186×213 cm © Wenders Images GbR
[3] The Red Bench, Onomichi, 2005, C-Print, 186 x 200,6 cm © Wenders Images GbR
[4] Cemetery in the City, Tokyo 2008, C-Print, 132×133 cm © Wenders Images GbR
[5] Moscow Backyard, Moskau 2006, C-Print, 125×139 cm © Wenders Images GbR
[6] Ferris Wheel (Reverse Angle), Armenia 2008, C-Print, 151,3 x 348 cm © Wenders Images GbR
The book Places, strange and quiet has been published by Hatje Cantz Verlag. More info at their web-site
Monday, April 11. 2011
Via information aesthetics
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Next to their established offices in Boston and Milan, MIT Senseable Lab is now also active in Singapore, where they just launched an impressive exhibition [senseable.mit.edu] with five different graphical perspectives into Singapore's social, economic and mobility patterns. The five visualizations are all based on real-time data recorded and captured by a vast system of communication devices, microcontrollers and sensors.
What seems to be in the pipeline is an open API to allow others access to the rich data streams: "The exhibition is just the beginning of something that aims to develop into an open platform for the management of urban real-time data and the engagement of developer communities in writing innovative applications for the city."
"Hub of the World" shows the ships and containers arriving and leaving Singapore. "Isochronic Singapore" deformes a street map of the city proportional to its travel time. "Raining Taxis" combines taxi and rainfall data to establish the experience of not finding any taxis when it rains. "Urban Heat Islands" combines ambient temperature and energy usage to investigate whether cities are indeed warmer than the surrounding environment. "Formula One City" conveys the impact of the sports competition, for instance in terms of geo-located text messaging behavior. Lastly, "Real Time Talk" indicates the level of cellphone network usage throughout the city.
The exhibition runs from April 8th until May 1st at Singapore Art Museum.
Thursday, April 07. 2011
Via MIT Technology Review
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A novel approach to design and construction could save materials and energy, and create unusually beautiful structures.
By Kevin Bullis
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Model maker: Neri Oxman works on “Cartesian Wax: Prototype for a Responsive Skin,” a model that is now part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Credit: Mikey Siegel |
In conventional construction, workers piece together buildings from mass-produced, prefabricated bricks, I-beams, concrete columns, plates of glass and so on. Neri Oxman, an architect and a professor at MIT's Media Lab, intends to print them instead—essentially using concrete, polymers, and other materials in the place of ink. Oxman is developing a new way of designing buildings to take advantage of the flexibility that printing can provide. If she's successful, her approach could lead to designs that are impossible with today's construction methods.
Existing 3-D printers, also called rapid prototyping machines, build structures layer by layer. So far these machines have been used mainly to make detailed plastic models based on computer designs. But as such printers improve and become capable of using more durable materials, including metals, they've become a potentially interesting way to make working products.
Oxman is working to extend the capabilities of these machines—making it possible to change the elasticity of a polymer or the porosity of concrete as it's printed, for example—and mounting print heads on flexible robot arms that have greater freedom of movement than current printers.
She's also drawing inspiration from nature to develop new design strategies that take advantage of these capabilities. For example, the density of wood in a palm tree trunk varies, depending on the load it must support. The densest wood is on the outside, where bending stress is the greatest, while the center is porous and weighs less. Oxman estimates that making concrete columns this way—with low-density porous concrete in the center—could reduce the amount of concrete needed by more than 10 percent, a significant savings on the scale of a construction project.
Oxman is developing software to realize her design strategy. She inputs data about physical stresses on a structure, as well as design constraints such as size, overall shape, and the need to let in light into certain areas of a building. Based on this information, the software applies algorithms to specify how the material properties need to change throughout a structure. Then she prints out small models based on these specifications.
The early results of her work are so beautiful and intriguing that they've been featured at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Museum of Science in Boston. One example, which she calls Beast, is a chair whose design is based on the shape of a human body (her own) and the predicted distribution of pressure on the chair. The resulting 3-D model features a complex network of cells and branching structures that are soft where needed to relieve pressure and stiff where needed for support.
The work is at an early stage, but the new approach to construction and design suggests many new possibilities. A load-bearing wall could be printed in elaborate patterns that correspond to the stresses it will experience from the load it supports from wind or earthquakes, for instance.
The pattern could also account for the need to allow light into a building. Some areas would have strong, dense concrete, but in areas of low stress, the concrete could be extremely porous and light, serving only as a barrier to the elements while saving material and reducing the weight of the structure. In these non-load bearing areas, it could also be possible to print concrete that's so porous that light can penetrate, or to mix the concrete gradually with transparent materials. Such designs could save energy by increasing the amount of daylight inside a building and reducing the need for artificial lighting. Eventually, it may be possible to print efficient insulation and ventilation at the same time. The structure can be complex, since it costs no more to print elaborate patterns than simple ones.
Other researchers are developing technology to print walls and other large structures. Behrokh Khoshnevis, a professor of industrial and systems engineering and civil and environmental engineering at the University of Southern California, has built a system that can deposit concrete walls without the need for forms to contain the concrete. Oxman's work would take this another step, adding the ability to vary the properties of the concrete, and eventually work with multiple materials.
The first applications of Oxman's approach will likely to be on a relatively small scale, in consumer products and medical devices. She's used her principles to design and print wrist braces for carpal tunnel syndrome. They're customized based on the pain that a particular patient experiences. The approach could also improve the performance of prosthetics.
Oxman, 35, is developing her techniques in partnership with a range of specialists, such as Craig Carter, a professor of materials science at MIT. While he says her approach faces challenges in controlling the properties of materials, he's impressed with her ideas: "There's no doubt that the results are strikingly beautiful."
Copyright Technology Review 2011.
Friday, April 01. 2011
Via Analix Forever via Domus web
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Concrete Islands / 9–17 April 2011
Curated by Elias Redstone for Analix Forever
Andreas Angelidakis (Greece)
Iwan Baan (The Netherlands)
Frédéric Chaubin (France)
mounir fatmi (Morocco)
Niklas Goldbach (Germany)
Vernissage: Saturday 9 April 2–8pm / drinks from 5pm
Analix Forever’s first show in Paris
6 rue Elzévir, 75003 Paris
Open daily 11am–7pm
www.archiemo.wordpress.com
www.analix-forever.com
Concrete Islands is a group exhibition of photography and video exploring contemporary experiences of utopian architectural projects. For many architects modernism was a physical manifestation of human progress and, as architectural historian Colin Rowe wrote in The Architecture of Good Intentions, “The architect could stipulate an intrinsic connection between the form of his buildings and the condition of society.” The works in Concrete Islands, by a selection of international contemporary artists, document, celebrate and critique architectural projects designed with inherent social and political values that now exist in various stages of inhabitation, dereliction and destruction.
The influence of architects to control space and determine its social structures alters over time. The artists each provoke an emotional response from the architecture as they find it now, adding their own narrative and interpretation, and exposing new relationships between the architecture, society and nature. As the title Concrete Islands suggests, what we find is architecture that exists in some form of isolation – whether that is geographical, social or ideological.
Andreas Angelidakis often introduces fiction and fantasy into his work to reveal truths about architecture. The film ‘Troll’ tells the story of a modernist, low-income apartment building in Athens that wants to be a mountain. The building, called Chara (‘Joy’) was built by Spanos and Papailiopoulos architects in 1960, taking up an entire city block with a network of interior gardens. Over time it has felt the effects of Athens’ extensive urbanization and deteriorating economy. Angelidakis takes a leap of imagination, suggesting that the accumulation of plants and soil in this garden-housing overtakes the architecture and Chara wants to become a mountain and leave the city altogether. Angelidakis suggests that ruins are just buildings on their way to becoming nature.
Iwan Baan’s work is characterized by his portrayal of people in architecture, revealing the context, society and environment around architecture. He has photographed two of the most ambitious urban projects of the 20th century, Chandigarh and Brasília, both conceived out of political agendas and presenting the future as conceived by its creators. Baan’s images show real life taking place in these two invented cities that have adapted to everyday social rituals and basic needs. Oscar Niemeyer’s Museu Nacional provides little protection from the elements within Brasília’s urban plan laid out by Lúcio Costa. A young man remains enthusiastic as he is drenched in the rain, while small crowds find shelter under the building’s entrance ramps. In Le Corbusier’s Palace of the Assembly in Chandigarh two men are viewed bathing and dressing themselves through the perforated concrete façade. Whether they live or work in the building is ambiguous, but here they have found a space suitable to conduct their morning routine.
Over the course of many journeys to Eastern Europe and Asia between 2003 and 2010, Frédéric Chaubin has been searching for and photographing atypical examples of architecture dating from the late Soviet era. Largely located in regions on the periphery of the former USSR, such buildings are defined by a utopian formal language uncharacteristic of the standard paradigms of Soviet state architecture. The buildings express the dreams of architects that were educated within a strict Soviet system yet, perhaps as a paradox, managed to achieve immense creative freedom in their work. According to Chaubin, this diversity of architectural style during the late 1970s is an expression of the demise in Soviet totalitarian homogeneity. His deliberate enhancement of the dramatic dimension to these buildings pays homage to the imagination of those non-conformist architects and underscores the fictional dimension of history.
Le Val Fourré was built in the 1960s in the Parisian banlieue of Mantes-la-Jolie as a large scale, optimistic project to meet the increased demand for homes in the city. Densely populated, under resourced and poorly integrated with public transport, the residential project has become a place of escalating frustrations and civil unrest since the 1990s. During a residency at Le Chaplin in Mantes-la-Jolie, mounir fatmi made several films documenting the gradual demolition of Le Val Fourré. ‘Architecture Now! Etat des lieux #1’ focuses on an individual apartment as it is torn down by a bulldozer. The men demolishing the building are as absent from view as its former residents, leaving the social implications of such an act to the imagination. As the architecture is slowly destroyed, nature is revealed.
‘Gan Eden’, a film by Niklas Goldbach, also inverts the relationship between architecture and nature. It was filmed in 2005 in the remains of the Dutch pavilion designed by MVRDV for the World Expo 2000 in Hanover, Germany. The pavilion was intended as a multi-level park but was left to decay when the Expo closed. Goldbach’s film sees two men cruising in the decaying pavilion as an act of re-appropriation. In a text in the accompanying catalogue, the architects celebrate the creation of a new ruin in this transition from utopia to distopia. Overcome by nature, the pavilion became the park it had always aspired to be.
About the artists
Andreas Angelidakis runs an experimental practice in Athens, Greece, that is involved in building, designing and speculating the contemporary ecosystem of screens and landscapes. His medium is habitation, of buildings, clouds, spaces, furniture, videos, online communities or exhibition spaces, and operates at the intersection of systems: Art and Architecture, Virtual and Real, Building and Nature, Ruin and Construction. His work has been exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale, Sao Paolo Biennial, ExperimentaDesign in Lisbon, and Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton and Jeu de Paume in Paris.
www.angelidakis.com
Dutch photographer Iwan Baan is known primarily for images that narrate the life and interactions that occur within architecture. Born in 1975, Iwan grew up outside Amsterdam and studied at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. He collaborates with many architects including Rem Koolhaas, Herzog & de Meuron, SANAA, Frank Gehry, Toyo Ito and Zaha Hadid. His photography has been featured in exhibitions at MoMA in New York and the Architectural Association in London. He has also conducted documentary projects across Africa, Asia and Latin America.
www.iwan.com
Frédéric Chaubin, born in Cambodia, is an artist, writer and editor-in-chief of Citizen K magazine for the last fifteen years. His photography considers architecture as an expression of its historical, cultural and anthropological condition. In 2003 he began a seven year project photographing unusual structures within the former USSR. 'Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed' was published by Taschen in 2011. Solo exhibitions include ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art, Karlsruhe, and the Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York.
www.fredericchaubin.com
mounir fatmi was born in Tangier, Morocco in 1970. His practice involves constructing visual spaces and linguistic games that aim to free the viewer from their preconceptions. His videos, installations, drawings, paintings and sculptures bring to light our doubts, fears and desires. His work was featured in Paradise Now! Essential French Avant-Garde Cinema 1890-2008 at the Tate Modern in London and Traces du Sacré at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.
www.mounirfatmi.com
German artist Niklas Goldbach creates video, sculpture and photographic works that focus on dystopic aspects of architecture. Gan Eden is the second in a series of videos about utopia in urban culture. His films have been screened at the International Architecture Film Festival Rotterdam, Temporary Kunsthalle Berlin and the Barbican, London. He was an artist in residence at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, in 2007/08.
www.niklasgoldbach.de
Friday, March 25. 2011
Via BLDGBLOG
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by noreply@blogger.com (Geoff Manaugh)
[Images: "Artificial clouds" designed at Qatar University under the direction of Saud Abdul Ghani; images from a video hosted by the BBC].
"Artificial clouds" driven by solar-powered engines might be deployed at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar to help keep the stadiums from overheating. Each cloud, as a short video hosted over at the BBC explains, "is constructed from an advanced, lightweight, and strong carbon-fiber material."
The interior of the cloud is injected with helium gas to make it float. The cloud hovers like a helicopter and is remotely controlled. In this way, the cloud hovers over the football ground, shielding it from direct sunlight and providing a favorable climatic environment. The cloud is also programmed to continuously change its shielding position according to the prevailing east-to-west path of the sun.
So much for roofs, then, if you can simply deploy artificial meteorological events in the form of robotic clouds at an estimated cost of $500,000 each...
[Images: "Artificial clouds" designed at Qatar University under the direction of Saud Abdul Ghani; images from a video hosted by the BBC].
After all, I suppose it makes sense that the next step in temporary event architecture will be a remote-controlled swarm of rearrangeable horizontal and vertical surfaces, forming ceilings, roofs, walls, floors, ramps, and stairways.
However, justifiable skepticism aside, there is something fantastically interesting in the suggestion that a regional architecture, whose formal and technical history includes several centuries' worth of portable tent design, would—and I exaggerate—leapfrog past the idea of stationary, permanent construction altogether and instead go for something like an on-demand spatial robotics, such as the "artificial clouds" seen here.
Are instantly deployable, remote-controlled sun shielding surfaces—unmanned aerial architecture, perhaps—a kind of unexpected next step in the evolution of tent design? Nomad caravans wander through the desert with strange, helium-filled wireless air pillows whirring quietly overhead. Perhaps they could even be Wifi hotspots. The ErgNet.
Wednesday, March 23. 2011
Via GOOD
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by Nicola Twilley
The photo above is, according to the BBC, an extremely rare photo of Barack Obama inside his top secret tent. The tent is an example of a mobile secure area also known as a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF, "designed to allow officials to have top secret discussions on the move." In fact, the BBC reports, "they are one of the safest places in the world to have a conversation."
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
Via ArchDaily
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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.
Buckminster Fuller
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
By Martin C. Pedersen
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.
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