Monday, October 01. 2012Poetic Cosmos of the Breath by Tomas Saraceno
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Tomas Saraceno is an artist and architect whose utopian visions for cities that float in the air has led him to create a series of experimental structures such as balloons or inflatable modular platforms that can be inhabited and exploit natural energies.
Poetic Cosmos of the Breath was an experimental solar dome created by Tomas Saraceno. It was launched at dawn on 22 September 2007 at Gunpowder Park, Essex, UK, commissioned by The Arts Catalyst. The project was inspired by the dome created by Dominic Michaelis in 1975, for the film Hu-Man. In the morning with the sunrise, Saraceno and his team filled the foil with air (video into the post) giving form to this huge colorful ephemeral space which was pinned to the ground at the edges with sand bags. The connection/reflection between the sun-light and the synthetic material di this magical environment.
Tuesday, July 24. 2012Summer works (vs. Summer break)By fabric | ch -----
We remained relatively quiet on | rblg recently, as you may have noticed... This is mainly due to the fact that we were working hard on two new exhibitions for which we were setting up two different architectural installations. One of these installations was an old work, Perpetual (Tropical) Sunshine (re-exhibited in the context of the Transat Festival 2012, the work was presented in one of the oldest churches of the city) and the other was a new one, Hétérochronie, quite large for an installation (~40m long), that we were presenting in a very crowded festival (Festival de la Cité 2012), in the park of the old academy (16th century building, old school of theology). It was in this later case a real "crash test" for this type of work as the public was 1° not used at all to this type of architecture and 2° very "undisciplined", with lots of kids running everywhere... (that enjoyed it a lot by the way, but were so disappointed that the screens were not "touchable"...) For once, both exhibitions happened in our home town and base camp: Lausanne and that was the first occasion for us to show our work to our... parents! Worse public, frightening! ;) As the Transat Festival is at first a music festival, as there was a fantastic organ in the church, we took the chance to set up a special sound performance with ensemBle baBel around John Cage's work during the exhibition of Perpetual (Tropical) Sunshine: Tropical - Cage. I'll make a detailed post later this summer about the new work, Hétérochronie (Heterochrony), once we'll be back from the "Summer break". We'll also start to post again on a more regular basis on | rblg back in September. But before that, we'll go unplugged for a few weeks!
Till then, here are a few shots from both exhibitions:
Perpetual (Tropical) Sunshine, Église Saint-François, Lausanne, June 2012.
Heterochrony, Cour de l'Académie, Lausanne, July 2012.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in fabric | ch, Architecture, Art, Interaction design
at
10:24
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, art, atmosphere, climate, data, devices, dimensions, exhibitions, exhibitions-fbrc, fabric | ch, installations, interaction design, interferences, monitoring
Friday, June 15. 2012An Architectural "Time Machine"Via Archinect -----
An architectural Time Machine by architect Heechan Park explores how to create an architectural time-based event. As the machines blow vapour rings that double as ephemeral scent zones, the public not only experiences a visual performance of smoke vortices travelling through space, but they also perceive scents that are temporally spatialised and visualised.
Personal comment: I'm not entirely convinced by the use of the term "time-machine" for this project (time-based architecture, indeed), but really interested in the materialisation of shapes through vapour, doubled with scent. It seems to give an ephemeral, evolutive and almost "molecular" nature to architecture. Friday, October 14. 2011Diaphanous Multicolor Thread Windings
I try to avoid superlatives in my headlines, and have been for awhile now. But it’s been a long time since I had such a hard time resisting that urge. Here’s a few that came to mind while I was composing this one about the work of Dallas artist Gabriel Dawe: stunning, magnificent, celestial, gorgeous, beautiful, amazing, transcendent. “Awesome,” if it could still be used literally, might also have been in that list. So, yeah, check it out. As of this writing, Mr. Dawe has an ongoing exhibition of his piece plexus no. 9 at Houston’s PEEL Gallery. Shown above is plexus no. 5. Do not miss clicking through the entire Plexus series at the artist’s site. [Thanks, Billy Baque!]
Related Links:Monday, May 02. 2011Landform Building
Even if this is rather a riding area and playground for moutain bikers (or such) underneath a highway (see below the glacier image), it can give us additionnal ideas toward a sort of "architecture as landscape" approach. We consider "architecture as landscape" a different type of variable environment: it is not the infrastructure that evolves (robotized and heavy approach), but the light, the weather, the (networked, mediated or computed) conditions, the creolization and spatial interferences. Similar to a landscape where climate and context evolve and where you "freely" migrate within, depending on the conditions and your activity or needs. A sort of Sanaa's Rolex Learning Center, but diy approach.
I'm also therefore taking the occasion to mention this new book about a similar topic: Landform Building, Lars Müller Publishing
Thanks to @BLDGBLOG for the following link, via F.A.D. (Free Association Design) ----- Circuits Beneath the Freeway
[flow lines of ramps, berms, drops and various home-spun earth retaining systems beneath the I-5 freeway] While in Seattle this past weekend I had the chance to make a brief stop by the city’s Colonnade Park. Given it’s size, I managed to cover about half of the accentuated terrain (on foot) built into the underbelly of the I-5. The brilliance of the park’s siting becomes obvious when you are immersed in it: the steep and jumbled topography; the formerly barren and listless ground in the shadow of the overpass; the industrial cathedral that serves as ready-made shelter for the 9-out-of-12 soggy months of the Northwest climate; and perhaps the most critical factor – the challenges and indifference towards such spaces – which allowed for it to be co-opted into something else equally unique and unpolished. [storage shed built into a ramp and elevated planks] It hard not to be enamored by the successful and improvised gestalt of the whole thing, in both program and materials. Much of what it is made of was donated or recycled from demolition projects around the city. And typical off-the-shelf items, like permeable waffle pavers (above), have been retooled as robust and removable cellular confinement systems. All the pieces of the circuits have this hand-made, custom quality that is site + multiple user specific. One comes away with the impression that the park will keep remaking itself incrementally, over and over again. Pieces and segments will be modified as they wear out, with new experiments being plugged in as desired. It seems that the builders and volunteers that have constructed it might actually be a little forlorn if the park were ever fully finished.
Related Links:
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture, Territory
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08:59
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, artificial reality, atmosphere, interferences, mashup, mobility, territory, variable, weather
Thursday, March 17. 2011On Ash Clouds and Snow StormsI’ve discovered this new electronic technique that creates new speech out of stuff that’s already there. Iceland is volcanically and geologically active. The interior mainly consists of a plateau characterised by sand fields, mountains and glaciers, while many glacial rivers flow to the sea through the lowlands. In this context, Eyjafjallajökull is one of the Iceland’s smaller ice caps located in the far south of the island. It covers the caldera of a volcano 1,666 metres [5,466 ft] in height that has erupted relatively frequently since the last ice age. Eyjafjallajokull most recent eruptions in 2010 were the cause of huge disruption to air travel across western and northern Europe and also caused big impact on farming, harvesting or grazing livestock. We can also read that samples of volcanic ash collected near the eruption showed a silica concentration of 58%—much higher than in the lava flows. Interesting context for an architecture and landscape course, isn’t it? Focused on understanding the complex reality of nonbuilt environments beyond poetic contemplation or scientific analysis, The Collector, On Ash Clouds is a course at the Master in Landscape Design Program from Harvard GSD with Paisajes Emergentes as visiting professors, which aims to register, interpret and draw weather and natural phenomenon with the intention of use the generated archive as raw material for the design process of any landscape project. The course was divided into three major bodies of research*, which was done between a visited site [USA] and a non visited place [Iceland]: [1] Weather and atmosphere [2] Emerging Landscapes [3] Drawings and photography The course lasted one week [in January 2011] during some of the most intense days of Boston’s winter. Within that week, the students did a quick exercise of research and then proposed an observatory project, working with unpredictable and violent natural phenomenon as the core of the research. As the instructors Luis Callejas and Sebastian Mejía [from Paisajes Emergentes] pointed: “It can be difficult to determine the boundaries of a complex natural system. The decision is ultimately made by the observer.” Luis Callejas also told us via e-mail:
Working with the ash cloud generated by 2010 eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull volcano, the group studied the conditions and effects that emerged due to this event, and its relation with issues like air navigation, the phenomenon of turbulence, and the possible effects on the island’s ecosystem, among others.
The idea of analyzing and working with issues like storms and islands also reminds us the Glacier/Island/Storm studio at Columbia GSAPP by Geoff Manaugh. As Rob Holmes pointed on mammoth:
From statements as “Building is not always edifying: designing with what is already there“, the students have worked on the perspective of investigative landscape design and its important role in history, architecture and imaginative creation. The result is a powerful intensification of emerging landscape conditions as possible solutions to design problems. If Brian Eno once said “For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.”, now we’re going to visualize geologic time by looking into the past as a way to look into the future, through the student’s eyes and their proposals to “manipulate the world”. And such as a long event as an island is, we’re going to analyze and write here a series of five post [this, the first one] to talk, using the student’s projects as study cases, about all the possibilities that are contained in the research of this kind of natural phenomena and how they can affect our architectural thinking and our response to environmental crises. …………………………………………………………… Harvard GSD Course. Master in Landscape Architecture Students: Instructors: Luis Callejas, Sebastián Mejía, Lukas Pauer
Related Links:
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture, Territory
at
10:56
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, atmosphere, geography, landscape, schools, territory, weather
Thursday, February 17. 2011Jetlag Bliss – A TravelogueA stranger in a strange place, you land on a snow-covered city and this suddenly feels as refreshing as being slapped without warning. Like sleep deprivation, you remember you need these abrupt changes to take you out of a lukewarm, pleasing state of hibernation. You feel privileged. You are part of an apparently disappearing sect: travelers of rare bliss, exchangers of precisely located, yet homeless knowledges – the yesteryear voyagers who have been slowly, but surely, substituted by passive tourists and predatory traders.
Anri Sala, Long Sorrow, 2005. Via Mousse Magazine.
Like if entering a proper nuit blanche, as soon as you arrive to the core of this city you find yourself visiting a contemporary art museum at 1.00 am – this hour still being your unquestionable biological time. And this museum is full of people, and you enjoyably rediscover the powerful work of Anri Sala, or come across artists like Young & Giroux. Mostly, you take in pieces that you’ve never seen before, and yet feel pleasantly close to home. A satisfying cultural acclimation, as it would be. A few hours later, you will remember being in Tokyo on a reverse timetable. You will remember assaulting the streets for food at around 4.00 am, a harmless vampire looking out for the nearest 24/7. You will recall feeling sleepy at 7.00 pm and abandoning yourself to the same chronological cycle, over and over again. As it were, in this unexpected enclave of French language in America you find yourself reading Barthes between 4.00 and 8.00 am. You register the light coming in. Then you write. Just another way of getting lost – and found – in the delights of translation.
© Pedro Gadanho, “5.00 am (Hotel room with a view, #12)”, 2011
This one time you refuse to change the hour in you mobile phone. You stubbornly stick with your time zone. You will experience four days of a slightly dislocated timetable. As such, your panel conversation takes place at 11.00 pm, and by 1.30 am you are still discussing if and why architectural writing is undergoing a fictional turn. (A member of the audience suggests that maybe we are no longer interested in the truth. You counter that we may solely be bored or, even worse, giving in to the perverse logic that entertainment must take the lead in even pedagogical and disciplinary matters.) Dinner finishes at 5.00 am. Two days after, you are still waking up at 4.00 am, local time. It is Saturday and four hours until breakfast. You make the usual morning skype call to your family. Then you head for Stereo, like a 12 year-old who skips Sunday school to join the after hours crowd. It turns out that Montreal has an interesting electronic scene and is twinned to your own city by a legendary sound system. And as they used to say, M.A.N.D.Y and Troy Pierce are in the house. It’s a long time since you’ve been clubbing on your own. In this dance floor sunglasses after dark are obviously fashionable. A guy wears a T-shirt that says: “Egypt woke me up.” Did it really? Fortunately, at this stage social interaction is no longer required. As ever in the past, you are here exclusively for the acoustic engineering. As the sound involves you, your mind fills with words you will eventually write down. You reflect that bad techno is like any other form of porn, too lastingly engaged in some basic arrangement. Then again, the most layered electronica of post-Reich crop is the be-bop of our era. Music is probably the clearest way to understand the fundamental play of novelty and obsolescence in our mental life. Novelty is an addiction. Even if it would be repetition that, as Barthes put it, “engendrerait elle-même la jouissance.” As architects like to believe in durability, they mostly reject novelty as a motor of their own doings. Nonetheless, architecture too is subject to rules of cultural consumption. And those dictate that we want our brain cells constantly rearranged by new arrangements of old and new fragments. Three hours listening to music that you had never heard before and you are ready for the last, long day you will spend in town. The hypnotic beats have made you strangely apt to appreciate Buckminster Fuller’s Biosphere and Moshe Safdie’s still surprising Habitat 67 – even if you are walking from one to the other alone under a severe snow blizzard. The trance-like quality of those “rythmes obsessionels” have opened your mind to the Mile End’s graphic novel stores and the weird and wonderful ephemera shops of Boulevard St. Laurent – even if you are long past your regular dinnertime.
© Pedro Gadanho, “Ruins of the Future (Habitat 67)”, 2011
The morning you leave town you are woken up by the alarm clock at 5.30 am. Local time is catching up with your body. It is forcing you to conform. You timely escape into the airport. By 10.00 am you are in New York. One of those places, if not the place, which crisply illuminates how precious it is to breathe the air of the city. A few hours are enough. Just before you definitely head home, five hours is what it takes to once again verify how a city can remain itself and yet retain an ever-unbelievable degree of new stimuli. Indeed, what Georg Simmel has once dubbed the mental life of the metropolis here translates in the peculiar feeling that the spur of the new it too can be enduringly inscribed into the flesh of stones.
Sunday, September 05. 2010ZERO1: The 2010 01SJ Biennial----- San Jose digital art festival showcases “Build Your Own World” projects including a magic book, an Internet light source for space colonies, and the sounds of ripening tomatoes.
4 Sep 2010 - 19 Sep 2010
- Practical Information: Location:
Multiple locations in San Jose, CA
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Cost:
Day pass $24 - Multi-day Pass $45. More information below.
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The 2010 01SJ Biennial (ZERO1) presents artwork, performance, special events, and talks from September 16th through 19th under the theme, “Build Your Own World.” swissnex San Francisco supports three projects included in this year’s interdisciplinary, multi-venue digital art Biennial. I-Weather as Deep Space Public Lighting, by fabric | ch, in the South Hall proposes an open source, artificial climate and public light source based on human metabolism that could be distributed through an imaginary “Deep Space Internet” to intergalactic colonies. Tomato Quintet, by Chris Chafe, Greg Niemeyer, Sasha Leitman, and Curtis Tamm, also shows in the South Hall. This piece both sonifies and visualizes the difference in air quality between a chamber housing ripening tomatoes and the ambient environment. At the San Jose Museum of Art, artist Camille Scherrer’s Le Monde des Montagnes (The World of Mountains) blends low and high tech in an interactive, ditigal fairy tale. Her augmented reality storybook lets viewers flip through the pages only to find magical animations appear on a nearby computer monitor. With support from Pro Helvetia, the Swiss Arts Council. Stay tuned for related event announcements.
- Related events Retro-Tech Gallery Talk ----- I-Weather as Deep Space Public Lighting (2010), by fabric | ch
fabric | ch is Christian Babski, Stéphane Carion, Christophe Guignard, and Patrick Keller. The Lausanne, Switzerland team formulates new architectural proposals and produces radical livable spaces. In 2001, architect Philippe Rahm and fabric | ch set up I-Weather.org, an open source, artificial climate based on human metabolism, circadian rhythms, and light therapy research. I-Weather.org envisioned synchronizing and distributing climate to any physical or digital space connected to I-Weather’s server. In 2008, NASA announced the first successful communication with a distant spacecraft 20 million miles away via the Deep Space Internet, a model for a forthcoming interplanetary Internet. At the 01SJ Biennial, fabric | ch takes this idea to its conclusion by setting up I-Weather Deep Space Public Lighting, a metabolic public light source distributed through the imagined Deep Space Internet spaceships and intergalactic colonies.
Tomato Quintet (2007/2010), by Chris Chafe, Greg Niemeyer, Sasha Leitman, and Curtis Tamm
Tomato Quintet (2007/ 2010) is a “musification” and visualization of the air quality differences between a container of ripening tomatoes and the ambient environment. Tent walls made from sheets of Mylar are induced to vibrate through transducers attached to the top and bottom. Visitors to the tent will find a Plexiglass chamber filled with green tomatoes. During the course of the show, the green tomatoes will ripen to perfection while air quality sensors measure the gas output (CO, CO2, NO2, plus temperature and light). The Tomato Quintet 2.0 software will compare the patterns and differences of air qualities in the two spaces and render them audibly through speakers and headphones. On the final day of the Biennial, the project will convert the ripe tomatoes into salsa for guests to enjoy during lunch, accompanied by the sounds of the tomato ripening data accelerated by a factor of 240X.
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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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