Thursday, April 21. 2011
Very nice edited picture by Philippe Rahm architectes on Rahm's Facebook account. It's about a publication in Hochparterre, a swiss magazine. I haven't read the article yet... but the picture describes a sort of climatically variable, imaginary "landscaped" architecture according to what I speculate. Architecture as variable landscape. I like it a lot.
To understand why the different "functions" are at different level and why you would need to use ladders to get there, you should check this project.
Tuesday, February 22. 2011
-----
Alan Gibney was over at Arup a couple of weeks ago testing a Wireless Sensor Network design tool in number 8 Fitzroy Street that he developed during his PhD on a tool for wifi access point positioning.
Using a 3D info of the building the tool allows us to figure out the best location for network gateways based on the required location of sensing nodes and the material characteristics of the building. This particular installation was of interest since the majority of the office is open plan which means that the “stuff” that interferes with wireless signals is much more dynamic and difficult to model than say a concrete wall or a glass partition which is traditionally quite stationary and has modelable properties.
Data Capture Process
The process shown in the sketch above involved 1] identifying sensor locations on the fourth floor of number 8 Fitzroy, 2] walking around the floor plate taking measurements of signal strength for each node in different areas, 3] mapping the signal strength, 4] generating a heatmap of gateway options, 5] running agent based optimisation algos to select optimal gateway positions.
Signal strength of node in different locations of office
The signal strengths were then loaded into the design tool to verify that the actual were similar enough to those predicted in the model. With a mean error of 1.41 the model seemed pretty robust.
The design tool then allows a variety of gateway / sensor nodes positions to be tested and compared for different types of optimisation (battery life, signal robustness, minimising nodes required etc.)
Topology of possible WSN
A ray launching method is used to propogate the signal strength from a node to a gateway with the journey being recalculated using a motif model that describes the radion propogation model of a material. The image below shows the heat map generated for a gateway positioned in the open plan area of the office.
Candidate gateway locations
Measurement vs Prediction
Heat map based on signal strength from gateway
Next steps are to use the design tool to model the whole building in preparation to roll out a 200+ node WSN in the building. The aim of the installation will be to monitor light (lux) levels in the office alongside occupancy to analyse and optimise both light comfort levels and energy efficiency.
More detail on the WSN design tool is available at:
Motif Model
Propagation Model
Optimisation Algorithms
All images on Flickr
Friday, December 03. 2010
Via BLDGBLOG
-----
by noreply@blogger.com (Geoff Manaugh)
 [Image: From "Kielder Probes" by Bob Sheil].
Beginning in 2003, architect Bob Sheil began experimenting with a group of "micro-environmental surveying probes" that he was later to install in Kielder Park, Northumbria, UK.
 [Image: From "Kielder Probes" by Bob Sheil].
The probes were "designed to act as dual monitors and responsive artefacts." What does that mean? Sheil explains:
The probes were designed to measure difference over time rather than the static characteristics of any given instance. Powered by solar energy, the probes gathered and recorded ‘micro environmental data’ over time. The probes were simultaneously and physically responsive to these changes, opening out when warm and sunny, closing down when cold and dark. Thus not only did the probes record environmental change, but they demonstrated how these changes might induce a responsive behaviour specific to a single location.
After the probes were installed, they were filmed by "an array of high-resolution digital cameras programmed to record at regular intervals."
   [Images: From "Kielder Probes" by Bob Sheil].
The resulting data—which took note of the climatic and solar situations in which the objects began to change—offers insights, Sheil suggests, into how "passively activated responsive architecture" might operate in other sites, under other environmental conditions.
 [Images: From "Kielder Probes" by Bob Sheil].
As DIY landscape-registration devices constructed from what appear to be off-the-shelf aluminum plates, they also cut an interesting formal profile above the horizon line, like rare birds or machine-flowers perched amidst the tree stumps.
 [Image: From "Kielder Probes" by Bob Sheil].
Thursday, August 12. 2010
-----
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.
Friday, July 23. 2010
By fabric | ch
-----
As a follow up to our recent post about fabric | ch's installation (Arctic Opening / Fenêtre Arctique) on the Frioul Island in Marseilles, here are some pictures shot during the exhibition.
It has been a quite difficult project to achieve due to hard climatic conditions (40°C all day long during installation and exhibition... This was certainly hard for us, but even more for computers and electronic equipment...), but also due to the fact that the location, size of installation and lighting technology have changed one week prior to opening! ... Definitely not easy to manage...
We thought of this project as a sort of fictional expedition, but it ended up to be a real one! We worked during one week on site to set it up, test, code and modify it. The result was some sort of hypnotic leftover of this experience, running in standalone mode.
 
Interfaces and programs analyze the meteo as well as the lighting conditions north of the Artic Circle, where daytime is permanent at this time of the year (we were still close to the summer solstice in the Northern Hemisphere). These illumination conditions were then channeled (though a LED based large "window-display") to the Frioul Island to light up a piece of its deserted landscape. This distant light appears only at sunset in Marseilles and until sunrise.
 
.jpg)
 
.jpg)
Pictures: Frank Petitpierre, Nicolas Besson, Leticia Carmo, fabric | ch
--------------------------------
Project, conception and programmation: fabric | ch
Ligths: Lumens8
On site supervision: Etienne Fortin, AMI
MIMI Direction: Ferdinand Richard, AMI
Curatorship: Pierre-Emmanuel Reviron, Seconde Nature
With the support of Marseille-Provence 2013, MIMI Festival and Lumens8. Arctic Opening is a MIMI 2010 creation by fabric | ch.
Wednesday, June 23. 2010
By fabric | ch
-----
Arctic Opening is a new installation by fabric | ch, curated by Seconde Nature (curatorship: Pierre-Emmanuel Reviron) that we will install next week on the Frioul Islands in Marseille (South of France, Mediterranean Sea), in the context of the Festival MIMI (Festival des musiques innovantes et actuelles).
The installation will be freely accessible to everyone from the 30th of June to the 14th of July and is part of an outdoor exhibition presenting several works of art / experimental architecture (among which Nicolas Reeves, Lee Patterson).
 
The aim of the project is to let appear a "second day" made of a large artificial ligthing, between Marseille's sunsets and sunrises, when everything becomes dark and quiet on the islands. This illumination will have its source up north, beyond the polar circle, where the sun shines 24 hours long during summer. Thus the continuous day of the arctic summer will be transported to the shore of the Mediterranean Sea.
Arctic Opening will light up a zone of the arid landscape of the Frioul close to an industrial ruin, channeling a fictional catastrophic future of an Arctic Ocean free of ice with the present of this mediterranean island, already surrounded by sea routes and heavy tourism. The result will become a metis landscape, all nights long: an arctic mediterranean, remote day at night.
 
 
The overall installation will look a bit like a scientific expedition, with sensing devices and climatic interfaces set up under a tent, which will analyze the polar meteorologic data and control the variations of intensity of Arctic Opening.
.jpg)
--------------------------------
ARCTIC OPENING
Each day, when night falls on our urbanized landscapes in our cities, our streets or our ports, another day dawns, electric. It is literally a "second day" which begins: the one of neon signs, street lights, sodium, mercury or fluorescent lighting, the one of illuminated apartments and shops windows, the one of night activities that we did not know two centuries ago.
Although today we no longer think much about it, as this "second day" is now part of everyday life of city dwellers, this artificial light had been a conquest: by fire first, then by the gas, and more recently by electricity. This "fabricated" light permitted first to extend artificially the day at night to illuminate the darkness, but also to transform our relationship to time, to landscape and to space. It especially allowed to exceed the given natural immemorial cycle of day and night induced by the rotation of the Earth itself, and thus to redefine architectural and urban spaces.
However, that day, which has become "perpetual", has interfered since the nineteenth century with our natural rhythms, producing dramatic changes: emancipated of the natural alternation of day and night, social habits and customs of inhabitants benefiting This "discovery" found themselves immediately and irrevocably transformed. One began to live and work at night, having fun more and more under artificial light, and sometimes, as compensation, to sleep the day away. One also began to design new architectures that did not require natural lighting anymore. In a few decades, artificial lighting profoundly altered the lifestyle of city dwellers, but not only: birds began to sing at night near the lampposts, insects to swarm under the spotlights and stars to disappear of the urban night sky, opening the door to a strange world, that combines natural and artificial cycles. Losses and gains then.
This new environment was also marked by the willingness of men to control the "randomness" or the "wildness" to take control of a growing number of factors and constitutive dimensions of their habitat. Today, this "second day", historically "industrial", is still often a day with a monotone lighting, having essentially a functional goal (to see, to secure, to work, but also to read, to cook, etc..). Mostly, it evokes nothing, and if it varies, it is to stay in a comfort zone preset unlike natural climates which are constantly playing with landscape to offer different uses and perceptions of a same environment. In addition we are just beginning to take the measure of the energy cost of that enterprise and its participation in global ecological negative balance of humanity. Yet this environment, sometimes magical, sometimes disturbing, develops undoubtedly for us a poetry of shifts. Now, the challenge is to deploy these shifts, which combine presents and futures, into a comprehensive reflection on our contemporary space and our consumption of energy.
Designed for the Innovative Music Festival (MIMI 2010) in Marseille, on the Frioul islands, Arctic Opening does not aim to deny this "second day", but to amplify its positive and sensitive issues. Thus, Arctic Opening seeks to develop the potential of imagination(s) of artificial illumination, while integrating new technologies and intelligent lighting cycles of low energy consumption.
In a global environment, endlessly interconnected, which develops new forms of mobility, temporalities, and social behaviours at the crossings of time zones, this artificial day provides an opportunity for another kind of "days", simultaneous and distant: an imaginary or mediated "connection" with countries where precisely and literally, at the same time, the sun is shinning. Through satellite imagery and sensor data, it is now possible to imagine opening a "window" onto a sensitive and remote light whose intensity varies continuously, the sky is sunny, then cloudy, then possibly sunny again. A window "teleporting" abstractly a remote atmosphere without physical mobility, without means of transport other than transportation data from there to here.
With Arctic Opening, fabric | ch proposes to create such an "opening" at a large scale, to another day: an artificial and sensitive light, revealing some geographical patterns, luminous and meteorological, across the globe (to the summer of one hemisphere corresponds the winter of the other, to the daylight the darkness, to the perpetual light of a pole the night of the other, etc.). When night falls over Marseille this "second day" gets up with its source somewhere north of the Arctic Circle, on the edge of the habitable zones (Hammerfest, Murmansk, Prudhoe Bay, Tuktoyaktuk, Igloolik, Clyde River, Scoresby, etc.), where once the ice melted new navigation routes open and will open more and more in the future. Fed by light coming from regions, where in this season, the horizontal light of the sun never sets, where sunrise and sunset mix, Arctic Opening reproduces the continuous modulation of the northern summer. Composed of hundreds of light emitting diodes (LEDs), this bright band long of eighteen meters illuminates a rocky landscape, swept by winds. At sunrise, it goes slowly to reveal a temporary installation of pipes, placed there to conduct this experiment in distant light. Erected near the vicinity of a military and industrial relic of the twentieth century, a tent hosting the instruments of control suggests a possible scientific expedition in an "hostile" zone.
The combination of light produced by this window and the Frioul islands' landscape produces a composite territory: Arctic Mediterranea, remote nocturnal day.
This hybrid area in mixed light is purposely created as a prospective environment, which evokes the contemporary patterns of mobility and crossing time zones, the fluxes and and the networks, the artificiality and the mediatisation, or to indicate the strange topographic similarities between the arid Frioul islands and the Arctic regions where no tree grows. As if this temporary place in front of Marseille, illuminated by a light transported from the Arctic could become the distant, catastrophic and fictitious future of these northern territories: warmed by climatic changes, visited by boats navigating on new routes opened by melting ice, the shores of the Far North could begin to resemble those of the Mediterranean Sea. This environment would then hybridise himself as well, as people become increasingly mobile over time: mix of here and elsewhere, future and present, material and immaterial.
Arctic Opening: mixed territories.
fabric | ch, June 2010.
--------------------------------
Original Text (in French):
FENÊTRE ARCTIQUE
Chaque jour, lorsque la nuit tombe sur nos paysages urbanisés, dans nos villes, nos rues ou nos ports, un autre jour se lève, électrique. C'est littéralement une " seconde journée " qui commence : celle des néons et des enseignes, des éclairages publics au sodium, au mercure ou à la fluorescence, celle encore des fenêtres et des vitrines illuminées, celle enfin d'une effervescence nocturne que nous ne connaissions pas il y a encore deux siècles.
Bien qu'aujourd'hui nous n'y pensions plus guère, tant ce " deuxième jour " fait dorénavant partie de notre quotidien de citadins, cet éclairage fut une conquête : par le feu en premier lieu, par le gaz ensuite, et plus récemment par l'électricité. Cette lumière " fabriquée " permit d'abord de prolonger de façon artificielle le jour durant la nuit, d'éclairer la pénombre, mais aussi d'architecturer et de transformer de façon radicale notre relation au temps, au paysage, à l'espace. Elle permit surtout de dépasser cette donnée naturelle, immémoriale et incontournable qu'a toujours été le cycle du jour et de la nuit induit par la rotation de la Terre sur elle-même, et de redéfinir ainsi l'espace architectural et urbain.
Cependant, ce jour devenu " perpétuel " grâce à l'électricité interféra dès le XIXème siècle avec nos rythmes naturels, produisant des modifications spectaculaires : émancipés de l'alternance diurne et nocturne imposée par la nature, les habitudes sociales et les usages des habitants bénéficiant de cette " découverte " se retrouvèrent immédiatement et irrémédiablement transformés. On se mit à vivre et travailler la nuit, à se divertir de plus en plus sous un éclairage artificiel, et parfois, en compensation, à dormir le jour… à l'abri des persiennes (autre système, mécanique celui-ci, de contrôle du climat et de la lumière). On se mit aussi à concevoir de nouvelles architectures qui ne nécessitaient plus d'éclairage naturel. En quelques décennies, l'éclairage artificiel modifia en profondeur les modes de vie des citadins, mais pas uniquement : les oiseaux se mirent à chanter la nuit à proximité des lampadaires, les insectes à s'agglutiner sous les projecteurs et les étoiles à s'effacer partiellement du ciel nocturne urbain, ouvrant ainsi la porte à un univers étrange, transformé et où se mêlent cycles naturels et artificiels. Pertes et gains donc.
Ce nouvel environnement fut également marqué par la volonté des hommes d'en maîtriser l'" aléatoire " ou le " sauvage " pour prendre le contrôle d'un nombre grandissant de facteurs et de dimensions constitutives de leur habitat. Aujourd'hui encore, cette " deuxième journée ", historiquement " industrielle ", demeure souvent un jour à la lumière monotone, à vocation essentiellement fonctionnelle (voir, sécuriser, travailler, mais aussi lire, cuisiner, etc.). La plupart du temps, elle n'évoque rien, et si elle varie, c'est pour rester dans une zone de confort préprogrammée, au contraire des climats lumineux naturels qui jouent continuellement avec le paysage pour offrir différentes occupations et perceptions d'un même environnement. De plus nous commençons à peine à prendre la mesure du coût énergétique de cette entreprise et de sa participation au bilan écologique global négatif de l'humanité. Pourtant, cet environnement, parfois magique, parfois inquiétant, développe pour nous, incontestablement, une poésie des décalages. Ces décalages qui mêlent présents et futurs, il s'agit de les déployer dans une réflexion d'ensemble sur notre espace contemporain et notre consommation d'énergie.
Conçu pour le Festival des Musiques Innovantes (MIMI) 2010 à Marseille, sur les îles du Frioul, le projet Fenêtre Arctique n'a donc pas pour objectif de nier cette " deuxième journée ", mais d'en amplifier les aspects sensibles et positifs. Fenêtre Arctique cherche ainsi à développer le potentiel d'imaginaire(s)de l'illumination artificielle, tout en intégrant les nouvelles technologies et les cycles d'éclairage intelligents à faible consommation énergétiques.
Dans un environnement désormais mondialisé, perpétuellement interconnecté, où se développent de nouvelles mobilités, temporalités et comportements sociaux aux croisements des fuseaux horaires, ce jour artificiel offre l'occasion d'une ouverture vers d'autres jours, simultanés et distants : une " connexion " imaginaire ou médiatisée avec des contrées où précisément et littéralement, au même instant, il fait jour. Par le biais d'images satellites et de capteurs de données, il est désormais possible d'imaginer ouvrir une " fenêtre " sur une lumière sensible et éloignée dont l'intensité varie, continuellement, où le ciel est ensoleillé, puis couvert, puis éventuellement ensoleillé à nouveau. Une fenêtre " téléportant " de façon abstraite une atmosphère distante, sans mobilité physique, sans moyen de transport autre que le transport des données, de là-bas à ici.
Avec Fenêtre Arctique, fabric | ch se propose de créer une telle " ouverture " à large échelle, vers un autre jour, durable et distant : une clarté artificielle, sensible, révélant certains motifs géographiques, lumineux et météorologiques, à l'échelle du globe (à l'été d'un hémisphère correspond en opposé l'hiver de l'autre, au clair l'obscur, au jour perpétuel d'un pôle la nuit de l'autre, etc.). Lorsque la nuit tombe sur Marseille, ce " deuxième jour " se lève en prenant sa source quelque part au nord du Cercle Arctique, aux confins des zones habitables (Hammerfest, Murmansk, Prudhoe Bay, Tuktoyaktuk, Igloolik, Clyde River, Scoresbysund, etc.), où une fois les glaces fondues de nouvelles routes maritimes s'ouvrent et s'ouvriront plus encore à l'avenir. Alimentée par la lumière de contrées, où, en cette saison, le soleil à l'éclairage horizontal ne se couche jamais, où son lever se mêle à son coucher, Fenêtre Arctique reproduit les modulations continuelles de l'été septentrional. Composée de centaines de diodes électroluminescentes (LEDs), cette bande lumineuse longue de dix-huit mètres éclaire un paysage rocailleux, balayé par les vents. Au lever du soleil, elle s'éteint lentement pour laisser apparaître une installation temporaire de tubulures, plantées là pour mener cette expérience en lumière distante. Dressée à proximité, au voisinage d'un vestige militaire et industriel du XXème siècle, une tente abritant des instruments de contrôle évoque une possible expédition scientifique en milieu " hostile ".
La combinaison de l'éclairage produit par cette fenêtre et le paysage des îles du Frioul engendre un territoire composite : Méditerranée arctique, jour distant nocturne.
Ce territoire métisse en lumière mélangée est créé à dessein comme environnement prospectif des motifs contemporains de la mobilité et du croisement des fuseaux horaires, des flux et des réseaux, de l'artificialité et de la médiatisation, ou encore pour signaler les étranges similarités topographiques entre les îles arides du Frioul et les territoires arctiques où aucun arbre ne pousse. Comme si ce lieu temporaire au large de Marseille, éclairé par une lumière reconstruite et transportée de l'arctique, pouvait révéler le futur lointain, catastrophique et fictif, de ces territoires nordiques : réchauffés par les dérèglements climatiques, parcourus par le va et vient des bateaux lancés sur les nouvelles routes maritimes ouvertes par la fonte des glaces, les rives du Grand-Nord pourraient commencer à ressembler celles de la Méditerranée. Cet environnement se métisserait alors, lui-aussi, à la façon des populations devenues de plus en plus mobiles au fil du temps : mélanges d'ici et d'ailleurs, de futurs et de présents, de matériel et d'immatériel.
Fenêtre Arctique : territoires mélangés.
fabric | ch, juin 2010.
--------------------------------
Project, conception and programmation: fabric | ch
Ligths: Lumens8
On site supervision: Etienne Fortin, AMI
MIMI Direction: Ferdinand Richard, AMI
Curatorship: Pierre-Emmanuel Reviron, Seconde Nature
With the support of Marseille-Provence 2013, MIMI Festival and Lumens8. Arctic Opening is a MIMI 2010 creation by fabric | ch.
Personal comment:
Note: the MIMI Festival is the occasion to listen to some of the most innovative or profiled musicians in the incredible context of the Frioul Islands. I can for example highly recommend the evening of the 11th of July: Carsten Nicolai a.k.a. Alva Noto in concert with Blixa Bargeld (Einstürzende Neubauten). This promises a lot!
Thursday, June 17. 2010
Via BLDGBLOG
-----
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?
Thursday, May 20. 2010
Image via ArchDaily
-----
Personal comment:
It is just some sort of reserve of sand, or something similar I guess. But it makes me think of some potential architectures. Architecture as landscape, with landscape openness and variations in topology, materials, seasons and daily variation in climate and illumination...
Wednesday, January 20. 2010
Dutch designers Kapteinbolt have created a collapsible plywood workspace.
Called FLKS, the design features a desk and chair that fold out from two hinged sheets.
The whole arrangement can be folded flat and leaned against a wall when not in use.
Here’s some text from Kapteinbolt:
–
FLKS
We like to introduce FLKS (flex), a flexible workplace.
Just open the panels unfold the table and the chair and put the plug in for light.
The legs from the table and the chair are provided with special designed joints, pull and turn 90°.
The dimensions of the panels are a combination of sizes according to the Modulor of Le Corbusier in combination with the functional human sizes of today. This design is characterized by simplicity, clarity, freedom and space.
Freedom in using and in arranging this workplace.
The dialogue between the space and furniture, but also the spaciousness of the furniture itself is an important fact. By bringing furniture back to the essence you can create space. The FLKS provides a definition of space. By giving cover to the back and to one of the sides, the FLKS creates a private and comfortable workplace.
A flexible workplace.
The closed panels open in a 90° angle. The workplace is easy to move and usable in any space.
FLKS is not only a functional piece of furniture, but also a room divider. Several pieces can be arranged into perfect work stations.
The pieces do not only interact with the space in which they find themselves, but also with each other.
With an extra chair it is even a workplace for two.
The various units do not only interact with the space in which they find themselves, but also with each other. One panel at a side and one panel at the back, open or just a frame, provides a safe and homely feeling. This definition provides a safe and private feeling, by giving cover to the back and to one of the sides. This cover can be formed by a closed panel or by just a frame.
Kapteinbolt is a design studio for 2d and 3d design founded by Louwrien Kaptein (interior architect) and Menno Bolt (multimedia designer).
Material:
poplar/birch plywood/stainless steel
-----
Via Dezeen
Personal comment:
Not a new idea, but done in a simple and clever way!
Friday, December 04. 2009
The Jargon ETC team is finally publishing our comprehensive post on sustainability. We hold the issue quite dearly here at the blog, but have never gotten to a public definition. Given that sustainability is currently the hottest issue in architectural circles thanks to recent inciting articles by Amanda Baillieu and the upcoming Copenhagen Summit on Climate Change, we feel like now is the opportune time to address the issue.
In the articles below each of our contributors talk about sustainability 300 words. Each author addresses their opinion on its definition and the larger implications of sustainability.
Read it all and give feedback with comments.
----------
Mr. Cuellar
By "sustainable," I understand a productive ecological approach that has no degenerative impact on the earth's natural, chemical life-based cycles and finite resources. The conventional means for achieving sustainable architecture are strictly functional: the building must meet these requirements, expend this little water, contain so much recycled material, etc.
Defining our sustainability strategy as functional would be to ignore the scope and imaginative potential of the issue. Many aspects of building, food production, transportation, and our very societies are unsustainable, and recent waves of eco-paranoia only make this more clear. Sustainability concerns every aspect of our daily lives, therefore the solution to managing resource consumption should, too.
Socially, we are at once bombarded by energy-saving tips and accustomed to long, hot showers.
Psychologically, we face "eco-angst."
Morally, it's difficult to decide whether the perversion of nature is "wrong" or irrelevant, interesting and subject to further perversion.
Politically, we are encouraged to trade in our clunkers, but suburban homeowners' associations forbid street-facing PV panels.
Practically, how could we possibly know for sure whether organic produce from overseas is more sustainable than pesticide-coated local fruit?
The misstep of architects would be to assume that meeting energy and spatial standards alone can cure the germ of today's ecological problems, let alone address our complex habits of consumption.
I propose a temporal and geographical solution, a nomadism, part Johnny Appleseed, part wi-fi addict. Debord's notion that nomads endure a "content less freedom" is helpful to understand the proposal (The Society of the Spectacle, New York, Zone Books, 2006 edition). We can suppose sedentariness produces content (a content-full captivity), but this is obviously unsustainable today. We mustn't adopt new typologies, but radicalize our existing ones. There must be living rhythms and situations, beyond and behind our artificial gardens of Eden, that agitate normalization and make the earth's outside environment fertile and flexible again.
----------
Mr. Grey
There are two leading approaches to architectural sustainability. The first view of sustainability is as an architectural a priori, no different from structure, materials or occupancy. This is the approach which leads to critical solutions and an understanding of entropy. The other approach is that of continual accretion. This second option, used by an army of LEED certified practitioners and advocated by figures as prominent as President Obama, believes that the application of more solar, wind, insulation, and geothermal is the solution to make something sustainable. These answers are built on the myth of capital production as the solution to any obstacle. Despite its wide acceptance, sustainable people should be skeptical of the ‘more’ solution.
The ‘more’ argument has a long history in the West. Children are taught that the Soviet Union collapsed because of the weight of overwhelming amounts of capital production in the West. Likewise, mass production is credited with overcoming the ‘Wild West,’ defeating fascism in Europe, and birthing a semi-autonomous middle class.
Now, facing a climate crisis, the ‘more’ solution resumes its typecasting. Architects embrace the more ideology for its marketability. Large allocations for solar and plant covered buildings dominate current built form and school pedagogies. These can be sold to clients in Dubai or New York without ever thinking about the real differences between these places.
More solutions always parallel the exponential growth patterns of capitalism. There is nothing sustainable about exponential models. Natural entropy is part of any critical sustainable solution; this directly involves architecture, and harks to old precedents.
This architecture, considering the climate a priori, was noted by Vitruvius, shown in the primitive hut by Laugier in 1804 and again by Frank Lloyd Wright. This architecture stops building 'more' for the sake of reparation. It creates critical architecture that requires pursuit of material, form, psychology, and ideology to offer a critical approach to sustainability.
examples : + and -
(+) Laugier: Primitave Hut Wright: Taliesen West Zumthor: Thermal Baths Roche: Hybrid Muscle
(-) Piano: Vulcano Buono SOM: Pearl River Tower DWELL magazine: Normandy Chapel
----------
Mr. Langevin
Environment as Sustainability
The question of sustainability is a question of environment. “Environment” (or some form of the term) has long been part of the public consciousness, beginning in the 1960’s with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, continuing into the 1970’s with the conservation movement, and remaining relevant to current discussions about climate change and global warming. While the general understanding of “environment” has evolved during these decades, the exploration of the distinctly human type of environment has lagged behind, stymied by the practice of standardizing the atmospheres that our buildings provide. Going forward, attempts to redefine these unsustainable built environments will provide the basis for a real sustainable revolution.
The word “environment” describes a complex network of interdependent variables that change across time and space. Variability is crucial in establishing an environment’s capacity for diversity, flexibility, and adaptability, all of which are tenets of fundamentally sustainable systems. Earth’s natural environment acts as one such variant ecosystem on a large scale, transforming by day and season in a cyclical process that continues on indefinitely into the future.
Since the advent of air-conditioning, the human environment has been uniquely divorced from the notion of variability, striving instead for predictability through strict mechanisms of control. Standardization has neutralized the climatic context of buildings by defining an artificially tempered interior that can be implemented in any corner of the world, provided a big enough HVAC system and tight enough exterior envelope. In these spaces, the occupant is deterministically reduced to the passive recipient of prescribed target conditions.
A sustainable human environment cultivates lower human energy use, higher sensory engagement, and increased productivity by integrating with surrounding ecosystems and embracing internal variability. Drawing from the diurnal and seasonal transformations of the natural climate, the environment acts as its own smaller ecosystem that evolves over time in a similarly cyclical manner. Efforts to achieve this atmospheric dynamic within a building are rare and difficult to pursue, as the addiction to climate control runs deep and is firmly entrenched in prevailing codes and guidelines. Nevertheless, they provide an essential challenge to the human environments most responsible for mankind’s dissonance with the Earth, and in doing so access the heart of the answers to the sustainability question.
-----
Via Jargon, etc.
Personal comment:
"The word “environment” describes a complex network of interdependent variables that change across time and space. Variability is crucial in establishing an environment’s capacity for diversity, flexibility, and adaptability, all of which are tenets of fundamentally sustainable systems. Earth’s natural environment acts as one such variant ecosystem on a large scale, transforming by day and season in a cyclical process that continues on indefinitely into the future."
and further away:
"The word “environment” describes a complex network of interdependent variables that change across time and space. Variability is crucial in establishing an environment’s capacity for diversity, flexibility, and adaptability, all of which are tenets of fundamentally sustainable systems. Earth’s natural environment acts as one such variant ecosystem on a large scale, transforming by day and season in a cyclical process that continues on indefinitely into the future."
These are quotation from "Mr. Langevin" to which I quite agree and that make me think to what we tried to "pinpoint" (the airconditioning as a non variable functional and comfortable environment) in the project RealRoom(s). It also make me think of another research project about space variability we worked on: Variable environment, even if this one is not really focused on sustainability. It could be a side aspect of it, I think in particular of Rolling Microfunctions"
|
