On September 29, Storefront for Art and Architecture will inaugurate a new exhibition showcasing research conducted over the past 3 years at ETH Zurich by Swiss architects Gramazio & Kohler into full-scale digital fabrication in architecture using industrial robots. At the same time, construction work will begin on Pike Loop, the first architectural project to be built on site by an industrial robot in the US.
Located on Pike Street, the robot, R-O-B, will work for up to four weeks—in full view of the public— to construct a brick wall, a highly sculptural response to the specific identity of the site. The same robot unit recently built the award-winning installation, Structural Oscillations, at the 2008 architectural biennial in Venice. For the Pike Loop installation, more than seven thousand bricks aggregate to form an infinite loop that weaves along the pedestrian island. In changing rhythms the loop lifts off the ground and intersects itself at its peaks. The installation was coordinated through the New York City Department of Transportation’s Urban Art Program.
More images and a video after the break.
Developed through their research at ETH Zurich Faculty of Architecture, Switzerland, Gramazio & Kohler’s work explores highly complex architectural artifacts, built by industrial robots typically used to assemble automobiles and perform other high-precision tasks. The accuracy, strength and speed of these robots allow them to fabricate architectural forms of unprecedented complexity and intricacy. Gramazio & Kohler’s work represents the cutting edge of innovation in the field of digital fabrication in architecture. For many years architects have relied on digital manufacturing processes such as CNC milling or 3D printing as a tool for formal research at model-scale. For the first time, Gramazio & Kohler’s work explores the potential of mobile digital fabrication techniques that can fabricate at 1:1 scale on site.
The exhibition at Storefront Gallery will present the results of Gramazio & Kohler’s ongoing research into digital fabrication in architecture at ETH Zürich Faculty of Architecture. The same robot, R-O-B, unit recently built the award-winning installation, Structural Oscillations, at the 2008 architectural biennial in Venice.
Exhibition location: Storefront for Art and Architecture, 97 Kenmare St., NYC Exhibition opening reception: Sept. 30, 7p.m. (Exhibition ends Nov. 14, 2009)
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Click here to view the embedded video.
Personal comment:
Projet similaire à ce que G&K avaient réalisés pour la Biennale d'architecture de Venise. Ici, la construction du mur, la cinétique du robot devient l'élément exposé.
To celebrate London as a centre of design and innovation, the ‘Digital Architecture London’ Conference will take place at the Building Centre on 21st September 2009. Presenting a selection of London’s leading architects, artists, designers and engineers, the conference will examine how London is shaping the digital future of the built environment.
Introducing the latest developments in digital design practice, the conference will explore new spaces, social interactions, design and fabrication processes, and speculate on architecture’s post-digital futures.
Speakers include:
Patrik Schumacher, Director and Partner, Zaha Hadid Architects and Co-Founder, Design Research Laboratory, Architectural Association.
Neil Spiller, author of Digital Architecture Now [2008], Visionary Architecture [2007] and many more; Professor of Architecture and Digital Theory; and Director of AVATAR at the Bartlett School of Architecture.
Brett Steele, Director of the Architectural Association School of Architecture and AA Publications; and Co-founder and former Director of the AADRL.
Tony Dunne, Professor and Head of the Design Interactions Department at the Royal College of Art; and Co-founder of Dunne & Raby.
Geoff Manaugh, Author of the popular website BLDGBLOG and recently of The BLDGBLOG Book, Chronicle Books [2009].
Usman Haque, Director of Haque Design; Research and founder of Pachube.com; and recent recipient of the 2009 World Technology Award (Art), Design Museum, 2008 (Interactive) Design of the Year Award and Wellcome Trust Sciart Award.
As well as Murray Fraser, Hanif Kara (tbc), Rachel Armstrong, Bob Sheil, Charles Walker, Tobi Schneidler, Marcos Cruz, Alvin Huang, Matt Webb, Stephen Gage, Ruairi Glynn, Alan Penn, Marjan Colletti and more.
Plein de personnes que nous connaissons à cette conférence (mais pas de fabric | ch): Brett Steele, Geoff Manaugh, Tony Dunne, Usman Haque, Rachel Wingfield, etc. Je crois que c'est la deuxième année qu'ils organisent cette conférence à Londres. A suivre...
A new study of neural prostheses in monkeys suggests that learning to control a robotic arm with the power of thought may happen more naturally than scientists had expected. Jose Carmena and Karunesh Ganguly at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB), found that the animals create a mental map of the device, much as we do when learning to swim or swing a tennis racket.
A number of labs have already shown that monkeys--and in a few cases, humans--with electrodes implanted into their brains can learn to control a computer cursor or robotic arm. To train the subjects, scientists first record the activity in a group of neurons as the monkey moves its real arm (or in the case of a paralyzed human, as the person imagines moving his or her arm). Researchers then analyze the neural activity to develop a decoding algorithm that can translate the pattern of brain-cell firing into an action--say, moving a cursor to a certain point on a computer screen.
In the new study, published today in the journal PLoS Biology, monkeys learned to precisely control a computer cursor over a few days. As the animals became proficient at the task, the researchers identified a specific pattern of neural activity in the brain associated with the movement. "The profound part of our study is that this is all happening with something that is not part of one's own body. We have demonstrated that the brain is able to form a motor memory to control a disembodied device in a way that mirrors how it controls its own body. That has never been shown before," said Carmena in a press release from UCB.
The research also suggests that optimizing the decoders may not be as important as expected. A few weeks after the monkeys learned to control the arm with the original decoder, Carmena and Ganguly introduced a new one, indicated by a different colored cursor. According to the release:
As the monkeys were mastering the second decoder, the researchers would suddenly switch back to the original decoder and saw that the monkeys could immediately perform the task without missing a beat. The ability to switch back and forth between the two decoders shows a level of neural plasticity never before associated with the control of a prosthetic device. "This is a study that says that maybe one day, we can really think of the ultimate neuroprosthetic device that humans can use to perform many different tasks in a more natural way," said Carmena.
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.
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.
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.
There’s nothing wrong with hooking up a robot with a Facebook account. IRC channels have had ELISA-style bots who have answered your questions in a seemingly intelligent manner for decades. Plants are tweeting, asking for more sunlight and water; babies are sending messages from the womb.
However, the high tone and far-reaching assumptions of the BBC article, discussing how Dr Nikolaus Mavridis will give his robot a Facebook page, make for a particularly funny read.
First, it says that the good doctor and co-researchers are doing this because they want to “look into ways of overcoming the reluctance of people to stay in touch with robots.”
Well, this may come as a surprise, but I’ve been reluctant to stay in touch with robots for several reasons other than the lack of their Facebook profile. First, there aren’t that many of them; and those that do exist aren’t really all that intelligent. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge science fiction fan and have a keen interest in robotics and AI, but however you feel about the subject it’s a bit too early to “stay in touch” with robots.
The article also says that embedding the robot in a social web - Facebook, that is - will “give rise to a sustainable friendship can grow up between man and machine.” Erm, nope. It’s a fun stunt to raise some awareness about the project, and it’s cool for Facebook to have a robot among its 200 million users, but it will not give rise to friendship between man and machine; just like those IRC bots haven’t really improved human-robotic relationships over the years. Maybe the fact that we’re mostly ignoring robots as far as social activities go will come back and haunt us in some Matrix-like fashion, but I’ll take my chances and skip this particular Facebook friend.
At first glance, QB1 appears to be a simple screen mounted onto a black arm and box. But it comes to life through human interaction, for now in the form of a sort of personal DJ service.
(Credit: OZWE)
SAN FRANCISCO--When Swiss developers designed the QB1 robot, they weren't going for human-like looks or cute puppydog mannerisms.
Instead, they're hoping QB1 will hook people in on a more meaningful level--by providing a handy music-suggestion service--and thus giving the robot continuous exposure to data stemming from real human interaction.
Artificial intelligence "systems need to learn in the real world, from real people. You cannot program them with knowledge from the real world," said Frederic Kaplan, CEO and co-founder of QB1 developer OZWE.
The QB1 was showcased to the public last weekend at Swissnex, an annex of the Consulate General of Switzerland here that's dedicated to bridging knowledge in science, education, art, and innovation between Switzerland and North America.
QB1 is what Kaplan calls a "robotic object"; people interact with it through gestures. In its first application, QB1 is loaded with a kind of disc jockey feature because that invites people to spend time with it.
Kaplan got this idea out of his experience working for 10 years with Sony's world famous dog-like AI robot, Aibo.
"What was frustrating was that nobody was interacting with it long-term. There are so many objects in your house, so why interact with an object that is only for pleasure?" he said. And as Aibo needed time with humans to learn, this was a fundamental problem.
"The limit for AI is not computing power, it's getting experience," Kaplan said. So QB1 tries to steal your time doing something useful, playing your music. The AI system incorporated into QB1 has about five different strategies to intelligently predict what music you want to listen to at the moment.
One of the approaches is based on statistical probability and might give the best results with the fewest errors in the beginning. Another more complicated scheme observes who is in the room, the time of the day, and how people move. After some time, it might have learned enough to perform better than the statistical probability analysis, and data gets prioritized based on your feedback. It is, in effect, learning the user.
"If indeed it is successful, it can be used for an enormous number of applications," Kaplan said.
At first glance, the QB1 seems to have nothing to do with AI. It's just an elegant screen mounted on a sleek, black, cloth-covered arm and box. The screen moves to look toward you, displaying a shadow of your movements and an intuitive interface.
OZWE CEO Frederic Kaplan presented his company's QB1 robot over the weekend at Swissnex, an annex of the Consulate General of Switzerland in San Francisco.
(Credit: Erik Palm/CNET)
According to Kaplan, QB1 is unique in having both an interactive gesture-based interface and robotic movements. With built-in infrared lights and sensors, it performs face recognition through 3D modeling without a stereo camera. It also detects how your body moves.
"Industrial and graphic design are core aspects of QB1," Kaplan said, mentioning how people's movements are reflected stylistically on the screen when they interact, as many people don't like to see their own raw image. This was discovered when a predecessor of QB1, Wizkid, was exposed to visitors for three months at The Museum of Modern Art in New York last year.
"We're now looking for people who want to try (out QB1) in their homes for a couple of weeks. Later we will start production and sell it, hopefully in 2009," Kaplan said.
Notre ami Frédéric Kaplan à Swissnex San Francisco (où nous étions le mois passé) qui présente son robot-computer QB1. Nouveaux modes d'interaction avec ici l'usage d'une caméra 3d (enregistre la profondeur par le biai d'un faisceau infra-rouge).
Sony’s AIBO may be defunct, but the little robotic dogs still have a loyal fanbase. On February 7th in Japan, a bunch of AIBO owners (37 of them) got together and put on a show, conducted by what else but a Sony Rolly. It looks like the Rolly was set up to play an audio command, which the AIBOs would all respond in unison… Have a look:
A new exhibition called Forest, curated by Cécile Martin, opens up tomorrow night in Montreal. For the show, "artists and architects have joined forces to propose a new vision of the forest."
There are three pavilions in all: "three installations that invite one to penetrate and explore the movements and dangers of the canopy, soil and hidden dangers of the forest." They include the poetically named "From Chernobyl to Montreal, the Incandescent Zen Garden," whose creators note that "the natural phenomena of radioactivity and sound waves are amplified," with part of the installation "illuminated night and day by a red light, the same one that made the forest – the Red Forest – adjacent to the Chernobyl nuclear reactor vibrate."
This slightly unclear image nonetheless leaves me wondering what the biological effects might be if you could cause a several-acre test-forest to vibrate constantly: what strange roots and branches would grow? Would constant vibration cause radically new tree structures to grow – or just make for some very happy plants?
It'd be like the sound farm, only more tactile – and far stranger.
A perpetual earthquake as a lab for cultivating the unnatural.
The other two pavilions, meanwhile, are "The Macrocosm of Fiber or the Filtering Pavilion" and "The Mobile Branch, A Forest of Hypnosis and Vertigo." The latter project, a collaboration between architect Philip Beesley – whose work was explored here a few years ago – and artist Patrick Beaulieu, is described a kind of animatronic thicket: "A raised three-dimensional flooring and a cover propelled at 300 rotations per minute form a vibrating dance of branches and twigs, constituting a human-sized space of the in-between from which humans are nevertheless excluded."
You wander into a forest – only to realize that it's not a forest at all, but a vast machine...
There are a series of workshops on Friday and Saturday, as well – so if you're anywhere near Montreal, check it out! Tell them you heard about it on BLDGBLOG.
Implant Matrix, we read, is "an interactive geotextile that could be used for reinforcing landscapes and buildings of the future." It is a responsive latticework that, installed beneath soil, would act as a kind of a terrestrial prosthesis, a local replacement for the earth's surface. An earth surface machine.
The Implant can also be used, however, as a way to treat "an architectural building skin as a responsive textile," facilitating "active exchanges with building occupants." In the process, the machine would exhibit "mechanical empathy."
Which means what, exactly?
"Mechanical empathy" is described by the project's designers – Philip Beesley Architect of Toronto – as a kind of architectural eroticism. So if you're lonely... reach out and touch your house: "The components of this system are mechanisms that react to human occupants as erotic prey. The elements respond with subtle grasping and sucking motions. Arrays of ‘whisker’ capacitance sensors and shape-memory alloy actuators are used to achieve sensitive reflexive functions. The interactive elements operate in chained, rolling swells, producing a billowing motion. This motion creates a diffuse peristaltic pumping that pulls air and organic matter through the occupied space."
The assembly, in other words, with its micro-mechanical nerve endings, seems to mimic orgasm... Perhaps giving new meaning to earthquakes. (Read more in this PDF).
Two more, decidely cinematic, views of the Implant Matrix:
Of course, there is a bewildering array of other such projects by Philip Beesley Architect featured on their website, including Cybele, a kind of rubberized terrain-machine on stilts –
– which, seen from above in this next image, offers its own miniature landscape, another earth surface machine.
Then there's the hypnotically delicate Orpheus Filter, with its shivering infrastructure of virus-like bladders arranged in hanging constellations and blurred carousels (below).
(Abstractly related: Strandbeestmovie. With huge thanks to Eric Bury for the tip! And... I just saw that Tropolism also featured the Implant Matrix, so check out their coverage for a bit more).
This 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.
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