Wednesday, April 06. 20112015 Pan American Games Pavilion / Manuel Gross + Patrik Staub + Stefan Vetsch + Yannick VorbergCourtesy Manuel Gross + Patrik Staub + Stefan Vetsch + Yannick Vorberg Manuel Gross, Patrik Staub, Stefan Vetsch and Yannick Vorberg, all recent graduates of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, have shared with us their winning entry for the AIAS/Vinyl Institute 2015 Pan American Games Awards Pavilion to be situated in Toronto, Canada. Follow after the break for a comprehensive write up and additional images of their competition entry. Courtesy Manuel Gross + Patrik Staub + Stefan Vetsch + Yannick Vorberg CONCEPT: Waterfront Toronto The Pan Am Games of 2015 in Toronto are a great opportunity, to reconnect the waterfront with the city. This is our goal because the waterfront offers a lot of qualities. First of all, it is a great place to have a rest. There is a beautiful view and the connection to the water. The waterfront is the perfect place to meet, stroll and relax. The Pan Am Village is located at the West Don Lands, an area that is separated from the waterfront by the railways, the Gardiner Expressway and the Lake Shore Boulevard. With our Project, we bring the people back to the waterfront. The selection of the waterfront as our site is urbanisticly very sustainable – we bridge the physical and psychological barrier of the Lake Shore Boulevard, the Gardiner Expressway and the railways. The pavilion becomes a starting point for the further development of the Lower Don Lands. Courtesy Manuel Gross + Patrik Staub + Stefan Vetsch + Yannick Vorberg Pan Am Games Award Pavilion Our Design is inspired by the Name of Toronto, which is derived from the Iroquois word tkaronto, meaning “place where trees stand at the water”. After a while, the meaning of tkaronot changed into “meeting place”. We really like the simple idea of a meeting place that is created through a couple of trees. The wood is an ethnic roof, which protects people from rain and sun, the wood attracts the people – our pavilion works as simply as that. The huge roof of the pavilion creates an interesting and protecting place, where people can meet, relax or entertain themselves. The forest spreads over the site and leads the people to the water. Under the roof there are some boxes, which contain the different programs like public restrooms, ticketing and the stage with the back stage area and storage rooms. These boxes are inspired by the image of supported logs in the wood. Use of vinyl As a material concept, we tried to use vinyl not only as a cladding material. We developed a simple structure in which vinyl works as a supporting element in form of standard weather balloons. This structure only works with the use of vinyl and that was exactly our goal. The form follows the function and the form became very plurivalent. People may recognize the pavilion as a forest, others may see lots of ephemeral clouds in the sky. This equivocation makes the pavilion so interesting and special. The facade and the roof of the boxes consist of recycled PVC pipes. The pipes have different functions and are more than just a cladding. With this system we also design the furniture for the park. The Victory Soya Mills Silo is an icon of Toronto – townsfolk identify with this building. A light PVC roof creates a special room on top of it without disturbing the presence of the silo. Courtesy Manuel Gross + Patrik Staub + Stefan Vetsch + Yannick Vorberg SITE: Connection The Victory Soya Mills Silos connect our site visually with the city. Projections on the silos lead the people to the site, a bar on the roof makes this icon even higher. The bar attracts people, even after the games. This sustainable intervention supports the further development of the waterfront. Pedestrians and cyclists will arrive via the Union Station. We reevaluate the underpasses of the railways with the same balloon structure as we used for the pavilion. The Cherry Street underpass connects the village with the pavilion. The Bay Street underpass leads from the Union Station to the Queens Quai, our main bike and pedestrian path. The silo works as an orientation point, “balloon trees” reevaluate the Queens Quai and make the street attractive for pedestrians and cyclists. A good infrastructure around the site brings people from the city, but also from the wider region to our site. We plan shuttle buses, which connect the Union Station, the Pan American Pavilion and the Pan American Village. CONSTRUCTION: Pavilion Standard, vinyl based and helium filled weather balloons support a PVC PES membrane. A PVC net holds everything together. Wire ropes with a PVC coating anchor the construction to the ground. The boxes under the roof consist of a simple steel substructure. Recycled PVC pipes clad and stiffen this steel frame at the exterior. The pipes also work as a sunblind and a rain drain. A vinyl insulation with an interior PVC cladding completes the construction. Bar We use an economical construction for this additional program. Reusable scaffolding stairways and construction elevators bring the visitors to the top of the silo. The bar consists of a simple steel and glass construction. A PVC PES membrane filled with helium and air works as a roof. Transparent organic photovoltaic cells are printed on this membrane. They catch the sunlight and transform it into energy, which supports the bar.
Friday, March 25. 2011The Cloud Tent[Images: "Artificial clouds" designed at Qatar University under the direction of Saud Abdul Ghani; images from a video hosted by the BBC].
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...
Monday, March 07. 2011Weather Architects of the Year 2050 A.D. [Image: "Whirlpool" (1973) by Dennis Oppenheim].
Artist Dennis Oppenheim's "Whirlpool" project, from the summer of 1973, sought to create an artificial tornado on the bed of a dry desert lake in Southern California. It was intended as a "3/4 mile by 4 mile schemata of tornado," the above image explains, "traced in [the] sky using standard white smoke discharge from aircraft." As the Telegraph describes it:
In a short story called "The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D," J.G. Ballard envisions a tropical atoll where the residents have learned to "sculpt" clouds in the sky, listening to Wagner over loud speakers and using specially engineered gliders and flying techniques.
Personal comment: Some comments and additionnal references by Geoff Manaugh about McCall's "Column" project. Wednesday, February 16. 2011Vertical greenhouseVia GOOD ----- (...) -- Taken out from a longer post about food and architecture by Nicola Twilley --
(...)
Personal comment: I just saw this picture in an article from Nicola Twilley that makes me think of a project we did back in 2008, Tower of Atmospheric Relations (and that in some other ways retro-confirm the project's hypothesis of a vertical greenhouse building / climate exhibition and clock). Tuesday, January 25. 2011Une ère conditionnéeVia Libération ----- By Sylvestre Huet Récit - Le glaciologue Claude Lorius démontre que l’homme est devenu un «géo-ingénieur» climatique aussi puissant que les forces géologiques, et annonce l’anthropocène, l’ère de l’homme.
Iceberg dans les eaux antarctiques. (REUTERS) - More about this book, Claude Lorius and the Anthropocene directly on Libération.
Related Links:Personal comment:
Anthropocene is a word we hear more and more about. It probably just gives a name to what we all observe everyday: that our environment is getting more an more artificial, conditioned at a global scale with ecological costs.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Culture & society, Science & technology, Territory
at
12:33
Defined tags for this entry: artificial reality, books, climate, conditioning, culture & society, geography, science & technology, sustainability, territory, theory
Monday, January 03. 2011Remnants of the Biosphere by Biospheric DesignOld post but one of the most requested SPACEINVADING projects on archinect.com Via bldgblog --- Remnants of the Biosphere by Biospheric Design Location: Arizona Image Credits: Noah Sheldon "The structure was billed as the first large habitat for humans that would live and breathe on its own, as cut off from the earth as a spaceship," the New York Times wrote back in 1992, but the project was a near-instant failure. Photographer Noah Sheldon got in touch the other week with a beautiful series of photos documenting the decrepit state of Biosphere 2, a semi-derelict bio-architectural experiment in the Arizona desert. The largest sealed environment ever created, constructed at a cost of $200 million, and now falling somewhere between David Gissen's idea of subnature—wherein the slow power of vegetative life is unleashed "as a transgressive animated force against buildings"—and a bioclimatically inspired Dubai, Biosphere 2 even included its own one million-gallon artificial sea.
The entire site was sold to private developers in 2007, leaving the buildings still functional andopen for toursbut falling apart. Sheldon was originally inspired to visit and photograph the site after reading in the New York Timesthat "suburban sprawl" had come to surround the once-remote research site. Indeed, we read, real estate development has "conquered vast swaths of the Sonoran Desert. The Biosphere, miles from nowhere when it was built in the 1980s, is now within the reach of a building boom streaking north from Tucson and south from Phoenix (and which some demographers say will eventually join the two cities, once 100 miles apart)." Traffic jams are not infrequent where there were once country roads, and new suburbs have sprung up within just a few miles of the research site. Now, like something straight out of J.G. Ballard, the property might someday be home to a development called Biosphere Estates. Sheldon's images, reproduced here with his permission, show the facility advancing into old age. A vast biological folly in the shadow of desert over-development, the project of Biosphere 2 seems particularly poignant in this unkempt state. The fertile promise of the microcosm has been abandoned. In this context, Biosphere 2 could perhaps be considered one of architect Francois Roche's "buildings that die," a term Roche used in a recent interview with Jeffrey Inaba. Indeed, in its current state Biosphere 2 is easily one of the ultimate candidates for Roche's idea of "corrupted biotopes"; the site's ongoing transformation into suburbia only makes this corruption more explicit. Watching something originally built precisely as a simulation of the Earth —the in "Biosphere 2" is meant to differentiate this place from the Earth itself, i.e. Biosphere— slowly taken over by the very forces it was meant to model is philosophically extraordinary: the model taken over by the thing it represents. A replicant in its dying throes.
Posted by Christophe Guignard
in Architecture, Sustainability
at
12:31
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, artificial reality, climate, earth, energy, sustainability
Tuesday, November 30. 2010Microclimates objectsThese conceptual cooling units by London designers PostlerFerguson would be made from 3D-printed sand. Called Microclimates, the pods would be printed layer by layer on a large rapid-prototyping machine using locally sourced sand and a magnesium binging agent. Water evaporating from the porous material would lower the temperature of the sand, in turn cooling the air as it flows through each pod. A complex internal structure would create a large surface area for this heat exchange to take place efficiently. The project was designed for Dubai gallery and studio Traffic. More about PostlerFerguson on Dezeen »
The information below is from the designers: Microclimates/Postlerferguson 2010 What strikes us about Dubai is the energy and technological sophistication of the city that has arisen in the last few decades in one of the most ancient areas of human civilization. Dubai’s architecture is striking not only for its design, but also for the leaps in construction technology employed to realize it. Our proposal draws on both the hypermodern, global city of today and the traditional building techniques that are ancient Dubai’s heritage. Microclimates is not just an installation, but a building language that can be reused again and again to create new public spaces. Traditional Islamic architecture dealt sustainably with the harsh desert climate by careful control of light and airflow through elements such as the masharabiya, wind towers, and earthen walls. Microclimates are built up layer by layer out of locally sourced sand combined with a magnesium based binder. Using custom software, Microclimates is based on a three-dimensional interpretation of the masharabiya built from local sand by using a large scale rapid prototyping machine, with a complex internal structure whose large internal surface area efficiently conditions air passing through it by evaporative cooling. Combining the principals behind these ancient building elements with the most advanced computer-aided manufacturing techniques, we are able to create new methods of construction that draw on the aesthetic and sustainable benefits of traditional buildings to realize a modern vision of what 21st century architecture in Dubai could achieve.
Personal comment: Where natural conditioning based on vernacular principles meets rapid prototyping made of local materials... Wednesday, November 10. 2010I-Weather as Deep Space Public Lighting - follow up & pictures
By fabric | ch ----- One month and a half ago, we were presenting a new work during the 2010 01SJ Biennial in South Hall, San Jose -- an amazingly big air conditioned (and sort of inflated) hall in the downtown area -- (in San Jose, San Francisco Bay Area, CA), under the exhibition main title "Build Your Own World". This artificial interior landscape cut from natural light was the ideal place to set up I-Weather as Deep Space Public Lighting, a new work from fabric | ch that uses I-Weather, the open source artificial climate based on human metabolism, circadian rythms and on medical knowledge about light therapy and chronotherapy. The main purpose of the installation, as mentioned earlier on this blog, was to "propose a critical use of I-Weather as a model for a metabolic public lighting source, distributed and synchronized through an imaginary Deep Space Internet into the confined and conditioned environments of space exploration vehicles or into speculative public spaces of “distant colonies”". What could a public space offer in 2010? How could public lighting --an old technology... that still defines most part of the public space at night-- evolve? What is the nature of space in Outer Space, is it public, private? If it is a public space -- by now, space exploration has been mostly supported by public fundings... --, could we light it up with a public and open source artificial climate, distributed through a new type of Internet? These were some of the ideas we tried to adress through this piece.
And here are (finally!) some follow-up pictures of the installation.
Yellow-Orange time ("night"):
According to the lighting and color rules of I-Weather, yellow-orange light (above) doesn't affect your body clock, it is therefore similar to a night situation, but where you can still undertake calm activities. At some periods (just below), I-Weather as Deep Space Public Lighting presented the full color spectrum of I-Weather, a gradient that vary from blue to orange (day to night) and that could also therefore be read as a "time rainbow". Below, in blue, is the day time (blue light blocks the secretion of melatonin into the body).
Gradient time ("time rainbow", all times at the same time):
Blue time (day):
--- I-Weather has been produced with the support of Swissnex San Francisco and Pro Helvetia.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in fabric | ch, Architecture, Art
at
15:36
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, art, artificial reality, climate, exhibitions, exhibitions-fbrc, fabric | ch, internet, landscape, lighting, opensource, public
Friday, November 05. 2010Deep Space Public Lighting, Chilean Copper-Gold Mines, Rare Earths Geopolitics, and iPhones as Portable Artificial Suns(Deep Space Public Lighting by fabric | ch. Image courtesy of the artists.) For the past few months, I-Weather.org, developed by Philippe Rahm and fabric | ch, has been churning up a pastel maelstrom here on this blog for use by our spatially and temporally displaced readers to restore their circadian rhythms, whether this is actually possible or not. You, too, can embed this artificial sun on your website to blast your asynchronous readers into metabolic normality. Its open source code is freely available. At the recent 01SJ Biennial in San Jose, California, we saw a less earthbound and less private platform for this quasi-light therapy: a flickering light tower for “confined and conditioned environments of space exploration vehicles” and “speculative public spaces of distant colonies.” To distribute and synchronize these pockets of simulant terrestrial cycles of day and night across vast distances, fabrica | ch proposes using a theoretical Deep Space Internet. (Deep Space Public Lighting by fabric | ch. Image courtesy of the artists.) (Deep Space Public Lighting by fabric | ch. Image courtesy of the artists.) By happy coincide, we first learned about this project just as the first reports about the trapped miners in Chile started trickling in to our attention, specifically, the news that NASA scientists have been flown in by the Chilean government to offer advice on how to help the men stay physically and mentally healthy during the weeks-long rescue. (Graphics and research by C. Argandoña, I. Muñoz, C. Araya, J.Cortés/LA TERCERA, via The Washington Post. Source) Al Holland, a NASA psychologist, says during a press conference: One of the things that's being recommended is that there be one place, a community area, which is always lighted. And then you have a second area which is always dark for sleep, and then you have a third area which is work, doing the mining, and the shifts can migrate through these geographic locations within the mine and, in that way, regulate the daylight cycle of the shift. It occurred to us that one should make a portable version of Deep Space Public Lighting for future mining disasters. It should be able to fit through bore holes and then easily assembled by survivors in the murky depths of a collapsed tunnel. A deployable piazza for subterranean “distant colonies.“ (Trapped miners at the Copiapó mine on video. Image via Reuters/Chilean Government. Source.) Rather than being illuminated by the anemic brightness of a hard hat or video camera, one bathes in soothing electromagnetic wavelengths from a technicolor torch. Or from an i-weatherized iPhone. (There's an app for that.) And yes, considering the high demand for coal and industrial minerals, there will be many more mining disasters, many more trapped miners and, depending on various fortunate circumstances, more tunnels to be reconfigured. In fact, only a few days after the last Chilean miner was brought to the surface, 11 miners were trapped at a coal mine in China after a deadly explosion. Consider, too, the recent export ban by China on shipment of rare earth elements to Japan after a kerfuffle between the two countries involving a collision between a Chinese fishing trawler and Japanese Coast Guard patrol boats near some disputed islands. The ban may have been brief, and China may have denied having instituted one in the first place, nevertheless, the incident points again that China is willing to use its near resource monopoly of rare earth metals as a political tool, to get its way, in other words. Other countries have again taken notice, and are scrambling to develop alternative sources, if not already, to ensure future supply. With new mines opening and even old mine operations being restarted, there are more potentials for disasters. Reformatted in this context, Deep (Inner) Space Public Lighting engages not just with issues such as “public space, public data, public technology and artificial climate” but also with the geopolitics of natural resources, globalization and our collective networked boredom that seemingly can only be satiated by an epic spectacle natural and man-made disasters and the ensuing heroic rescue of survivors.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in fabric | ch, Architecture, Art
at
10:06
Defined tags for this entry: architects, architecture, art, artificial reality, climate, digital, fabric | ch, lighting, physiological, publications, publications-fbrc, weather
Friday, October 22. 2010Dangers in the Air: Aerosol Architecture and Invisible Landscapes-----
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture, Art
at
08:56
Defined tags for this entry: air, architecture, art, artificial reality, climate, design (environments), particles, speculation, theory
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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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