Friday, February 05. 2010
London-based Steven Chilton of Marks Barfield Architects, the designers of the London Eye, has sent us fascinating images of Villa Hush Hush, an innovative high end residence they are currently developing. The project has been privately commissioned and currently has planning permission.
Images + project description after the jump.
Villa Hush-Hush - by Steven Chilton of Marks Barfield Architects, designers of the London Eye
Specifically created for sensitive sites and affording sensational views, Villa Hush-Hush is designed as a spectacular new home concept that can disappear into a landscape, but at the touch of a button be lifted above the treetops to provide wonderful panoramic views.
Project Architect and designer Steven Chilton said: “The inspiration comes from a fascinating brief to create an individually crafted and beautiful home. The design derives from a simple cubic composition inspired by the work of Donald Judd. Unique in design and function, and unlike any other home in the world, it will offer a memorable, moving, living experience.”
In plan, the villa is divided into four clearly defined zones, of which it is possible to elevate two, depending on the internal arrangement and client’s requirements. The clean simplicity of the forms concentrates the relationship between the villa, the viewer and its environment.
Externally the moving element transforms the villa into a kinetic sculpture creating a unique spectacle with an assured quality. Inside, bespoke designs by interior specialists Candy & Candy will frame spectacular views that would slowly be unveiled as part of the villa rises up above the surroundings bringing the horizon into view, creating a unique, memorable, and heightened feeling.
Engineers Atelier One designed the lifting mechanism which pushes a support column up out of the ground raising the moving element of the villa from its lowered position to the required height. The lifting mechanism has been designed such that the lifting, at around 10cm per second, is gentle and steady. The moving element of the villa can be lowered more quickly as it is easier to drop the structure than lift it. This means it would take about five minutes to reach its full height above ground and about three minutes to descend.
The support column and the moving element of the villa are balanced by 260 tonnes of steel plate acting as a counter-weight suspended in a cradle and guided within a central inner steel tube structure, and are driven by eight 22kW drive motors, equivalent in total to an energy efficient family sized vehicle. Redundancy is designed into the system of motors and gearboxes such that in the event of failure of a single drive unit the mechanism will function as normal, with no reduction in performance.
Working with dynamic specialists Motioneering, dampers have been designed into the structure to limit the dynamic response of the structure at various heights and wind speeds to ensure the highest levels of comfort.
To maximise the economic efficiency of the structure, the structure is restricted from being elevated during very high winds. The high wind limit for this is around Beaufort Scale 7 which is described as when whole trees are in motion and effort is needed to walk against the wind. In these cases the moving element of the villa would remain comfortably in its lowered position.
About Steven Chilton, Associate Director MBA
Born in London in 1971, Steven first made his mark on the environment as a graffiti artist prior to pursuing a career in architecture. After studying at Manchester University where he received a Distinction in design, he joined MBA in 1997 and spent the first three years working on the design and construction of the London Eye.
Since then he has designed the award winning Millbank Millennium Pier outside Tate Britain, collaborating with acclaimed conceptual artist Angela Bulloch and recently created the competition winning sculpture to mark the entry point into Wales called the Red Cloud.
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Via Archinect
Monday, July 06. 2009
More nuggets from the RCA show. This time from Design Products' edgy and inspiring Platform 13, headed by the very talented Onkar Kular and Sebastien Noel.
Images courtesy Jen Hui Liao
Jen Hui Liao's Self-Portrait Machine is a device that takes a picture of the sitter and draws it but with the model's help. The wrists of the individual are tied to the machine and it is his or her hands that are guided to draw the lines that will eventually form the portrait.
The project started with the observation that nearly everything that surrounds us has been created by machines. Our personal identities are represented by the products of the man-machine relationship. The Self-Portrait Machine encapsulates this man-machine relationship. By co-operating with the machine, a self-portrait is generated. It is self-drawn but from an external viewpoint through controlled movement and limited possibility. Our choice of how we are represented is limited to what the machine will allow.
Images courtesy Jen Hui Liao
The project aims to explore the cooperation process of human & machine. The designer explains: I found some the relationship between human and machine are amazing and could be horrible (like this one that shows how we human invent machines then put human inside to it to manufacture goods), The final object - A machine is a miniature of what I understand through the process of research, and the aim of the machine is to let people have a chance to feel the condensed process of how we generate our self identity from external point of view as from the society, which is a big machine we all in.
P.S. the website of Self-Portrait Machine will be on line soon, it will show more about the background research and the building process of it. I'll update this post as soon as the website is up.
Videos of the machine in action.
Exhibition view. The designer had aligned portraits made by the machines along with portraits made by painters
The Royal College of Art Show is open every day from 11amd to 8pm until July 5, 2009.
This piece originally appeared in We Make Money Not Art.
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Via WMMNA
Personal comment:
Dans la série (très en vogue en design) des machines à dessiner: une variation intéressante ou l'humain est l'exécutant guidé par la machine.
Friday, June 19. 2009
In a city where good architecture is practically de rigueur, Graz still manages to surprise and inspire with the strength and sheer variety of its built environment. In fact, the city’s stable of progressive architects seems intent that it should not simply rest on its laurels as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Leading the charge is architectural outfit Ernst Giselbrecht + Partner.
Since founding the firm in 1985, principal Ernst Giselbrecht has parlayed his passion for light – filtered and mechanically controlled light to be precise – into a series of bold and generously lit public buildings. Thanks to his training as both architect and mechanical engineer, the Giselbrecht oeuvre is extensive, covering everything from clinics, railway stations and schools to research facilities and university extensions.
His most recent work for Kiefer Technic is a high water mark for these ideals. A manufacturer of doors and equipment for hospital operation theatres and stainless steel furniture, Kiefer asked for an airy showroom – overlooking a park – that showed off the firm’s products to best effect. Giselbrecht’s solution was to clad the entire southern end of the showroom with a wall of white aluminium louvre panels that open and shut using an array of electronically-controlled horizontal hinges.
The result is a building whose façade gracefully morphs in a series of concertina folds depending on the light requirements and warmth tolerance of those inside. The system can be programmed to display countless patterns and configurations, giving what could have been a humdrum office a fascinating animated façade.
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Vis Mediaarchitecture
Personal comment:
Un autre type de "media façade"! Un peu plus intéressant.
Monday, May 25. 2009
Scheduled to open October 2009, Asymptote Architecture’s YAS hotel in Abu Dhabi is currently nearing completion. Based in NYC, Asymptote are known for their work at the crossroads of Art and Architecture.
Yes, that’s a formula 1 racetrack you can see in front of the hotel in the image below.
The grid-shell encompassing the hotel complex consists of 5,800 pivoting diamond shaped glass panels. With the help of lighting integrated behind each panel, designed in conjunction with Arup Lighting in NYC, the project is said to ‘respond visually and tectonically to it’s environment.
I am yet to figure out for sure whether the individual panels of this facade actually move, but I do remember hearing about a year ago that this was the intention. Regardless of whether this ambitious plan made it through to the final design - the result is definitely spectacular. This hotel is, after all, in the desert.
Asymptote’s founders and partners Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture quote their inspiration for the architectural landmark as ‘aesthetics and forms associated with speed, movement and spectacle to the artistry and geometries forming the basis of ancient Islamic art and craft traditions.’
In 2004 Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture were awarded the Frederick Kiesler Prize for Architecture and the Arts in recognition of contributions to the progress and merging of Arts and Architecture. For this project, I’ll be keen to see what they do with the facade (content?) once it’s up and running.
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Via Interactive Architecture dot Org
Personal comment:
Le devenir "media" de l'architecture ou des surfaces architecturales... Le devenir volumique des écrans et autres surfaces ré-/inter-actives...
Monday, December 01. 2008
Nokia robots take over the home
Finnish handset vendor Nokia unveiled some blue skies technology on Thursday, in the shape of its Home Control Centre.
The world's biggest handset manufacturer claims that the platform will be the basis for next generation security, smart home solutions and household energy management systems.
What this means is that Nokia sees its gadgets eventually taking full control of your home. Consumers could monitor and control their electricity usage by switching devices on and off remotely, they could control temperature, heating, and ventilation systems, and even have remote security systems which could send live video feeds via the mobile network. What could possibly go wrong?
Actually, while much of this sounds like science fiction, some of the technology is already available, with celebrity users including ex-Microsoft boss Bill Gates and Southampton singing sensation Craig David, who famously demonstrated his house's 'chill mode' at Mobile World Congress 2006.
Teppo Paavola, vice president and head of corporate business development at Nokia, said: "The home of today has intelligence everywhere, but to date there has not been a solution that is interoperable with wide range of home systems that can easily be controlled. We want to create an open solution where external partners can develop their own solutions and services on top of our platform. We believe that the mobile device is an ideal interface to control home intelligence, especially when the user is not at home."
Nokia expects its platform to be taking control of homes everywhere by the end of 2009.
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Via Telecoms.com
Personal comment:
Une nouvelle initiative dans le domaine de la "maison intelligente": Nokia. Les applications envisagées sont toujours aussi pauvres par contre... Tout le problème de la "domotique": de la technologie mais pas d'idées.
Tuesday, September 30. 2008
In What Should be Automated?, Matti Tedre discusses the fundamental flaw in the debate around automation. The question should not be “what should be automated?” but instead “How can one automate things efficiently and reliably?”, which then shifted to “why things should be automated?”:
“since the 1980s the focus in computing research has been gradually broadening from the machine and automation toward how and where computers are used, the actual activities of end users, and how end users collaborate and interact
(…)
Neither the theoretician’s question “What can be efficiently automated?” nor the practitioner’s question “How can processes be automated reliably and efficiently?” include, explicitly or implicitly, any questions about why processes should be automated at all, if it is desirable to automate things or to introduce new technologies, or who decides what will be automated.“
Why do I blog this? preparing a presentation about failed futures, including some elements about the problems caused by “automation”. The author of the paper argues that the shift from what to how/why lead computing researcher to a situation where they really have to pay attention to “ the needs, wants, hopes, expectations, wishes, fears, concerns, and anxieties that people have regarding technology“.
Personal comment:
Un petit insert du blog de Nicolas Nova qui pose la (bonne) question: les "choses" doivent-elles être automatisées, si oui comment et pour faire quoi?
L'automatisation (la "domotique" en architecture) est aujourd'hui une activité par défaut où l'on automatise simplement des comportement fonctionnels du bâtiment, sans se poser la question du pourquoi. Mais surtout, sans se poser la question de ce que pourrait produire une telle approche en terme de formes & fonctions architecturales. En quoi cela pourrait transformer le bâtiment.
Monday, September 08. 2008
(Special fav session at LIFT Asia 2008 this morning since this topic is linked to my own research, my quick notes).
By Nicolas Nova
Adam Greenfield’s talk “The Long Here, the Big Now… and other tales of the networked city” was the follow-up of his “The City is Here for You to Use“. Adam’s approach here was “not technical talk but affective”, about what does it feel to live in networked cities and less about technologies that would support it. The central idea of ubicomp: A world in which all the objects and surfaces of everyday life are able to sense, process, receive, display, store, transmit and take physical action upon information. Very common in Korea, it’s called “ubiquitous” or just “u-” such as u-Cheonggyecheong or New Songdo. However, this approach is often starting from technology and not human desire.
Adam’s more interested in what it really feels like to live your life in such a place or how we can get a truer understanding of how people will experience the ubiquitous city. He claims that that we can begin to get an idea by looking at the ways people use their mobile devices and other contemporary digital artifacts. Hence his job of Design Director at Nokia.
For example: a woman talking in a mobile phone walking around in a mall in Singapore, no longer responding to architecture around her but having a sort of “schizeogographic” walk (as formulated by Mark Shepard). There is hence “no sovereignty of the physical”. Same with people in Tokyo or Seoul’s metro: physically there but on the phone, they’re here physically but their commitment is in the virtual.
(Oakland Crimespotting by Stamen Design)
Adam think that the primarily conditions choice and action in the city are no longer physical but resides in the invisible and intangible overlay of networked information that enfolds it. The potential for this are the following:
- The Long here (named in conjunction with Brian Eno and Steward Brand’s “Long Now”): layering a persistent and retrievable history of the things that are done and witnessed there over anyplace on Earth that can be specified with machine-readable coordinates. An example of such layering experience on any place on earth is the Oakland Crimespotting map or the practice of geotagging pictures on Flickr.
- The Big Now: which is about making the total real-time option space of the city a present and tangible reality locally AND, globally, enhancing and deepening our sense of the world’s massive parallelism. For instance, with Twitter one can get the sense of what happens locally in parallel and also globally. You see the world as a parallel ongoing experiment. A more complex example is to use Twitter not only for people but also for objects, see for instance Tom Armitage’s Making bridges talk (Tower Bridge can twitter when it is opening and closing, captured through sensors and updated on Twitter). At MIT SENSEeable City, there is also this project called “Talk Exchange” which depicts the connections between countries based on phone calls.
Of course, there are less happy consequences, these tech can be used to exclude, what Adam calls the “The Soft Wall”: networked mechanisms intended to actively deny, delay or degrade the free use of space. Defensible space is definitely part of it as Adam points out Steven Flusty’s categories to describe how spaces becomes: “stealthy, slippery, crusty, prickly, jittery and foggy”. The result is simply differential permissioning without effective recourse: some people have the right to have access to certain places and others don’t. When a networked device does that you have less recourse than when it’s a human with whom you can argue, talk, fight, etc. Effective recourse is something we take for granted that may disappear.
We’ll see profound new patterns of interactions in the city:
- Information about cities and patterns of their use, visualized in new ways. But this information can also be made available on mobile devices locally, on demand, and in a way that it can be acted upon.
- Transition from passive facade (such as huge urban displays) to addressable, scriptable and queryable surfaces. See for example, the Galleria West by UNStudio and Arup Engineering or Pervasive Times Square (by Matt Worsnick and Evan Allen) which show how it may look like.
- A signature interaction style: when information processing dissolving in behavior (simple behavior, no external token of transaction left)
The take away of this presentation is that networked cities will respond to the behavior of its residents and other users, in something like real time, underwriting the transition from browse urbanism to search urbanism. And Adam’s final word is that networked cities’s future is up to us, that is to say designers, consumers, and citizens.
Jef Huang: “Interactive Cities” then built on Adam’s presentation by showing projects. To him, a fundamental design question is “How to fuse digital technologies into our cities to foster better communities?”. Jef wants to focus on how digital technology can augment physical architecture to do so. The premise is that the basic technology is really mature or reached a certain stage of maturity: mobile technology, facade tech, LEDs, etc. What is lacking is the was these technologies have been applied in the city. For instance, if you take a walk in any major city, the most obvious appearance of ubiquitous tech are surveillance cameras and media facades (that bombard citizen with ads). You can compare them to physical spam but there’s not spam filter, you can either go around it, close your eyes or wear sunglasses. You can compare the situation to the first times of the Web.
When designing the networked cities, the point is to push the city towards the same path: more empowered and more social platforms. Jef’s then showed some projects along that line: Listening Walls (Carpenter Center, Cambridge, USA), the now famous Swisshouse physical/virtual wall project, Beijing Newscocoons (National Arts Museum of China, Beijing) which gives digital information, such as news or blogposts a sense of physicality through inflatable cocoons. Jef also showed a project he did for the Madrid’s answer to the Olympic bid for 2012: a real time/real scale urban traffic nodes. Another intriguing project is the “Seesaw connectivity”, which allows to learn a new language in airport through shared seesaw (one part in an airport and the other in another one).
The bottom line of Jef’s talk is that fusing digital technologies into our cities to foster better communities should go beyond media façades and surveillance cams, allow empowerment (from passive to co-creator), enable social, interactive, tactile dimensions. Of course, it leads to some issues such as the status of the architecture (public? private?) and sustainability questions.
The final presentation, by Soo-In Yang, called “Living City“, is about the fact that buildings have the capability to talk to one another. The presence of sensor is now disappearing into the woodwork and all kinds of data is transferred instantly and wirelessly—buildings will communicate information about their local conditions to a network of other buildings. His project, is an ecology of facades where individual buildings collect data, share it with others in their “social network” and sometimes take “collective action”.
What he showed is a prototype facade that breathes in response to pollution, what he called “a full-scale building skin designed to open and close its gills in response to air quality”. The platform allows building to communicate with cities, with organizations, and with individuals about any topic related to data collected by sensors. He explained how this project enabled them to explore air as “public space and building facades as public space”.
Yang’s work is very interesting as they design proof of concept, they indeed don’t want to rely only on virtual renderings and abstract ideas but installed different sensors on buildings in NYC. They could then collect and share the data from each wireless sensor network, allowing any participating building (the Empire State Building and the Van Alen Institute building) to talk to others and take action in response. In a sense they use the “city as a research lab“.
Source
Wednesday, August 06. 2008
[Image: NASA's ANTS].
Alex Trevi sent me a link last week – which he later posted – about the so-called ANTS program. ANTS is an "autonomous nano technology swarm" developed by NASA for possible use in the "lunar base infrastructure" of tomorrow.
ANTS consist of "highly reconfigurable networks of struts, acting as 3D mesh or 2D fabric to perform a range of functions on demand."
The ANTS approach harnesses the effective skeletal/muscular system of the frame itself to enable amoeboid movement, effectively ‘flowing’ between morphological forms. ANTS structures would thus be capable of forming an entire mobile modular infrastructure adapted to its environment.
However, I was especially excited to see that the ANTS system has been hypothesized as "an architectural pathway to artificial life."
Might the artificial biology of tomorrow be buildings that have come to life?
[Images: NASA's ANTS].
I'm reminded here of Philip Beesley's Implant Matrix, or Theo Jansen's Strandbeesten, machine-architectures that cross over into animation and back, convincingly evincing signs of life.
But NASA's recent research into ANTS suggests that these units could actually be used to build whole bases and instant cities under extreme – and literally lunar – living conditions, where the village itself would not be just a substrate or infrastructure but a kind of artificially intelligent labyrinth of living architecture that coils round itself in a cascade of walls and air locks. All under the constant radiative glare of the sun.
[Image: NASA's ANTS].
These "autonomous remote systems," as NASA refers to them, are already coming into existence, of course; one need only look as far as the skies of the Middle East, for instance, which now buzz with unmanned aerial drones, or at the deep desert labs of the U.S. Air Force, where shape-shifting airplanes are taking (and re-taking) shape.
But is there a drone architecture?
Unmanned buildings – server farms, parking garages, airport terminals, and offshore cargo-processing warehouses (or RoboVault, say) – that, given mobility, could approach the condition of biology?
And is this what the haunted house genre has always been about: a fear of architecture that has come to life?
[Image: Ron Herron's Walking City, first proposed in Archigram 4 (1964)].
It's NASA meets Archigram meets Manuel de Landa meets Theo Jansen – a walking city gone off-world, communicating via secure satellite to earthbound observers back home.
Personal comment:
En lien avec le post déjà fait "New exploration rover-robot", cf- ci-dessus.
Wednesday, July 30. 2008
Smart metering is coming. Within a decade, you’ll know exactly how much every flip of a switch or turn of a knob costs in monthly utility charges.
By Adam Stein
The Times profiles two British seaside towns on the forefront of the low-tech energy efficiency revolution. Take, for example, Hove residents Brenda and Jeffrey Marchant, owners of a typical Victorian house. The Marchants were always energy-thrifty, but instant feedback is a uniquely motivating force.
"Turn on a computer and the device — a type of so-called smart meter — goes from 300 watts to 400 watts. Turn off a light and it goes from 299 to 215. At 500, the meter is set to sound an alarm.
Homeowners are insulating attics and swapping out windows as part of an ambitious effort to drop the city’s emissions 20% by 2012. None of the efficiency measures are particularly exotic, and most pay for themselves. The city provides grants for some of the more expensive items, such as solar water heaters.
The U.S., of course, lags, but already technology providers are working on more sophisticated forms of smart meter that can adjust power consumption automatically by controlling appliances. When woven together into a smart grid, these systems can help reduce peak power demand. (In March 2008, Worldchanging covered Boulder, Colo.'s plans for the first U.S. smart grid)
Demand management is good for the environment, and also good for utilities. Southern California Edison plans to distribute smart meters to all 5.3 million customers by 2012. Such a program would have been financially infeasible just a few years ago. With prices on the technology dropping, the utility now expects to at least break even.
And, of course, you early adopters can get a jump start on the electricity savings by installing your own home energy monitor.
Read more about smart infrastructure in the Worldchanging archives.
Adam Stein is a co-founder of TerraPass. He writes on issues related to carbon, climate change, policy, and conservation.
'I’ve become like one of Pavlov’s dogs,” Mrs. Marchant said. “Every time it bleeps I think I’m going to take one of those pans off the stove. I’d do anything to make it stop. It helps you change your habits.'"
Monday, July 21. 2008
In 2002, Ned Kahn worked with the staff of Technorama, the major science center in Switzerland, and their architects, Durig and Rami, to create a facade for the building which is composed of thousands of aluminum panels that move in the air currents and reveal the complex patterns of turbulence in the wind. The facade is visible from the large urban plaza in front of the museum.
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