The worlds of architecture and scientific illustration collided when Macoto Murayama was studying at Miyagi University in Japan. The two have a great deal in common, as far as the artist’s eye could see; both architectural plans and scientific illustrations are, as he puts it, “explanatory figures” with meticulous attention paid to detail. “An image of a thing presented with massive and various information is not just visually beautiful, it is also possible to catch an elaborate operation involved in the process of construction of this thing,” Murayama once said in an interview.
The Informal City Dialogues is a year-long project supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and conducted by Forum for the Future. It homes in on six cities: Accra, Bangkok, Chennai, Lima, Manila and Nairobi. In each of these cities, it aims to foster a conversation about the informal urban realm, and how it can be cultivated and harnessed for the benefit of all.
These informal realms, from single-chair barbershops to nine-passenger vans to sprawling settlements, are propelling the explosive growth of the urban Global South. They are the neighborhoods, economies and systems that exist beyond the reach of government: the slums, black-market industries and undocumented businesses that fuel these cities’ growth. They’re split off from the formal city, and often neglected or harassed by local authorities.
And yet the informal aspects of these places are also intricately intertwined with the formal. Indeed, many residents have one foot in both worlds: the slum dweller who commutes to her job at a major hospital, the unlicensed microbus driver who lives in a condominium highrise.
For the next round of discussion I’d like to shift the subject to the physical environment, posing the question, Is architecture rational?
Much of the newer work we see as we walk the streets of the city whether it’s New York, Seattle, Dubai, or the newer sections of Copenhagen, is more dramatic than architecture once was: taller, swoopier, twistier, less symmetrical. Architectural language, informed by the capabilities of parametric software and computerized fabrication tools, has become more fluid and less rectilinear.
From the onlooker’s perspective, it looks a lot like style. But when you talk to an architect, you often wind up having a conversation about how utterly pragmatic the building in question is.
For instance, the Seattle Central Library by OMA, completed in 2004. The lead architect on the project, Joshua Prince-Ramus, once told me: “Style freaks us out, the very word style.” He went on to explain the strange shape of the building—it looks like a monstrous mechanical jaw—by showing a diagram made by the library’s administrators of all the functions they required in the new building. Prince-Ramus claimed the architects translated the librarians’ chart directly into architectural form. He called this method “hyperrational.”
Book-ish Territory: A Manual of Alternative Library Tactics by architect NIkki O’Loughlin is an exciting and interesting way of conceptualizing the idea of libraries as a public space not just for the public but by the public. Read it HERE
Did you ever want to hide something from prying eyes, yet were afraid to do so in your home? Now you can secrete your valuables away from home, by following Dennis Fiery’s eye-opening instructions. The world around us is filled with cubbyholes and niches that can be safely employed….and this book identifies them. Illustrated with numerous photographs, and including an index of hiding places, appendices of Simplex lock combinations and appropriate vendors, and a bibliography, this is the most comprehensive and informative book ever written about public hiding spots. Eliminate the risks involved with hiding your possessions at home by utilizing the techniques described in this book. –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
A few days ago, the European Space Agency issued a series of photographs taken in one of the agency’s anechoic chambers, in the “zone of silence” as the title of the press release says. So what is an anechoic chamber? It is an echo-free room where the walls coated with special materials absorb all reflections of sound or electromagnetic waves and insulate any noise coming from outside, thus it simulates a quiet open-space of infinite dimension, which is quite useful in the aerospace industry. Text and Images via io9. See more HERE
Before the Florida Keys meant sun, sea, and Jimmy Buffet, they were famous for mosquitoes—dense, black clouds of them that hummed and bit without pause, spread malaria, dengue, and yellow fever, and drove visitors temporarily insane with irritation.
In the 1920s, hordes of mosquitoes were the major obstacle standing between Richter Clyde Perky, a real estate developer from Denver, and the success of his fishing resort on Lower Sugarloaf Key. The construction manager Perky had hired to oversee the project complained that “in the late afternoon, you would just have to rake the bugs off your arm” and that “they’d form a black print on your hand if you put it against a screen and suck all the blood right out of it.
In his search for a solution, Perky came across a book called Bats, Mosquitoes, and Dollars by Dr. Charles Campbell. A doctor and “city bacteriologist” based in San Antonio, Texas, Campbell had been experimenting with attracting bats to artificial roosts since the turn of the century, in the belief that they were the natural predators of mosquitoes. As an article in BATS magazine explains, Campbell initially thought that the design of bat architecture would be a simple matter:
“Can bats like bees be colonized and made to multiply where we want them?” he wondered. “This would be no feat at all!…Don’t they just live in any old ramshackle building? They would be only too glad to have a little home such as we provide for our song birds…”
After a handful of expensive failures, followed by several months spent in the caves of West Texas, observing bats in their natural environment, Campbell came up with his pioneering design for a Malaria-Eradicating Guano Producing Bat Roost, “built according to plans furnished by the greatest and only infallible of all architects, Nature,” and equipped with “all the conveniences any little bat heart could possibly desire.”
Located in the Cathedral is the Great Stalacpipe Organ, the world’s largest musical instrument. Stalactites covering 3 1/2 acres of the surrounding caverns produce tones of symphonic quality when electronically tapped by rubber-tipped mallets. This one-of-a-kind instrument was conceived by Mr. Leland W. Sprinkle of Springfield, Virginia, a mathematician and electronics scientist at the Pentagon.
After visiting the caverns with his son and experiencing the organ-like sounds of a stalactite being tapped, Mr. Sprinkle submitted a complex plan for a stalactite-tapping instrument. It took 36 years of frustrating research, design and experimentation to bring his dream to its present state of perfection. Three years alone were spent searching the vast chambers of the caverns to select and carefully sand stalactites to precisely match the musical scale. Only two stalactites were found to be in tune naturally.
The four-keyboard console of The Great Stalacpipe Organ was constructed by the Klann Organ Supply Company of Waynesboro, Virginia, to meet the peculiar needs of this subterranean installation. Then the organ was connected to various stalactites with over five miles of wiring.
Special effects…are coup de théatres, thunderclaps that shock you: a burst; an eruption; something small, like an insect down your back; a wall dissolving suddenly.—from The Vatican to Vegas
A richly illustrated journey through five centuries of optical illusions and other wonders. A guided tour through special-effects environments from 1550 to the present, Norman Klein’s The Vatican to Vegas: The History of Special Effects demonstrates how Renaissance and early Baroque artists pioneered interactive, cinematic, and even digital environments. As in our era, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century illusion serviced a global culture and even relied on “software” of a kind: solid geometry for architecture, optics, sculpture, painting and theater. As if from a cryonic thaw, these forms have reemerged very clearly in recent decades. And to manage all this friendly disaster, modern special effects have evolved a unique grammar as precise as the rules of film, theater, and music. Klein reviews this syntax and demonstrates how special effects are not only a barometer for politics, myths of identity and economic relations, but an instructive parallel for understanding where our civilization may be headed next.
There’s something eerie about a clown-striped fumigation tent on a dark, residential street. Perhaps, in addition to its incongruous looks, it’s the knowledge that the house underneath is abandoned, its air rich with aerosoled death, necessitated by an infestation of parasitic insects. It evokes a sense of the uncanny – a mood that photographer Robert Benson went to great lengths to capture in his new photo series.
“I was never arrested and always stood on public property or had permission, but I definitely got some weird looks,” says Benson, who by day is an editorial and commercial photographer.
For several months Benson scoured San Diego (where he lives) for tented houses. At first he tried shooting the project by day with a film camera, but the photos were flat. By shooting at night with a digital camera, he found an added contrast and a tone that makes the photos so evocative, almost menacing.
Excerpt from an article written by Jakob Schiller at WIRED. Continue HERE
See more of this series at Robert Benson’s site HERE
ONE Prize Award aims to explore the social, economic, and ecological possibilities of urban transformation. This year’s competition is set in the context of severe climate dynamism. How can cities adapt to the future challenges of extreme weather? The ONE Prize is a call to deploy sophisticated design to alleviate storm impact through various urban interventions such as: protective green spaces, barrier shorelines, alternative housing, waterproofing technology, and public space solutions. We wish to reinvigorate infrastructure and repurpose spaces towards environmental adaptation in order to put design in the service of the community.
The ONE Prize seeks architects, landscape architects, urban designers, planners, engineers, scientists, artists, students and individuals of all backgrounds.
How can urban ecosystems be enhanced to prevent flooding?
What can restore Rockaway Beach social infrastructure and public space?
When can the New Orleans community change to accept storms without losing character?
What can protect Asian Coastal Cities against the unforeseen?
Where can shorelines be storm surge barriers as well as interactive zones?
How can storm proofing be seen as an opportunity to rethink the future of our cities?
The ONE Prize Award is an international competition and it is open to everyone from professional to students. The teams can have one or more members. The proposals can be for real or speculative projects, at one or more actual sites. Projects can be located either in the U.S. or abroad, but should be applicable to the U.S. Proposals need not be generated exclusively for this competition, provided that they address the intent of the competition.
PRIZES
Since 2010, One Prize has awarded over $40,000 in in prize money. We continue to promote all the winning projects and explore the possibilities of implementation in New York City and around the world.
1st place US $5000
2nd place US $2000
3rd place US $1000
Press coverage by One Prize media sponsors.
Presentation of Designs at Lectures and Exhibitions.
Prominent Year-Long Exposure on the Competition Website.
Early Registration by June 30, 2013
Registration and Submission by August 31, 2013
Architecture depends—on what? On people, time, politics, ethics, mess: the real world. Architecture, Jeremy Till argues with conviction in this engaging, sometimes pugnacious book, cannot help itself; it is dependent for its very existence on things outside itself. Despite the claims of autonomy, purity, and control that architects like to make about their practice, architecture is buffeted by uncertainty and contingency. Circumstances invariably intervene to upset the architect’s best-laid plans—at every stage in the process, from design through construction to occupancy. Architects, however, tend to deny this, fearing contingency and preferring to pursue perfection. With Architecture Depends, architect and critic Jeremy Till offers a proposal for rescuing architects from themselves: a way to bridge the gap between what architecture actually is and what architects want it to be. Mixing anecdote, design, social theory, and personal experience, Till’s writing is always accessible, moving freely between high and low registers, much like his suggestions for architecture itself.
The everyday world is a disordered mess, from which architecture has retreated—and this retreat, says Till, is deluded. Architecture must engage with the inescapable reality of the world; in that engagement is the potential for a reformulation of architectural practice. Contingency should be understood as an opportunity rather than a threat. Elvis Costello said that his songs have to work when played through the cheapest transistor radio; for Till, architecture has to work (socially, spatially) by coping with the flux and vagaries of everyday life. Architecture, he proposes, must move from a reliance on the impulsive imagination of the lone genius to a confidence in the collaborative ethical imagination, from clinging to notions of total control to an intentional acceptance of letting go.
Heat maps of apartment rental prices. In June 2011 Jeff Kaufman made a map of Boston-area apartment prices. He says: I’ve made an updated version: $/room, $/bedroom. As before the data comes from the (awesome) site padmapper, which means it’s pretty close to all Boston-area apartments currently on the market.
By Dutch Artist Frank Halmans. The machines literally suck up dirt into the interior of a dollhouse. Halman has created functioning vacuum cleaners and dust busters in the shape of buildings in an attempt to show how ‘dirt and debris’ clutters our personal space.
“The future of” is a participatory book project initiated by Crap is good which tries to provide an insight into the future role of architecture. Realizing the problematic nature of the simple question ‘What is the future of Architecture?’ we feel it is still somehow relevant in describing the architectural practice of today.
Every architectural attempt starts by making a representation of an imaginative situation or design, which will happen, or could happen in the future. In many cases an architectural design remains a future plan, and in times of economical and political crisis, the question of what comes next, gains relevance. So, while architects shape the future, this book is concerning about the future of architecture.
“Do not sit on the art!” is something you don’t hear very often at contemporary art shows, making Ina Weber’s new solo exhibition Architectures, Memories, Utopias at Berlin’s Haus Am Waldsee an exception. The confusion of some attendees (at least three on Sunday afternoon) is understandable: Weber makes sly, playful sculptures that mimic the ordinary objects and mundane buildings of the modern city. Consequently the red bench, one of a cluster of objects that make up the show’s first work Fußgängerzone (“Pedestrian Zone”), could easily be mistaken for, well – a red bench. Upon a closer look the artifice becomes apparent, but the object-imitations hew close enough to the originals to provoke our normal reactions to such objects, confounding in their similarity.
Weber is adroit in small acts of deception (a skill she might have picked up from the Martin Kippenberger, who taught her at the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Kassel). In one room of the exhibition, 13 small sculptures of ceramic and concrete depict unassuming buildings in Berlin and beyond: a Chinese restaurant, a department store, a Mietskaserne, a post-war apartment block. Sitting in two rows directly on the floor, at the mercy of wandering toddlers, the diminutive models cut a sharp contrast to the oversized and ungainly sculptures on display elsewhere in the show. These distortions of scale and proportion in Weber’s work are disconcerting. Something is off here, but what exactly, is hard to say.
Awkward_NYC, or The New York City Map of Awkward Social interactions in Public Spaces, is a collaborative online map for reporting social accidents and small interpersonal traumas that occur unexpectedly in public spaces. The map pinpoints sites in the New York Metropolitan area where misunderstandings, outbursts, physical altercations, arguments between friends or strangers, and romantic spats or break-ups have occurred. These mishaps are characteristic of the human urban experience– they’re unsettling, often comic, strangely powerful mini-narratives and dramas that would otherwise go untold, but may linger in memory for months and years, as we move through the same urban landscapes, day in and day out.
Anyone can add a story to the map; the project is fully web-based and participatory. The map taps into the confessional, voyeuristic, narrative impulses that typify online behavior and subverts the notion of mapping as reductive, objective, and authoritative. As stories are added to the map, a series of data visualizations depicting the emotional terrain of the city will be generated.
Presented by Urban States, this lecture was given on Wednesday, August 31, 2011 at the University of Southern California School of Architecture.
Architect and theorist Markus Miessen (studiomiessen.com, criticalspatialpractice.org, nOffice.eu, winterschoolmiddleeast.org) lecture presents the third part of his “participation trilogy” – encouraging the role of what he calls the “crossbench practitioner,” an “uninterested outsider” and “uncalled participator” who is not limited by existing protocols, and who enters the arena with nothing but creative intellect and the will to generate change.
TAAK is an international platform that develops innovative art projects and educational programmes relating to social issues such as ecology, urbanisation, social design and human rights. TAAK places topics of public interest on the agenda and develops innovative strategies and perspectives for a changing world. Art and culture shape and express values that can unite different groups in society. By using art to mobilise artists, commissioners, citizens and organisations around specific themes, TAAK investigates how new types of social initiatives and citizenship may arise.
Torre David, a 45-story skyscraper in Caracas, has remained uncompleted since the Venezuelan economy collapsed in 1994. Today, it is the improvised home to more than 750 families living in an extra-legal and tenuous squat, that some
have called a “vertical slum.”
Urban-Think Tank, the authors of Torre David: Informal Vertical Communities, spent a year studying the physical and social organization of this ruin-become home. Richly illustrated with photographs by Iwan Baan, the book documents the
residents’ occupation of the tower and how, in the absence of formal infrastructure, they organize themselves to provide for daily needs, with a hair salon, a gym, grocery shops, and more. The authors of this thought-provoking work investigate informal vertical communities and the architecture that supports them and issue a call for action: to see in informal settlements a potential for innovation and experimentation, with the goal of putting design in service to a more equitable and sustainable future.
Architektur für Kinder is an ongoing research project about the history of playgrounds and will transform into an international show in the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh PA (June 2013).
NEXT Architectson the Melkwegbridge: The Melkwegbridge is located in Purmerend, the Netherlands. The bridge is part of the masterplan ‘De Kanaalsprong’ and connects the historic city center with the towns’ new district. The most striking part of the bridge, designed by NEXT architects, is a massive arch which reaches the height of 12m above water level and stands in a continuous line with the Melkweg-road, thus offering an incredible view over the city. The high lookout is an attraction in itself and lets pedestrians fully experience the relation between the new and historic center of Purmerend.
Bicycles and remainder traffic cross the bridge using the 100m long bicycle deck. This deck was designed as a pendulum over the water, so that the slope could be limited to a minimum. Because pedestrian traffic was separated from cyclists, the direct line between the Melkweg-road and city centre could remain. Furthermore the 48m arch remains the fastest possible way to cross the water.
The pedestrian bridge weighs 85 tons, consists of 130 steps and is supported by a steel arch. The design makes it able to retain the spatial openness of the channel and its surroundings. Both bridge sections flow smoothly into each other and form one whole. This unity is enhanced by the continuity of materials and colors. In the edges of the bridge LED lines are applied that follow the contour of the bridge and guarantees a spectacular view on the bridge even after sunset.
As the demographic evolution in germany and other countries becomes more dramatic, social systems will collapse and from the ashes an aging society will rise, marked by crime, sickness and poverty. Developed by German designer Philipp Stingl, these products designed for the homeless and elderly population presents ‘house containers’ consisting of disposable trashboxes, drinking water canisters, freighthold and a lockable livingspace with sewage systems. essentially, these ‘living containers’ testify to an active and creative lifestyle for the old age without compromises.
uncube is a new digital magazine for architecture and beyond. Against the constant humming of online news feeds, uncube offers a space to breathe. Berlin-based with an international perspective, we care about authorship, curated content, and looking good – with thoughtfully considered and beautifully designed graphics and spreads. uncube combines the ease of online with the sensibility of print: both reflexive to the current yet reflective of the longer view – and all delivered with a lightness of touch.
Pill-A is born in Florence, but it is all over the place. It is meant to represent a refreshingly new space on everything Architecture (going possibly beyond the strictest disciplinary boundaries). Pill-A to distance itself from the feverish flow of information that has come to distinguish the world of Architecture on the internet. That is why it offers a weekly reflection on what is the quality work that is done in Architecture (which needs proper time and space to be perceived). Pill-A seeks out its projects among the ones that maybe haven’t found the coverage they deserve yet. Pill-A is an “amplifier” of projects and a contemporary archive, a gatherer of all the identities that converge on it. Its ambition is never to reach a stable spot but to constantly evolve and transform itself thanks to the exchange with you. Pill-A is intuition and it generates unexpected reactions through visual and auditive pairings. Pill-A is relatively easy to swallow, but potentially out of control in its (side)effects. Be on the Pill-A!
‘Social Housing – Housing the Social: Art, Property and Spatial Justice’ examines ongoing transformations in social housing and asks how these transformations are reflected in the aspirations and practices of artists.
Editors: Andrea Phillips and Fulya Erdemci
Housing provides essential shelter, but also gives form to the social. It represents and embodies the materiality of civic politics and thus demonstrates the uneven nature of spatial justice at local and global scale. For many years artists have contributed to the design and organization of structures of living together, often with ambivalent effect. Whilst many have imagined – and attempted to implement – radical new forms of social housing, as alternatives to both privatization and state provision, they have also ushered in waves of gentrification, thus contributing significantly to a story of capitalization now dominant within urban infrastructures. Social Housing – Housing the Social: Art, Property and Spatial Justice questions the politics of urban practice from a variety of geopolitical and disciplinary viewpoints, from liberal private initiatives to the Occupy movement, from Almere to Ramallah, mixing artistic and architectural contributions with those of sociologists, urban historians, philosophers, and activists
‘Social Housing – Housing the Social: Art, Property and Spatial Justice’ is the second volume in the ‘Actors, Agents and Attendants’ series of publications and symposia initiated by SKOR | Foundation for Art and Public Domain to investigate the role of cultural practice in the organization of the public domain.
We live in times of great turbulence. Movements that normally cannot be seen are now taking shape and happening unexpectedly. Things that appeared to be clear now become unclear. In the absence of external forces, friction within flows will self organize into a collection of so called irrotational vortices.
The Todays Art Festivalin The Hague occurs in a critical moment in the political and cultural life of The Hague where multi-million-euro architectural projects are being approved alongside dramatic budget cuts to smaller cultural institutions. Following previous experiments, this contradiction led us to propose a structure for the festival entirely made out of discarded materials, a vortex structure expressing this idea of a natural force that sucks everything in its path. This space would serve as a meeting point/festival center on the Spuiplein, the major public square in the center of The Hague and heart of the festival.
Raumlaborberlin joined forces with local garbage architects Refunc in organizing materials and building the structure. By tapping in to The Hague’s material flows we managed to obtain 3 containers of pallets, which were temporarily diverted to our working site for six days before returning back into their own life cycle. These 3 containers are the equivalent of what the supplier collects each day. The vortex thus becomes a materialization and temporary solidification of the local material flows.
All text and Images via Raumlabor, a network of 8 trained architects who have come together in a collaborative work-structure developing an experimental architectural practice . See More HERE
Using genetic analyses, scientists have discovered that Northern European populations—including British, Scandinavians, French, and some Eastern Europeans—descend from a mixture of two very different ancestral populations, and one of these populations is related to Native Americans. This discovery helps fill gaps in scientific understanding of both Native American and Northern European ancestry, while providing an explanation for some genetic similarities among what would otherwise seem to be very divergent groups. This research was published in the November 2012 issue of the Genetics Society of America’s journal Genetics.
Text and Image via Archaeology News Network. Continue HERE
Under Tomorrows Sky is a fictional, future city. Speculative architect Liam Young of the London based Tomorrows Thoughts Today has assembled a think tank of scientists, technologists, futurists, illustrators, science fiction authors and special effects artists to collectively develop this imaginary place, the landscapes that surround it and the stories it contains.
In online and live discussions held during the past months the think tank came together to design this future city and discuss the possibilities of emerging biologies and technologies. This time there are no dystopian visions of the future, we’ve seen enough of those. Under Tomorrows Sky imagines a post-capitalist urbanity full of optimism and joy, full of life and aspiration.
It is a city of extraordinary technology but at first glance appears indistinguishable from nature. It is an artificial reef that grows and decays and grows again as the city becomes a cyclic ecosystem. A city as a geological formation of caves and grottos covered by a thick layer of soil and slime, a biological soup of human and non-human inhabitants. The city and us are one, a symbiotic life form. The city grows and we grow with it. Together we form a giant complex organism of which ecology and technology are inseparable parts.
At this moment the phase of creation has begun. An intricately detailed miniature model of this future city will rise under tomorrows sky and come into being at MU in the upcoming weeks. Between August 10 and October 28 all involved with the creation of the model will develop a collection of fictions based in the city. The model will be the backdrop for animated films and a stage set for a collection of stories and illustrations. The audience will also be invited to contribute their own narratives to the city through a series of workshops. Under Tomorrows Sky will be the starting point of a new ecological urban vision. The city of the future is not of a fixed time or place but it will emerge through the help of many.
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