Shade Pixel by Design Media Lab / Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
Shade pixel is and interactive display that uses small depressions in its surface instead of a light source to display images. The project is another creation of the Design Media Lab at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. The display is a covered with a sheet of flexible spandex that is used to represent information. Small magnets are installed below the spandex and pull it into small depressions that when viewed from the front, create a shadow. When combined in series, these pixel-like depressions have the effect of a light based screen. Because it is non-luminescent and very basic in construction, a shade pixel display could be used on everyday products and even as a material for architectural designs.
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via designboom
THE CITY AND ITS FLOODED DOUBLE / Aqualta by Studio Lindfors
Studio Lindfors—of Cloud Skippers and Cloud City fame—have released a stunning new series of images in which we see New York City and Tokyo after a catastrophic flood.
Called Aqualta, the project is an exquisitely produced tour of a hydrologically transformed metropolis. Gondolas float through a still-blazing Times Square; people fish atop gravel banks that have built up beside inundated skyscrapers; and an aerial network of blimps, catwalks, pedestrian skyways, and cable cars passes and sways above the Venetian streets.
Similar in spirit to Squint Opera’s earlier look at a Flooded London, Aqualta is hard—if not impossible—to separate from the context of melting ice caps and global climate change. However, it deserves visual attention in its own right, even outside such politically charged discussions.
Far from stoking fear about a coming catastrophe, both of these projects—Studio Lindfors and Squint Opera—offer a vision in which people, and the cities they live in, have learned to adapt to the overwhelming presence of water. Indeed, Times Square, in Studio Lindfors’s vision, is radiant, markedly improved by the reflective waters that now flow through it. Of course New York should be at least partially flooded, one might be tempted to think; of course the future of urban planning involves designing with water.
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via BLDGBLOG (high res images HERE / BLDGBLOG flickr)
Technology versus Organic Life by Matthias Männer
Technology versus Organic Life fighting in an imaginary world. Or is it a real world? Perhaps our world? What would be the result of this fight and what would be the consequences for the humanity? Matthias Männer comes to give his point of view to this question through his work, geometrical installations representing both the real and unreal world. He was born in Mitterteich (Germany) in 1976 and he currently lives and works in Munich. In 2004 he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and in 2008 won a “Leonhard & Ida Wolf Memorial” Award.
Matthias Männer’s fields are Painting and Installation, two areas that both combined create a world full of inanimate creatures. This is an imaginary world where there is a constant fight between organic life and technologically advanced objects, a competition about taking over the control. In this concept Matthias is dealing with the modern society’s demands. Adapting geometrical shapes he creates installation objects which however are used only as prototypes as their natural dimensions would most probably prohibit their materialization.
Through their simple geometry these concepts grow out of the wall showing the way to a parallel universe far away from the real or visible world. These installations also reflect the need of the human beings to fight against modern technology and its inanimate creatures; they also represent the desire of everybody for the perfection that derives from his latest creations, a fruit of this advanced – in every possible aspect- world.
However these objects of no life at all, seem to be alive in their one way; an achievement of the designer’s perspective who manages to blow life and soul to these creatures. After all, no matter how strong or dominating Technology is, Life seems to put its own rules which are beyond and over any human devices or creations. This is how it has always been and probably will be in the future.
upcoming Exhibitions
me.machine
Opening: 05/11/2009, 18-21h
Exhibition: 06/11 – 12/12/2009
Wed-Fr 13-18h, Sat 12-16h
Dina4 Projekte
Theresienstrasse 51
80333 Munich
deep dig dug
Opening: 06/03/2010, 18-21h
Exhibition: 07/03 – 25/04/2010
Tokyo Wonder Site Hongo
2-4-16 Hongo, Bunkyou-ku,
Tokyo 113-0033
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via yatzer
Architects Will Investigate ‘Metabolism’ of Future Mega Cities at Icsid 2009 in Singapore
The next 40 years will see rapid urbanization and migration from country to city life. With the world’s mega cities (pop. +10mil) set to increase to 60 by the year 2050, and 75% of the world’s population expected to live in urban areas by the same time – how can the cities of the world develop and sustain themselves in the future?
David Nelson and Stefan Behling of Foster & Partners, and Richard Hassell and Wong Mun Summ of WOHA will attempt to envision not only these issues, but use Singapore as a case study of a city with limited resources for the next 40 years.
Foster & Partners will explore qualities that make up Singapore’s ‘metabolism’ – how it provides assured energy and food, while creating a sense of well-being for its residents. “As architects, we will focus on urban sustainability as an immediate opportunity for a rapidly urbanizing world and explore the role of buildings in this evolution.” Say David and Stefan. “The creation of sustainable and humane habitats will determine the long-term success of humans on earth.”
WOHA will test new cross-programmed infrastructure, urban and architectural typologies to address the pressing issues of water, food and energy security that a city like Singapore will face tomorrow. “In the spirit of seeing a country as simply a large design challenge, we aim to renovate Singapore for the massive changes of the coming century.” Say Richard and Mun Summ.
Toshiko Mori, Principle of Toshiko Mori Architect has a slightly different approach to building urban areas of the future. She believes that when it comes to urban planning, a designer should investigate beyond the city itself and analyse its network of rural support systems including natural infrastructure, wild zones and undeveloped land. Her aim is to renegotiate the notion of the ‘rural’ within the current climate of intense urban scrutiny and develop analytical design plans that take into account the surrounding agriculture, biodiversity and rural land use to sustain the city.
Catch Foster & Partners, WOHA and Toshiko Mori Architect exploring how urban areas will be experienced in 2050 at the Icsid World Design Congress from November 23 to 25, 2009 in Singapore.
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WALL HOUSE / Santiago de Chile by FAR
Suburban residence. As opposed to the general notion that our living environments can be properly described and designed “in plan”, this project is a design investigation into how the qualitative aspects of the wall, as a complex membrane, structure our social interactions and climatic relationships and enable specific ecologies to develop. The project breaks down the “traditional” walls of a house into a series of four delaminated layers ( concrete cave, stacked shelving, milky shell, soft skin ) in between which the different spaces of the house slip. From the inside out the layers build upon one another, both materially and geometrically, blurring the boundary between the interior and the exterior and creating, through the specificity of the different materials used (many of which are not common in architectural applications), a series of qualitatively distinct environments. The building’s most standout feature, an energy screen typically used in greenhouse construction, constitutes the outermost layer, creating not only a diffused lighting and comfortably climatized zone inside but also, through its folding and sometimes- reflective/sometimes-translucent surface, contributes to the diamond-cut appearance of the structure.
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via FAR
Innoshima House
Innoshima no longer exists. Another coastal town lost in the rush of Japan’s urbanization; the younger generations disappear into Tokyo and its surrounding satellites in search of newness and change. They leave behind monuments to the past. Kazuniro Fujimoto documented several of these haunting subjects in the city of onomichi. These remnants of tradition most likely influenced his design of house in Innoshima, a carcass beached along the port.
From the exterior you’d think Gordon Matta-Clark had visited innoshima in its heyday, carving out another warehouse. Most of the abscissions Matta-Clark left were demolished soon thereafter. They became a testament to the decay of the American city. In Fujimoto’s case, however, he has created a home in the form of ruins. House in Innoshima looks like a suprematist’s boat run ashore on Japan’s coast. Shafts of light pours into the belly of the beast. Whether or not it’s inhabited seems secondary to its monolithic presence – a skeleton in the shipyard.
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via ROLU
SEA: Seeing Eye Architecture by Eric Ellingsen (Species of Space)
Like seeing eye dogs, miniature service horses, assisting chimps and parrots,Architecture Service Animals are not merely to be looked at; they are to be lookedwith. They are structural organizations bred for the apperception of space and matter.
Chicago’s Architecture Service Animal is named Sid. Sid is a mongrel. Sid has a sister that lived in Casablanca, Morocco for 2 weeks. Sid’s sister had no name, but enjoyed her time in North Africa. Sid and his sister are bred following nature as a model. Nature does not design a dog. Nature designs dogs. No dog is ever only one dog, it is a singular instant of species in constant change; it is singularly plural. A hound breeder will work within the constraints of a living system, the hound, and manipulate the form of that particular animal to perform a certain intentional future role in the hunt. For instance, three offspring generations from the present, the hound as a system can be manipulated to perform as a pointer, a hunter, or a caller. Depending on the breeding techniques and the performance needs in the space of the pack and the field, the hound as system can be bred to become a sight hound for coursing speed, a scent hound to find the trail and lead the hunters, or a lurcher for working. The hound is a service animal in the service of the hunt. Systems manipulation allows an infinite set of form directions within a very finite set of parts. A hound can never be stretched into a giraffe, but breeding does allow a pack topology where an infinite set of hounds interior to the constraint is possible. Thus breeding allows for a space timing fit, a tuning of speeds and strength in space and acting, a tuning for an intentional performance in time. Likewise, the Architecture Service Animal Sid is a bred system not single designed form. This system allows for manipulability, for an organizational staging of possibilities rather than the puzzling of single design solution.
Sid has royal geometric bloodlines, purebred golden ratios found in the golden isosceles triangle. But Sid is also doctored with the fractal 3-dimensional spiraling genes of a romanesco cabbage. Sid’s body is grown from one simple base unit of corrugated cardboard. The single geometry of the golden isosceles is scaled up or down by rotation, such that the long side of the isosceles always becomes the short side of the next isosceles, or the long side becomes the next triangles short side. This introduces the organizational possibility of radical difference in a system of perpetual sameness. Each next scale up or down gives birth to another golden isosceles and a resultant fat isosceles triangle. In Sid, the 3-dimensional component is then grown by folding the 2-dimensional isosceles along the generational seam between the golden and the fat isosceles. These folded golden isosceles are then fastened to one another edge to edge, resulting in a spiral. Like all spirals, direction and form are inseparable. Their effect is their cause. Everything is an original. All the isosceles are originals while being reflections of each other and there are no copies. Each is indistinguishable from every other except in size and skin. This geometry allows the breeder a flea-bag kind of control and insures the survival of a species of same difference.
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via Archinect
MAP (Manual of Architectural Possibilities) by David Garcia Studio
from David Garcia:
MAP (Manual of Architectural Possibilities) is a publication of research and visions; research into territories, which can be concrete or abstract, but always put into question. Map is not a magazine (it only has two pages) and is not a book (it is issued twice a year). Map presents itself as a folded poster (A1) where information is immediate, dense and objective in one side, and architectural and subjective on the other. Map is a guide to potential actions in the built environment, a folded encyclopedia of the possible, a topography of ideas, or a poster on the wall.
MAP 001 Antarctica is out!
With an introduction by PETER COOK
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go HERE to pruchase MAP 001 at the AA Bookshop
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via BLDGBLOG and David Garcia Studio
COOP HIMMELB(L)AU : FUTURE REVISTED
From COOP HIMMELB(L)AU
In this exhibition, our attention is focused on two of COOP HIMMELB(L)AU’s latest architectural experiments, new projects which connect the worlds of art and science. The first of these is the 1969 experimental work finally realized in 2008, Astro Balloon 1969 Revisted-Feedback Space. It is a real-time interactive installation which responds to the users heartbeats. The second is Brain City Lab, an installation whose point of departure is their interdisciplinary research into affinities between the generative aspects of neural networks and urban environments. Both were presented, and much discussed, at the 11th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale (2008).
Astro Balloon 1969 Revisited-Feedback Space 2008 – concieved in 1969 as The Heart Space-Astro Balloon, was the installation which uses the participants heartbeat in a real-time bio-informational feedback mechanism to sychronize them to their environment. This large-scale installation was first realized in 2008 at the International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, some 39 years after its initial conception. Two participant’s heartbeats are sampled and visualized on screens in the balloons, giving the whole balloon the feeling of respiration. The installation has been upgraded and scaled to accommodate the exhibition half its size in the ICC (2009).
Brain City Lab is an interactive installation relating the development process of process of the human brain with that of the city. Based on the research of German neuroscientist Wolf Singer, which related human brain with urban structures, this installation is the latest product of the research that COOP HIMMELB(L)AU has developed in collaboration with neuroscientists, sociologists, and computer programmers. The final goal of the project is to develop programs adopting the latest resources from biological and information sciences to suggest unprecedented scenarios for urban and social development.
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