Tuesday, November 30. 2010
Via Archinect
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Today, the ARC International Wildlife Crossing Infrastructure Design Competition unveiled its five finalist designs for a next generation wildlife crossing at West Vail Pass, Colorado. The competition is intended to solve the problem of ensuring safe travel for humans and wildlife. Collisions between vehicles and wildlife have increased by 50 percent in the past 15 years threatening human and wildlife safety, and costing Americans $8 billion dollars annually. Bustler
Monday, October 25. 2010
Via Mashable
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After retiring the floppy disk in March, Sony has halted the manufacture and distribution of another now-obsolete technology: the cassette Walkman, the first low-cost, portable music player.
The final batch was shipped to Japanese retailers in April, according to IT Media. Once these units are sold, new cassette Walkmans will no longer be available through the manufacturer.
The first generation Walkman (which was called the Soundabout in the U.S., and the Stowaway in the UK) was released on July 1, 1979 in Japan. Although it later became a huge success, it only sold 3,000 units in its first month. Sony managed to sell some 200 million iterations of the cassette Walkman over the product line’s 30-year career.
Somewhat ironically, the announcement was delivered just one day ahead of the iPod’s ninth anniversary on October 23, although the decline of the cassette Walkman is attributed primarily to the explosive popularity of CD players in the ’90s, not the iPod.
Personal comment:
R.I.P. the "cassette walkman". I thought it was already gone for years! Now this is the occasion to light up a candle.
Monday, October 18. 2010
Via ArchDaily
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by Sebastian J
Courtesy of Weekend in a Morning Architects
Italian architects Massimiliano Marian and Andrea Cassi (Weekend in a Morning Architects), received first prize in the Rome City Vision Architecture Competition. Images and architect’s description after the break.
Rome is the city of illusions, it is not a chance
that the Church, Government, and Cinema, all things that produce illusion,
as you do and as we do, are here.
(…) which place better than this city, who died many times
and many times was reborn,
which quieter place to wait for the end by pollution, overpopulation.
The ideal place to see if the world will end or not.
(“Roma” by Federico Fellini, 1972)
Courtesy of Weekend in a Morning Architects
A cloud of aerostatic balloons is hanging over the city, airships borrowed from a time when dreaming and running after the future were compulsory. Almost a Fellinian dream, a sonnet by a famous composer played on a loose chord. Each balloon has taken off from a dock corresponding to a specific suburb, defining an imaginary circle that takes up the diameter of the Raccordo Anulare, the ring road of Rome, and embraces the city. A trampoline to look out, count the fallen and dream. Until you get back to the ground with fragments of these thoughts in your pockets.
Surrounded by the hills in a circular embrace; center of a land strip slid onto the sea, our sea. Rome is the embrace of an antique porch, open to the world. Enclosed by a ring of traffic, by mountains of houses that don’t follow the course of the river anymore; houses that all look the same, with doors and windows, piled on top of each other. Rome isn’t Rome everywhere. The circle of streets and buildings of its outskirts surround the city of souvenirs and memories: without any exchange, without any words. Like an old man and a boy, sitting on a bench with nothing to say.
Courtesy of Weekend in a Morning Architects
A vision is that place where memory and future look at each other without being afraid to speak. Sometimes a dream comes out of this. Waking up is always hard – headache and nausea. The vision that has always labeled Rome is made of the past, buildings that impose their history. Excavations for piping that take ages due to the steeplechase between buried treasures. Young american girls with sandals and international cameras as if they were in a theme park.
Waking up from a dream like this one means getting out of the historic city and moving on to what we, and not our fathers, are building. Rome isn’t Rome everywhere.
There are places where there’s no architectural or plastic element distinguishing a precise region, a particular landscape. These places reveal without any filters the inhuman nature of a maximized and globalized society, where there’s only one kind of landscape: the product of ideologies that act through simplifications or mere speculations. In these places the only thing leading back to a precise place of the territory is the skyline of the center, in a mist. The only element unifying two parallel yet divided realities is heaven. It’s the outskirts and heaven that we’re focusing on.
Courtesy of Weekend in a Morning Architects
The concept consists in creating a sort of fluctuating ring road. A new level that is added to the existing layers of the city. An immaterial level, defined only by the straight and circular trajectories of the balloons that move from one dock to the next, connecting the various Roman outskirts with each other. A system that is placed on the margins of the city that allows to seize the urban environment through new means. Knowledge, combined with the volatileness of a dreamt world, like a circus tent, like the famous travelers’ note books, these are the foundations of our views. “Let those who want to save the world if you can get to see it clear and as a whole.” (Earnest Hemingway, “Death in the afternoon”, 1932)
The outskirts turn into the center of a special infrastructural network and almost ends in themselves: the docking towers become new architectural symbols that reflect the existing physical necessity of the urban borders. At the same time they are the frame of a transport system that provides a solution for two issues: tourism and environment. Through offering the chance to fly/float over Rome, the new system is aimed at decentralizing a part of tourism, today concentrated in the old town, thus creating now opportunities for the suburbs. At the same time this new infrastructural level can be regarded as alternative to individual transport by car. A new quick and non polluting way of creating new links in urban texture. The antique taste of this airship shall remind us of evolution that has led to the creation of ever more effective and technically advanced means. We think that it’s fundamental that the poetic and fantastic aspect of this proposal is supported by a special emphasis on environmental and technical innovation issues that need to be the foundation of any urban project.
Courtesy of Weekend in a Morning Architects
A city in fact is a place where interaction takes place, where many different levels of connection exist: a real ecosystem made of continuous exchange between the substance of what’s being built and the living organisms. Infrastructures, plants and streets are the support of numerous activities, movements and both evolution and involution processes. Today it seems essential to try to understand their complexity, and that’s where new technologies can be of avail. Let’s imagine we can read parts of town with a system now present on every smartphone, that has a photographic lens: the lens of augmented reality (AR). Pictures taken from the airships are broadcast live on a screen at the bottom of each docking tower: environmental and other useful data complete the images, thus providing a genuine scan of the metropolitan situation. A new scientific medium, continuous and complete. The outskirts become the place where city is read. The grid has been completed – both physical and virtual exchange are taking place. In our vision the continuous exchange of informations between balloons and stations and stations themselves (between outskirts and outskirts, a “suburban” dialogue) guarantees transversal monitoring of the city, allowing the citizens to have better consciousness of their own role within the urban ecosystem. Hence knowledge, not only in terms of creating postcards from above or taking fascinating photographs from bird’s eye view, but rather as starting point for a necessary participation in change.
The aerostatic balloons float over the rooftops of Rome.
Try to touch the sky with your shortest fingers and look.
It’s the ideal place to see if the world will end or not.
Personal comment:
As a side note, I think it's quite "funny" to see how much "flying things" are now present in architectural renderings (birds, baloons, kites, etc.), and by extension, things based on wind (energy harvesting). In this case, the project is fully based on flying balloons, but in many other cases, I believe that it is a way to illustrate the idea of sustainabiliy (without the project being necessary sustainable...).
There is a full imaginary universe that has been recently reactivated around air, balloons, energy, connecting it with history of "air" architectures and/or cities (H. Hollein, Archigram, hippies, inflates, Krutikov, Friedman, HimmelBlau, etc.)
Sunday, September 05. 2010
Via Swissnex San Francisco
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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
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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.
Purchase tickets
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Related events
Retro-Tech Gallery Talk
September 16, 2010 at 12:00 pm
With Kristen Evangelista, associate curator and curator of the exhibition and Camille Scherrer
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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.
Le Monde des Montagnes (The World of Mountains) by Camille Scherrer
In Le Monde des Montagnes (The World of Mountains) (2008), Swiss artist and designer Camille Scherrer blends low and high tech to push storybooks into an interactive realm. She has created a digital fairy tale, enlisting both her background in illustration and new media art. As the reader turns the pages of an ordinary book, a nearby computer monitor displays the very same pages augmented with mysterious animations of birds and snowflakes. Scherrer created this magical illusion with custom software and a reading lamp that contains a hidden camera.
Scherrer likes to play at the intersection of technology and art, looking for new fields of investigation. In Le Monde des Montagnes, she created her own universe inspired by the mountains where she grew up. She graduated in 2008 from the University of Art and Design, Lausanne (ECAL) in visual communication and works at EPFL+ECAL Lab, whose mission is to foster innovation at a crossroads between technology, design, and architecture. Her project was awarded Best European Design Diploma (Talent exhibition, Design huis, Eindhoven) and has been exhibited and published internationally.
Thursday, August 12. 2010
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by Amanda Reed
Today a friend of mine shared this link with me about Tentstation in Berlin, Germany. Tentstation is an urban campground located near Berlin's main train station and popular tourist destinations like the Brandenburg Gate. The mastermind behind the Tentstation project, Sarah Osswald, was interested in taking advantage of the opportunities inherent in "the concept of using fallow urban space" and "the idea of interim usage" to create an urban campground in Berlin.
The outdoor swimming pool on the Tentstation grounds is used for multiple activities, from picnics to roller skating, and even for dancing, as picture here. (via)
Worldchanging has explored these ideas before -- Julia Levitt wrote about the idea of flexibility and using every bit of urban space to its fullest in "Temporary Spaces and Creative Infill" last year; and the Dott 07 team brainstormed the possibility of urban camping in "Sustainable Tourism: Must Tourism Damage the Toured?" back in 2007 -- but the Tentstation project is the first I've heard of that moves urban camping from concept to reality and couples it with utilizing underused urban spaces. What a great pairing!
import.export ARCHITECTURE (Oscar Rommens en Joris Van Reusel, architecten) have also explored ways of making urban camping a reality. Last year they designed a mobile urban camping unit (UC) intended to facilitate small scale urban camping. The structure is made of steel and supports four platforms on which tents can be pitched. The UC is meant to be flexible and mobile; it could be implanted in any city center to support an instant mini campground, "where adventurous city wanderers could stay overnight, meet other campers and find a safe shelter with basic designed practical facilities" (Dezeen).
From 24th April until 24th May 2009, the UC was constructed for the first time on the Antwerp shores of the Scheldt, for the Kaailand Festival exhibition on mobile architecture. The UC was also on display in Copenhagen, for the occasion of the project OUTCITIES from 25th July until
1st August 2009. (image via OWI // Office for Word and Image; photo by Dujardin Filip)
The UC is a fascinating design response to the development of the urban wilderness. Adam Anderson at Design Under Sky offered an apt description of the opportunities the UC design offers urban adventurers:
...a new wilderness is developing. Cities are rapidly growing, becoming more complex, and rather than locking ourselves up in our protective boxes, what if we found a new way to to test ourselves in the throws of the urban wilderness? Rather than becoming intimately involved with nature, listening and understanding the landscape, we rediscover urbanity in a completely new way. Smells, sounds, people, paths, roads, parks, architecture all become things of exploration rather than simply parts of the sum.
Import Export's 'tentscrapers' would facilitate that exploration. To get out there and be in the elements, to enjoy the city like one can enjoy nature, is what is so appealing to me about urban camping. And introducing the inexpensive nature of camping to city travel is a wonderful democratizing practice for tourism. With the success of Tentstation in Berlin, and Import Export Architect's compelling vision of 'tentscrapers' it looks like urban camping is on the rise...but perhaps all we really need are car tents?
These car tents seem to be a fun way to combining the idea of taking over parking spaces a la Park(ing) Day with urban camping. Just camouflage your tent to look like a car cover and no one will trouble you! (Image via Make)
Note: You may also be interested in this article on the Urban Voids design competition: "Filling Urban Voids . . . With Farms?"
Personal comment:
We published already the "tentscaper" project (nice name!), but I quite like this idea of temporary urban camping (in free or deserted allotments) that would bring new type of tourists in the center of cities. We could definitely think of "tent hotels", "tent-car park", etc. in the center of cities.
Wednesday, August 11. 2010
Via Archinect
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You've already got a road, but now you need to add some public transportation. A train doesn't fit, so what do you do? Turn the train into a tunnel, of course. The straddling bus project, designed by Shenzhen Hashi Future Parking Equipment Co. is a 16-foot public transport vehicle that is two road lanes wide, drives above cars and has a hollow underbelly so that other vehicles can pass underneath. - DoTheGreenThing.com
Personal comment:
Starts to look a bit like mobile urban architecture (an hybrid between a tunnel and a bus or a train in this case)... Are mobile cities in the utopian Archigram sense the next step?! Design of the "tunnel-bus" still need to be improved though...
Wednesday, July 07. 2010
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by Patrick James
We've done a bit of microhousing (and micro-driving) coverage of late, and here's some more. Inspired by the Urban Nomad movement of the 1960s and 1970s (which focused on diminutive, movable dwellings in cities), a Glasgow School of Art design student named Alec Farmer has built a tiny home in which he'll live for the next year.
Using the instructions written by [Ken] Isaacs in 'How To Build Your Own Living Structures', I have created a replica of this 50 year old design, and plan to live in it, in the centre of Glasgow, Scotland, for one year. In doing so I hope to gain more insight into Isaacs design, and also into the movement as a whole.
I move in at the start of September 2010.
Farmer describes the work of Isaacs as "smaller than architecture but bigger than furniture," and that sounds about right. His Urban Nomad Version 2.0 blog, which chronicles the experience of living in the tiny replica, has the potential to become a great resource for those of us interested in reducing the environmental impacts of our lives—and it already has a bunch of fantastic photographs.
Tuesday, June 22. 2010
Via Mashable
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Apple’s new privacy policy contains a small new paragraph of big importance: it gives the company license to store “the real-time geographic location of your Apple computer or device” and share it with “partners and licensees.” As if we haven’t had enough privacy kerfuffles of late.
Apple goes on to assure customers in the remainder of the new clause that location data is “collected anonymously in a form that does not personally identify you.” Still, there seems to be no effective method of opting out of the data storage and sharing, as you’ll need to agree to the new terms and conditions before downloading new apps or any media from the iTunes store.
The company gives a nod to MobileMe’s “Find My iPhone” feature as one of the services that requires personal location information to work, but it’s not saying much about other details, including who the data will be shared with and for how long it will be stored. Apple says the information it collects will be used to “provide and improve location-based products and services”; check out the full text of the new paragraph in the privacy policy below:
“To provide location-based services on Apple products, Apple and our partners and licensees may collect, use, and share precise location data, including the real-time geographic location of your Apple computer or device. This location data is collected anonymously in a form that does not personally identify you and is used by Apple and our partners and licensees to provide and improve location-based products and services. For example, we may share geographic location with application providers when you opt in to their location services.
Some location-based services offered by Apple, such as the MobileMe “Find My iPhone” feature, require your personal information for the feature to work.”
What do you think: should iPhone, iPad and Mac users be wary of this change in the privacy policy? Will this be business as usual now that geographic data is easy to come by on most of our devices?
[via LA Times]
Personal comment:
Is Apple the new evil? Spread the message...
Via Pruned
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by Alexander Trevi
(Less designery and messier than Vicente Guallart's microcoasts and hexagonal beaches, this seemingly ad hoc intervention on the rugged coastline of Catania, Sicily, simultaneously provides an easy and safe access to the waters, and creates an occupiable public open space on a patch of dangerous terrain where before only the daring few ventured out. Photograph by Massimo Vitali, from the series Sicily Primo, 2007. With thanks to Kate Collins for the photograph. Earlier: Slurry #1 #2.)
Thursday, June 17. 2010
Via BLDGBLOG
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by noreply@blogger.com (Geoff Manaugh)
While writing a brief post for the CCA today about 19th-century "portable buildings" and their unexpected role in facilitating the European colonial project, I stumbled on the "portable camps" of Canadian shelter firm Weatherhaven.
[Images: Multiple projects by Weatherhaven].
Weatherhaven was founded, historian Robert Kronenburg explains in his book Portable Architecture, "in 1981 by the merging of two separate businesses, an expedition organizing team and a Vancouver-based construction company."
The founders recognized the need for a dedicated approach to the provision of temporary shelter in remote places and developed a strategy to provide a complete service including design, manufacture, packaging, transportation, and erection of buildings, all of which would be created specifically to respond to the logistical problems of remote deployment in harsh environments.
For Weatherhaven, this includes the production of whole "Geological Survey Camps" and "mining villages," among many other examples, almost all of which are capable of being rapidly deployed and air-delivered by crate.
It is Flatpak City: pop open the box and go.
[Image: Service-installation by Weatherhaven].
"The first stage of the operation," Kronenburg writes, referring to a specific example of their cities-on-demand, "was to establish a Weatherhaven crew shelter so that a construction team could prepare a temporary landing site for heavier aircraft." From that initial seed, a whole civilization-by-airfield could be grown—an instant city from the sky. "A single crate was flown in by light aircraft and the building was assembled and in use within four hours."
The team then prepared the camp layout, and as the rest of the building components and other equipment were flown in, assembled the entire facility... The completed facility included sleeping and leisure accommodation, a 24 hour kitchen, showers, and toilets, a hospital, offices, and an engineering base, and was built in 20 working days.
The buildings themselves are neither architecturally nor materially interesting, Kronenburg adds, but they "are remarkable for their organizational and logistical approach."
It is just-in-time urbanism: parachuting in whole cities and logistical systems till a new, geographically remote metropolis is up and running in less than three weeks.
[Image: A military village by Weatherhaven].
These temporary mining villages and other extraction towns—somewhere above the Arctic Circle or deep in the desert, "often so remote as to be invisible to most of the world"—unfold in an industrial nanosecond. They stick around for mere years and then disappear, leaving no real archaeological traces, producing no tourist postcards, finding no place on any map, perhaps never even achieving the status of a formal name, yet nonetheless managing to house thousands of workers at a time.
What role should such compounds play in the writing of urban and architectural history?
[Image: A military village by Weatherhaven].
At the very least, these "longer-stay remote shelters," as Kronenburg calls them, are surely as vital to the global economy—with deep connections to the extraction industries, from diamond mines to tar sands—as the banking district of a recognized urban conglomerate. How ironic it would be to discover someday that an instant village for 2,000 residents, air-delivered by Weatherhaven into the emotionally bleak but mineralogically rich Australian Outback, has a larger economic footprint than the entire business district of a city like Sydney.
In many ways, I'm reminded of an article published last week in which we read that "Cisco Systems is helping build a prototype in South Korea for what one developer describes as an instant 'city in a box'."
Delegations of Chinese government officials looking to purchase their own cities of the future are descending on New Songdo City, a soon-to-be-completed metropolis about the size of downtown Boston that serves as a showroom model for what is expected to be the first of many assembly-line cities.
The idea that a government—or private corporation—can simply "purchase their own cities of the future" is a fascinating and oddly troubling one. "Five hundred cities are needed in China; 300 are needed in India," an excited developer explains—so why not simply "purchase" them from the cheapest or most reliable supplier?
Cities will be things you have delivered to you, like pizza, and they and their residents will be treated just as disposably.
[Image: The "modular datacenter" of Sun's Project Blackbox, a stackable, shipping container-based, portable supercomputing and data storage unit].
Offloading a few of Sun's Project Blackbox units, seen above, in order to construct a privately chartered city-in-a-box, based around a remote airfield somewhere in the Canadian Arctic, is something as likely to be seen in a Roger Moore-era James Bond film as it is in the corporate spreadsheets of a firm like Rio Tinto; but I'm left dwelling on the question of where these sorts of settlements belong in architectural history.
Purpose-built instant cities "purchased" wholesale from private suppliers, and erected in as little as one month's time, are only going to increase in quantity, population, diversity of purpose, and global economic importance in the decades to come; their impact on political science and concepts of sovereign territory and constitutional law is something we can barely even begin to anticipate. But if architects have more to learn from the international warehousing strategies of Bechtel than they do from the Farnsworth House or the software packages of Patrik Schumacher, then what role might firms like Weatherhaven prove to have played in transforming how we understand the built environment?
Put another way, should the COO of Weatherhaven be invited to contribute to Icon's next " Manifesto" issue? If so, what might architects and urban planners learn?
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