MERCADO NEGRO by RAMÓN CORONADO
Mercado Negro meaning Black Market in spanish is a 12 week project that deals with reclaiming an ordinary, everyday object and transforming it into a whole new object. At the same time hinting at the lack of parks and recreational functions in Los Angeles. Swing, chair, table and lamp.
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via RAMÓN CORONADO
A 5000 acre farm for Detroit? by Hantz Farms
Hantz Farms plans to farm up to 5,000 acres within the Motor City’s limits in the coming years.
from Hantz Farms:
INTRODUCING HANTZ FARMS™
It’s our dream to rejuvenate our city by returning to our agrarian roots, by creating the world’s largest urban farm right here in Detroit, a sustainable producer and seller of homegrown fruits and vegetables as well as clean energy. Owned, operated and staffed by Detroiters, Hantz Farms will provide:
- Hundreds of “green” jobs for local residents, with on-the-job education. We’ll help Detroit progress to the mixed economy that’s so important for our future.
- A generous supply of fresh, local, safe produce for our families and the region.Hantz Farms will be a year-round operation, providing spring vegetables, a bounty of summer produce, pick-your-own pumpkins and Christmas trees. Not only will we grow for Detroit, but we’ll also be able to export our produce.
- A cleaner, greener environment for our children.We’ll clear away the garbage, the blight, the debris, and in their place grow healthful crops and produce non-polluting wind energy. In every aspect of Hantz Farms, we plan to use only recyclable materials and aim to reduce waste to nearly zero. We’ll also reintroduce Detroiters to the beauty of nature.
- Synergy for local businesses. Tourists coming in to Detroit to visit Hantz Farms—not just for an annual event, but on a daily basis—will patronize other businesses as well.
- Consolidation of city resources. Detroit’s fire, police and public works departments can better serve city residents when freed from the burden of nearly abandoned neighborhoods.
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via Archinect and Hantz Farms Detroit
GEOSPATIAL HOLOGRAMS by Zebra Imaging
A firm called Zebra Imaging tells us about “geospatial holograms“—including the awesome handheld flashlight-sized projector.
Heavily pitching this as a military technology, citing its usefulness in “battle-space visualization” and “line-of-site analysis for sniper activity,” Zebra seems to under-appreciate the intense levels of interest this thing might generate in the civilian sphere. Hook one of these up to a projector phone and shine 3D holograms of urban space all around you. 3D narrative films of the future!
- Geospatial holograms used in commercial and government applications typically enhance conventional 2D maps, aerial photos, and 3D physical scale models. Complex environments can be well understood using geospatial holograms much faster than with conventional 2D media.
But imagine the gaming possibilities with this thing, let alone the architectural applications: you step up to the front of the class and shine a hologram of your final thesis project onto the blank tabletop before you… Architectural lightsabers.
I don’t at all doubt the usefulness of portable holograms when it comes to invading enemy cities, but I have to wonder what a few games design students in New York or San Francisco could do with this.
Replace all the streetlights on 5th Avenue next year with Zebra Imaging technology and, instead of Christmas decorations, baroque mansions shine in holographic 3D… a new one every half-block for more than a mile, outlined against winter snow.
Or fly black airships over Rome and shine holograms of missing buildings down onto the city below you, ancient walls reappearing in a Batman-like flicker of urban unreality, people looking out their windows, stunned, at this laser archaeology from the sky.
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via BLDGBLOG
MUSCATATUCK URBAN TRAINING CENTER
Before shipping out to Afghanistan, the U.S. Army and members of the Indiana National Guard have been training inside a simulated Afghan village—using what the New York Times describes as a “vaguely foreboding institution that once served as a farm colony for ‘feeble-minded’ boys, and later was a state mental hospital.”
- The Army and the Indiana National Guard have turned the windswept complex, known as Muscatatuck, into a simulacrum of a war-torn Afghan city, with a courthouse, a jail and a graffiti-smeared marketplace. While the table-flat farmland around here hardly evokes the Hindu Kush, this is where the government trains Americans who are part of the most ambitious civilian campaign the United States has mounted in a foreign country in generations—a “civilian surge” intended to improve the lives of Afghans.
The facility’s own website enumerates its architectural benefits, as it comes complete with “1,000 Acres, 70 Buildings, 2,000+ Rooms, (…) 9 Buildings with basements, [and] One mile of tunnels.”
This is, of course, only the most recent example of these sorts of facilities to receive media attention; it is but one part of the massive network of militarized simulations that have been built throughout the United States since 9/11 (and these facilities, of course, are themselves nothing new nor are they unique to the United States: there are historical precedents dating back millennia, as any competent military since the dawn of invasion has simulated its spatial tactics in advance). One such facility even hired actor Carl Weathers, of Apollo Creed fame, to serve as an “acting coach” for the simulated insurgents.
But the passage of U.S. Army trainees through a repurposed mental hospital—in fact, “a farm colony for ‘feeble-minded’ boys”—with the implication that this will help to prepare them for the violence of foreign wars, is extraordinary.
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via BLDGBLOG
O House by Hideyuki Nakayama Architecture
Located in the ancient Japanese city of Kyoto, the O House by hideyuki nakayama architecture is a kind of lean-to structure extending from a main 2-storey house.
O House takes its name from its form in which a kitchen, dining room, furniture and bath area, encircle the main house. these spaces are produced by spanning rafters located between the retaining walls of the adjacent and main house. the o house space is somewhat like a passage garden. Inside is a curved horizontal space, where a portion of the staircase, thin steelframe floor and equally lined fittings are found. The gable side of the house shows its dollhouse conditions, which are open and visible from the adjacent street. Going back and forth everyday through this passage-like area, the residents can see the shape of the main house from outside at various angles.
The house itself appears like a tower, depending on where one views it. the place where the family sleeps is on the second floor of the main house, and one can access it from the staircase that reaches out from the passage garden.
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via designboom
pAlice by SOFTlab
SOFTlab participated in Random Number’s SYSTEM:SYSTEM exhibition with their site specific installation, pAlice. The piece connects all of the openings in the room with a singular surface, turning it inside-out and giving viewers reference to the exterior of the room without physical access to it. Viewers can also look inside the surface from the outside of the room and see a space that is the surface average of these openings without actually seeing the interior space of the room. pAlice is made of over 2400 laser cut triangles and over 3600 custom connections. All of the tooling and labeling was automated using a custom written MEL script.
The name of the piece is a reference to the idea of an Alice Universe:
An Alice universe can be considered to allow at least two topologically-distinct routes between any two points (it is doubly connected), and if one connection (or “handle”) is declared to be a “conventional” spatial connection, at least one other must be deemed to be a non-orientable wormhole connection.
Also references Lewis’s Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass. The piece approximates a highly precise piece of geometry, but is covered in mirrored panels that camouflage the form by reflecting the interior of the room, covering the piece with the same texture as the interior of the room, completing the formal surface as an inversion of the room.
Designed and Produced By SOFTlab for the exhibition system:system
Curtated by Adam Henry and Christina Vassallo
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via CORE.FORM-ULA
Instant House by H3AR
Hugon Kowalski of Polish firm H3AR architecture and design recently created ’instant house’ for an international student competition in Milan. The theme was that of a temporary residential mini unit, linked to the presence of young people with high
levels of territorial mobility connected to particular metropolitan events.
The concept includes concrete cylinders, made from styrofoam concrete (which increases the acoustics and insulation and is twelve times lighter than normal concrete). This concrete contains TI02, which will reduce air pollution. in 2014 it will be possible to produce concrete from rice husks which reduce carbon dioxide emissions during the making process.
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via designboom
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