In October, when an Australian metal-recycling company purchased two deep-water berths in Providence, R.I., Mayor Angel Taveras hailed it as “a major accomplishment in the city’s efforts to revitalize its waterfront industries.”
Five months later, locals are unhappy about the “eyesore” their new neighbor has created: a 50,000-ton hill of steel. “Where did the scrap metal pile come from?” asked a Providence TV station.
It’s the epilogue to a battle that’s been raging in Providence for several years — on one side, a developer who wanted to turn the shoreline into apartments, offices and hotels. On the other, the maritime industries that have been working there since the turn of last century. In the end, industry won, but the complaints that followed — who put this big, ugly heap of metal on our lovely industrial port? — say something about our attitude toward working waterfronts.
“I think the average person likes the idea of a working waterfront,” says Jordan Royer of the Pacific Merchant Shipping Association in Seattle, a shipping industry trade association. We picture barnacled vessels from foreign ports, distant foghorns, a bad-ass Marlon Brando strolling cobblestone streets — not 20-story gantry cranes and deafening machinery running ’round the clock. “Our tank barges have to test their alarm systems every time they go out,” says Robert Hughes, vice president of Hughes Bros. marine company in New Jersey, “and they go out according to the tides and the currents.”
Image above: The Port Newark Container Terminal near New York City in Newark (Credit: Reuters)
”Give off / Give out” documents an intervention in Jakarta January 5th 2011, dealing with the problems of fine dust after the demolition of buildings. Indonesia is the second biggest importer of asbestos which is extremely dangerous when inhaled. In the video you see a small team trying to prevent the fine dust, which carries asbestos in it, of spreading through the air by watering the site. This intervention gets repeated in different parts of the city.
Give off / Give out, video, 3’30″. Video & Text by Philippe Van Wolputte, 2011
“These spiders have escaped the floodwaters inundating the town of Wagga Wagga in New South Wales, Australia, by moving to higher ground and building massive networks of interconnected webs over raised sticks and bushes. They have covered entire fields with snow-like coverings. Meanwhile, the floodwaters show no sign of subsiding from the town, declared a disaster area: 9000 people have been evacuated.”
IN a crowded place like Manhattan, there are moments when a certain question flits across people’s minds.
It could happen on a weeknight at the Union Square Trader Joe’s, when the aisles are so packed that shopping for frozen edamame morphs into a full-contact sport. Or perhaps it’s on a Saturday in SoHo when Broadway is transformed into an obstacle course of tourists and jewelry peddlers. Maybe it’s on the No. 2 subway line at rush hour, where personal space — if any — can be measured with a micrometer.
And then you pass by a new high-rise under construction, and it’s only rational to wonder: Just how many people can Manhattan actually hold?
Excerpt of an article written by AMY O’LEARY at the NYT. Continue HERE Via Explore
Scientists inspired by a camel’s nostrils are set to achieve the impossible and grow a man-made forest in the desert.
The £3.3 million giant open-air greenhouse in Qatar will bring plant life to one of the most inhospitable spots on earth and it is all thanks to the humped mammal’s nose.
Using a trick of nature the Sahara Forest Project will use surface water and cold water pumped up from 200 metres below the sand to feed trees, vegetables and algae.
Written by Martin Robinson, Daily Mail. Read article HERE
A film about place and memory, a farmhouse in Japan, and the lives of the people who called it home.
MINKA is a short documentary about a remarkable Japanese farmhouse and the memories it contains. In 1967, an American journalist and a Japanese student rescued the ancient house from the snow country of Japan, and their lives were forever changed.
The film begins when Associated Press foreign correspondent John Roderick became the unlikely owner of an enormous rundown farmhouse, a building type known as a “minka.” Working with a young university student named Yoshihiro Takishita, who would later become his adopted son, Roderick transported the massive timber house from the Japanese Alps to the Tokyo suburb of Kamakura. It defined both their lives: for Roderick, it was the backdrop for a remarkable career as the leading “China watcher” of the Mao era. For Takishita, it inspired a life spent collecting and rebuilding similar houses, work that continues today. But MINKA is more meditation than history. Filmed just following Roderick’s death at ninety-three, it uses this one house as a vessel of memory to explore the power of place, memory, architecture, and the meanings of home.
As much-admired photographs of decayed Detroit go on show in London, Brian Dillon charts the history of a literary and artistic obsession with ruins, from Marlowe to The Waste Land to Tacita Dean.
Brian Dillon: Early in May 1941, the novelist and essayist Rose Macaulay was staying at the Hampshire village of Liss, attending to family arrangements following the death of her sister Margaret. On the 13th she returned to London – since the start of the war she had lived in a flat at Luxborough House, Marylebone, and worked as a voluntary ambulance driver – and discovered that her home and all her possessions had been destroyed in the bombing a few nights before. In a letter to a friend and literary collaborator, Daniel George, she wrote: “I came up last night … to find Lux House no more – bombed and burned out of existence, and nothing saved. I am bookless, homeless, sans everything but my eyes to weep with … It would have been less trouble to have been bombed myself.”
The loss of her flat, and especially the destruction of her library, had a profound effect on Macaulay: it was a decade before she completed another novel. In 1949, she lamented: “I am still haunted and troubled by ghosts, and I can still smell those acrid drifts of smouldering ashes that once were live books.” But her memory of the blitz also nurtured a fascination with destruction, decay and the ambiguous emotions conjured by the sight of buildings and entire cities reduced to rubble. In 1953 Macaulay published Pleasure of Ruins, a lively and eccentric history of the “ruin lust” that gripped European art and literature in the 18th century, reached its height in the romantic period, and had apparently declined in the first half of the 20th century in the face of wreckage that could not be turned to aesthetic or nostalgic advantage.
The Tunnels of Cu Chi is a book written by Tom Mangold & John Penycate in 1985 focusing on a specific aspect of the Vietnam war which lead the U.S. Army to loose it. The technological and human asymmetry was nevertheless striking but such subterranean complexes allowed the Viet Cong to organize a strong resistance against the invading army. The ability for the earth to change its solidity characteristics was fundamental in the elaboration of a physical mean of defense:
The soil of Cu Chi is a mixture of sand and earth. During the rainy season it is soft like sugar, during the dry season as hard as rock. […] Such soil could stand the weight of a tank.
The U.S. Army volunteers who were exploring the discovered tunnels were named Rats. This name is not innocent as, for their psychological and physical survival they had to develop what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari called Becoming Animal. When reading from a witness of these operations, one might even talk of a becoming matter as the bodies needed to embrace their own material composition in relationship to the material environment:
I was just an animal – we were all animals, we were dogs, we were snakes, we were dirt.
Once Upon a Future is an imaginary fast-forward to a possible Bordeaux in 2030 – the target year by which the city today projects to reach the magic number of one million inhabitants. This work of social fiction, made in the format of a novel and exhibition, starts from the question – how would the future look if citizen’s collective capacity would grow and become Bordeaux’s main driving force? Curated by STEALTH.unlimited and Emil Jurcan, and made in collaboration with architecture center arc en reve, Once Upon a Future features contributions by writer and philosopher Bruce Bégout and a number of graphic and comic artists. It has been produced for the biannual Evento 2011 directed by artist Michelangelo Pistoletto, under the motto “art for an urban re-evolution”.
Slought Foundation (‘Sl-aw-t’) is a non-profit organization based in Philadelphia that engages the public in dialogue about cultural and socio-political change. We collaborate with a range of partners including artists, communities, universities, and governments to encourage cultural inclusiveness and social activism. Culture means more than preservation or presentation to us; it means the exchange of ideas, the creation of concepts.
From Kwame Anthony Appiah to Helene Cixous, Werner Herzog to Kazuyo Sejima, our programs feature today’s visionaries in conversation about the role of the artist in society, and the potential transformation of social and political structures. In 2010, 450+ hours of recordings from these programs, available online, were downloaded over 125,000 times by visitors from 100 countries.
Quayola is a visual artist based in London. He investigates dialogues and the unpredictable collisions, tensions and equilibriums between the real and artificial, the figurative and abstract, the old and new. His work explores photography, geometry, time-based digital sculptures and immersive audiovisual installations and performances.
Quayola’s work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; British Film Institute, London; Royal Albert Hall, London; Gaite Lyrique, Paris; Church of Saint Eustache, Paris; Forum des Image, Paris; Grand Theatre, Bordeaux; Palais des Beaux Arts, Lille; Empac Centre, New York; Yota Space, St. Petersburg; MIS, Sao Paulo; Casa Franca, Rio de Janeiro; BAC, Geneva; Sonar Festival, Barcelona; Elekra Festival, Montreal and Clermont Ferrand Film Festival.
Strata #4 is a multi-channel immersive video-installation commissioned by Palais de Beaux Arts in Lille. The subject of this work is a series of iconic pieces from the museum’s Flemish collection, focusing specifically on Rubens’ and Van Dyck’s grand altarpieces. Strata #4 is the result of a study and exploration of the paintings themselves, delving beneath their figurative appearance and looking at the very rules behind the composition, color schemes and proportions of each piece. It is a precise process aimed at creating new contemporary images based on universal rules of beauty and perfection. Documenting the improbable collisions between classical figuration and contemporary abstraction, Strata #4 aims to create an harmonious dialogue between worlds that may appear very distant from one another, but in fact share so much in common.
“Strata #1” is an audio-visual installation that explores the icons of Rome’s renaissance architecture and focuses on the layering of times, functions and representations.
Through sound and visual effects, “Strata #1” concentrates on the collective imagery of particular buildings, reflecting upon the stratified historical meanings they detain in the western society through time.
A rotating ceiling is inhabited by a computer-generated particle system. The latter moves and behaves in relation the sound, coexisting harmoniously with the surrounding architecture. The video environment created within the installation becomes a hybrid between a real architectural space and an abstract two-dimensional pattern: a new space in-between the real and the artificial.
In a dynamic dialogue between sound, image and architecture, the installation plays with history and its image, giving life to a process of metamorphosis which transforms structure and function of the original architectural space. Assuming different meanings, the represented ceiling appear under a new perspective that focuses on their images rather than their historical and architectural significance.
Images: Quayola
Music: Autobam
Bitscapes is a multi-screen installation exploring and challenging the ambiguity of realism in the digital realm. Natural landscapes from the wilderness of western Australia slowly deconstruct. By losing their “photographic skin”, the illusion behind their realistic appearance is revealed.
Commissioned to mark the first anniversary of ‘Lovebytes at Millennium Galleries’ – a permanent plasma screen gallery curated by Lovebytes with the Sheffield Galleries Trust (2006)
Direction/Design: Quayola, Chiara Horn
Sound: Giorgio Sancristoforo
Coding: W. Kosma
Excerpt from Natures series
The Natures project consist in a series of multi-screen installation pieces and a live audio-visual performance in collaboration with musician Mira Calix and cellist Oliver Coates. Natures explores the dialogue between “the natural” and “the artificial”, creating a world where these two elements coexist harmoniously. Interpreting plants’ organic behaviors, computer-generated elements become part of the natural world and viceversa.
Commissioned by Faster Than Sound and Aldeburgh Music (2008)
Design/Animation: Quayola
Music: Mira Calix, Oliver Coates
Producer: Joana Seguro (Lumin)
Assistants: D. Knowles, G. Berton, Y. Li, G. Korossy, P. Marquez, Mokhtarzateh, M. Gil, G. Gremigni, G. Polizzi
Areth: An Architectural Atlas is a projects by Adam Ryder. He is a artist working in photographic mediums in New York City. Much of his work is created in collaboration with Brian Rosa, who together with Ryder contribute to the creative studio Site Unseen.
About The Atlas
The writings and photographs contained in this volume are the product of an expedition to the world of Areth, undertaken by photographer Adam C. Ryder with generous support from the Areth Research Commission (ARC). Created in cooperation with the Sales and Publishing Department, this fourth edition in the series Areth Analyzed documents architectural forms across the three geographic regions of the planet’s super-continent — the Northern Mountains, the Central Basin and the Great Barrens. Analysis of the structures in the text that follows are based on detailed studies provided by the Xeno-Anthropological Research Authority (XARA) and the Architectural Study and Preservation Agency (ASPA) as well as several other departments within the ARC.
Introduction
The circumstances surrounding Areth’s discovery are by this time well-known. What remains unexplained are the circumstances that led to the abandonment of this distant world by its native inhabitants. The architectural relics left behind by a once-great civilization have compounded this mystery. Residential, industrial and scientific structures, even entire cities stand empty, yet intact across the giant Arethean landmass. The complete disappearance of this race has problematized conjecture about their seeming demise. Were the peoples of Areth the victims of an unforeseen tragedy or did they simply decide to leave their world entirely? This volume does not attempt to speculate on these questions but rather seeks to investigate that which is most telling about the Aretheans themselves; their architectural legacy. The images and written analyses that follow highlight those structures deemed to be among the most culturally relevant in understanding the values and customs of this lost civilization.
Unknown Fields is a nomadic studio that throws open the doors of the A A and sets off on an annual expedition to the ends of the earth exploring unreal and forgotten landscapes, alien terrains and obsolete ecologies. Each year we navigate a different global cross-section and map the complex and contradictory realities of the present as a site of strange and extraordinary futures. You will be both visionaries and reporters, part documentarian and part science-fiction soothsayers as the otherworldly sites we encounter will afford us a distanced viewpoint from which to survey the consequences of emerging environmental and technological scenarios.
This year the Division will be heading off on a reconnaissance road trip to chronicle a series of extraterrestrial encounters from the borderlands, black sites, military outposts and folkloric landscapes of the United States. From the ‘illegal aliens’ of the New Mexico border towns we will head north exploring territories of negotiation and conflict, zones of transgression, suspicion and speculation. We will rumble along the UFO highway, past the mythic territories of Area 51, listening to tall tales from conspiracy theorists amidst the sonic booms crackling in the quiet desert air. We will visit covert military test sites and the alien technologies of the aeronautics industry as we shape our own experimental craft to launch in the skies above the psychedelic community of the Burning Man Festival, where our journey ends. By the bonfires we will examine the mysteries and conspiracies that surround what lies off the map, off-grid and below the radar as we propose new truths and expose alternative fictions.
Joining us on our travels will be a troupe of collaborators from the worlds of technology, science and fiction. Together we will form a traveling circus of research visits, field reportage, rolling discussions and impromptu tutorials that will be chronicled in an annual publication and traveling exhibition. Throughout our journey the Division will identify opportunities for tactical intervention and speculative invention as we examine the unknown fields between truth and fiction.
Applications
The deadline for applications is 6 August 2012. All participants traveling from abroad are responsible for securing any visa required. After payment of fees, the AA can provide a letter confirming participation in the workshop. A portfolio or CV is not required, only the online application form and payment.
Fees
The AA Visiting School requires a fee of £695 per participant, which includes a £50 Visiting Membership. If you are already a member, the total fee will be reduced automatically by £50 by the online payment system.
Eligibility
The workshop is open to architecture and design students and professionals worldwide.
Zoroastrianism traditionally conceives death as a temporary triumph of evil over good: rushing into the body, the corpse demon contaminates everything it comes in contact with.
The flesh of a dead body being so unclean it can pollute everything, a set of rules had to be created in order to dispose of the corpse as safely as possible: as the natural elements of earth, air and water are sacred, the corpses were not to be thrown upon the water or interred. Cremation was also forbidden, as fire is the direct -purest- emanation of the divinity.
Hence a complex ritual was developed, in which the corpses would be eventually exposed to birds of prey and thus devoured, in a final act of charity.
After death every division of class and wealth disappeared, for all deceased would be treated equally.
A proper architectural typology was invented solely for the purpose of burial’s ritual: transported in the desert by nasellars (traditional zoroastrian pallbearers), the bodies of the deceased were then carted onto sandstone, forbidding hills, to be eventually disposed on cilindrical constructions called Towers of Silence.
Via Socks Studio. Please be aware that some of the images at the end of the post are extremely graphic. Viewer discretion is advised. Continue HERE
The Extreme Environment Love Hotel, by Ai Hasegawa, simulates impossible places to go such as an earth of three hundred million years ago, or the surface of Jupiter by manipulating invisible but ever-present environmental factors, for example atmospheric conditions and gravity. A love hotel is a place for discrete intimacy but also a place for intensive physical and mental exercise. How might our bodies change, struggle or even adapt with varying conditions around us? For example, during the Carboniferous period, ancestors of the dragonfly Meganeura grew up to seventy-five centimeters due to the huge concentration of oxygen in the air, a tremendous boon to the insect but high levels of oxygen would be toxic to our fragile bodies.
Recent figures speculate that around 10% of children are now conceived by In Vitro Fertilization. The world around us and our reproductive technologies have given rise to new ideas of what sex is or could be and where it stands between our biologically-programmed needs and inclinations and our human fetishes and desires. Perhaps the Extreme Environments Love Hotel might give rise to new evolutions and mutations of the human body and sex and give it a brand new role away from any of these historical precedents.
Ai Hasegawa studied computer graphic animation and interactive media art at the International Academy of Media Arts and Sciences, Japan. On graduating I created animations for educational TV programs in Tokyo. After moving to London I began working as an animator, character designer, illustrator and interaction designer.
Our built environment doesn’t have to be static. With the right synthetic biology, it can respond automatically to changes in temperature or moisture level, and even react to natural disasters, hunkering down during earthquakes or removing toxins after a toxic spill.
Synthetic-biology-based approaches to design practices, which have a material engagement with design and engineering practices, propose a new set of conditions in which architectures can alter their characteristics to suit changing environmental conditions. Living materials raise the possibility that buildings can make a positive impact on their local surroundings by performing remedial functions, that the construction of architecture could actually heal a stressed environment, for example, by removing toxins or fixing greenhouse gases. These new technologies could be on building exteriors, which present a managed interface with the environment.
Responsive architectures that are sensitive to their local environment can revitalize cities and equip communities with the ability to deal with and recover from radical disturbances in their surroundings, such as a natural disaster. Indeed, all cities should be designed with environmental crises in mind, whether they have reached the proportions of a megacity or not. Densely populated areas need to be considered potential disaster zones, where living spaces are at risk from the accumulation of toxic waste and from physical damage as a consequence of our unstable Earth. Given the present environmental challenges and worldwide population growth, fundamental changes in the expectations of buildings must be considered globally. This is a more urgent and radical requirement than current notions of sustainable development that pander to industrial developers; it promotes and demands an immediate rethinking of the way that we build our homes and cities. The strategic use of these new materials, woven into the substance of the urban landscape on building surfaces and into structural fabrics, provides an opportunity for buildings to actively participate in environmental challenges.
This installation was created with protocells, DNA-less chemical systems that can be programmed to form structures. Is this what you’re going to live in in the future?
“If you design with a view to optimize anything, it is bound to end up suboptimal, because it can’t cope with change. This applies as much to political constitutions, universities and buildings”
~ Jeff Mulgan
It began as a housing marvel. Two decades later, it ended in rubble. But what happened to those caught in between? The Pruitt-Igoe Myth tells the story of the transformation of the American city in the decades after World War II, through the lens of the infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing development and the St. Louis residents who called it home. At the film’s historical center is an analysis of the massive impact of the national urban renewal program of the 1950s and 1960s, which prompted the process of mass suburbanization and emptied American cities of their residents, businesses, and industries. Those left behind in the city faced a destitute, rapidly de-industrializing St. Louis , parceled out to downtown interests and increasingly segregated by class and race. The residents of Pruitt-Igoe were among the hardest hit. Their gripping stories of survival, adaptation, and success are at the emotional heart of the film. The domestic turmoil wrought by punitive public welfare policies; the frustrating interactions with a paternalistic and cash-strapped Housing Authority; and the downward spiral of vacancy, vandalism and crime led to resident protest and action during the 1969 Rent Strike, the first in the history of public housing. And yet, despite this complex history, Pruitt-Igoe has often been stereotyped. The world-famous image of its implosion has helped to perpetuate a myth of failure, a failure that has been used to critique Modernist architecture, attack public assistance programs, and stigmatize public housing residents. The Pruitt-Igoe Myth seeks to set the historical record straight. To examine the interests involved in Pruitt-Igoe’s creation. To re-evaluate the rumors and the stigma. To implode the myth.
Speakers: Professor Craig Calhoun, Professor Bruno Latour, Alan Rusbridger, Professor Judy Wajcman, David Adjaye, Professor Geoff Mulgan, Lord Richard Rogers, Polly Toynbee.
This event was recorded on 14 May 2010 in Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building.
In this exciting half-day conference two panels on ‘Public Life and Public Policy’ and ‘Cities and the Public Realm’, discuss these themes in the context of the work of Professor Sennett, the eminent sociologist whose recent books include The Culture of the New Capitalism and The Craftsman.
Amidst society’s hopes for a green future, the power of working with nature is still not sufficiently understood or exploited. Too many visions remain divorced from the end user. Claudia Pasquero and Marco Poletto, the architects and co-founders of London-based ecoLogicStudio, feel that ‘using and interacting with natural elements in a symbiotic way can become a game with ecological benefits.’ Recently they have focused on the potential of algae—micro-algae are used for energy, while macro-algae—like bio-radars or generative agents—is used for filtering water and making food.
New symbiotic algae and seafood/fish farms generated in Crane Greenhouses
As global regions undergo structural and demographic shifts, agritourism and algae farms have huge potential, but models need testing and feedback from people, so that prototypes can be optimally identified as multi-use educational resources related to their living context. ‘You don’t have so many choices at the moment. There is a detachment of production from consumption, when even recycling can be fun’, say ecoLogicStudio. Their Algae Farm for the Swedish Municipality of Simrishamn demonstrates the interactive potentials for algae-related urban activities and architectural prototypes. Here on the Ostersjiön region of Sweden on the Baltic Sea a decaying fishing industry and aging local population ‘calls for the introduction of a new type of economic and urban system.’
HORTUS (Hydro Organisms Responsive To Urban Stimuli) is a new exhibition from ecoLogicStudio that engages with the notions of urban renewable energy and agriculture through a new gardening prototype. Over a four-week growing period, flows of energy (light radiation), matter (biomass, carbon dioxide) and information (images, tweets, stats) will be triggered to induce multiple mechanisms of self-regulation and evolve novel forms of self-organisation. HORTUS proposes an experimental hands-on engagement with these notions, illustrating their potential applicability to the masterplanning of large regional landscapes and the retrofitting of industrial and rural architectural types, as exemplified in the project ‘Regional Algae Farm’ developed by ecoLogicStudio for the Swedish region of Osterlen.
Architectural Association School students, staff and visitors are invited to engage daily with HORTUS to invent new protocols of urban biogardening. A virtual organism such as this offers the opportunity to capture and build up information and cultivation practices, enriching the material experience of the visitor turned urban ‘cyber-gardener’.
Japanese based designer Noriyuki Otsuka recently completed the design of a all white shop with a mesh portal in the upcoming neighborhood of Umeda in Osaka, Japan. The design of LE CIEL BLEU is based on his design philosophy “Nothing is everything,” then Otsuka brought the design to life with his other philosophy “Mixtures of transparency.”
With these two concepts in mind, Otsuka and his team built a 2992 sq.ft. space using an array of white and cream hues with a large architectural element with in the space. We caught up with the architect who explained that the “interior space was a cylinder made with a structurally self-supporting mesh.” He noted that “because of the size of the feature I wanted to avoid integrating it too much with the surrounding space, so deliberately aligned it off center from the axis of the building.” By using this layout, the architectural portal became a strong design feature in the shop.
The floor was hand painted with original gold paint, while the walls and ceiling were finished in an acrylic emulsion paint.
ANCIENT HISTORY: The layers of sediment excavated in Denisova Cave (top left) and its surroundings have yielded such artifacts as chipping tools (top right), a fragment of a pinky bone, and a molar. DNA in the bone and molar led to the identification of a new hominin group, the Denisovans.Photos: Courtesy of David Reich (top left, top right, bottom right); Courtesy of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (bottom left, middle right)
Perched in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia, and overlooking the Anui River and its surrounding forest, is the Denisova Cave. It is not a particularly large natural structure, but its high ceilings, central limestone chimney, and location near abundant food sources have made it an inviting shelter for humans and animals for tens of thousands of years.
“It’s kind of a magical cave,” says David Reich, an HMS professor of genetics who traveled to the site this past summer. It was a rugged trip, covering 5,500 miles on a 48-hour journey that began in Boston, touched London and Moscow, and finished with a bumpy 10-hour van ride to the Denisova Cave, near Russia’s border with Kazakhstan. But Reich, whose affiliation with the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard means he’s more often surrounded by gene sequencers than Stone Age tools, took the opportunity to step inside this remote refuge to witness the resting spot of ancient DNA that had been preserved in bone fragments buried deep in cave sediments.
For the past year, Reich and an international team of evolutionary geneticists have been coaxing information from that DNA. What they’ve found has changed our understanding of human history.
DOWN TO EARTH: Excavation of Denisova Cave, a site overseen by the Russian Academy of Sciences, is an ongoing venture involving international teams of researchers. Photo: Courtesy of David Reich
Text and Images via Harvard Medicine. Continue HERE
Household archaeology has a long history of anthropological inquiry. Archaeological investigations of the household serve as a microcosm for the greater social universe. The household serves as a space for socialization processes. Household archaeology focuses on the household as a social unit, and involves research on the household’s dwelling and other related architecture, material culture, features, and larger sociopolitical organizations that are associated with a specific culture. Household social relationships have been associated as serving as an “atom” for society. Therefore, household studied effectively convey information pertaining to flexible economic and ecological conditions Household activity encompasses spheres of activity related to function and how people act. Household archaeology redefines the notion of the household and the domestic by challenging notions of what households are, how they operate and the social implications of such analysis. The material culture provides information about such activities. Households are families, domestic groups, and co-habitations. Households function in a variety of fashions.
History of Theoretical Background
Household archaeology involves archaeological investigations of household activities. It encompasses social formation processes, family or co-residential organization and the material culture associated with such activities. Scholarly inquiry into household studies began in the 1960s with research emphasis upon a micro-scale analysis of social groups. Households are commonly referred to as the most basic social unit. Households operate within social and economic processes aimed to structure general conditions of social life. “Household” and “family” are social phenomena. According to Bender, these constructions are “logically distinct and, under certain circumstances, vary independently of each other.” The household has three elements: the social (demographic), the material (possessions and dwellings) and the behavioral (activities). Household membership employs a variety of strategies and behaviors. Household archaeology is concerned with the material culture remaining from basic activity patterns as a result of human behavior.
A mysterious band of hacker-artists is prowling the network of tunnels below Paris, secretly refurbishing the city’s neglected treasures. Photo: UX
Thirty years ago, in the dead of night, a group of six Parisian teenagers pulled off what would prove to be a fateful theft. They met up at a small cafè near the Eiffel Tower to review their plans—again—before heading out into the dark. Lifting a grate from the street, they descended a ladder to a tunnel, an unlit concrete passageway carrying a cable off into the void. They followed the cable to its source: the basement of the ministry of telecommunications. Horizontal bars blocked their way, but the skinny teens all managed to wedge themselves through and ascend to the building’s ground floor. There they found three key rings in the security office and a logbook indicating that the guards were on their rounds.
But the guards were nowhere to be seen. The six interlopers combed the building for hours, encountering no one, until they found what they were looking for at the bottom of a desk drawer—maps of the ministry’s citywide network of tunnels. They took one copy of each map, then returned the keys to the security office. Heaving the ministry’s grand front door ajar, they peeked outside; no police, no passersby, no problem. They exited onto the empty Avenue de Sègur and walked home as the sun rose. The mission had been so easy that one of the youths, Natacha, seriously asked herself if she had dreamed it. No, she concluded: “In a dream, it would have been more complicated.”
The unauthorized cinema that UX built beneath the Palais De Chaillot. Photo: UX
Privately commissioned to create a gift for an architect, Daniel Weil created a one-of-a-kind clock that is both simple and complex. Reducing objects to their component parts has long fascinated Weil. The Radio in a Bag he created for his degree show at the Royal College of Art three decades ago is an icon of 20th century industrial design. This clock is the latest demonstration of his interest in investigating not just how objects look, but how they work.
The Clock for an Astronomer follows Clock for an Architect and Clock for an Acrobat as part of the “Matter of Time” series of unique timepieces designed by Pentagram’s Daniel Weil.
“The sun is the celestial time setter, and timekeeping is its terrestrial reflection,” says Daniel Weil.
A Sardine Street Box of Tricks is a handbook for anyone who wants to make their own ‘mis-guided’ tour or walk.
Written by ‘Crab Man’ and ‘Signpost’ (Phil Smith and Simon Persighetti – both members of Exeter-based Wrights & Sites group), the book is based on the mis-guided ‘Tour of Sardine Street’ that they created for Queen Street in Exeter during 2011.
The book is designed to help anyone who makes, or would like to make, walk-performances or variations on the guided tour. It describes a range of different approaches and tactics, and illustrates them with examples from their tour of Queen Street. For example:
– Wear something that sets you apart and gives others permission to approach you: “Excuse me, what are you supposed to be?”
– Take a can of abject booze from the street or a momentary juxtaposition of a dove and a plastic bag and mould them, through an action, into an idea
– Attend to the smallest things
– Examine the cracks in your street and the mould on its walls, note its graffiti, collect its detritus, observe how its pavements are used and abused
– Set yourself tasks that passers-by will be intrigued by: they will enjoy interrupting and even joining in with you
– Draw upon ambiguous, ironical or hollowed-out rituals to complement the multiplicity of your walk with intensity of feeling or depth of engagement.
– And so on…
Everything you need to build a town is here – Wrights & Sites
Once upon a time there was a primitive tribe that hunted and gathered in a verdant forest in a temperate clime.
I call them a “tribe” but that name may mislead if it suggests some rigorous form of social organization. In fact, the group was about as un-organized as it is possible for people to be. There were among them no elders, chiefs, shamans or any other kind of leader with authority over his fellows. With one exception– which we will soon discuss — there were no laws, rules or taboos that were obeyed or enforced among them and no judges or police to enforce them.
This lack of norms was reflected in their language which (luckily for our narrative purposes) was much like modern English but which lacked any moral or legal vocabulary. The natives never spoke of ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, ‘legal’ or ‘law’. They had no words for ‘promise’, or ‘contract’ and none for ‘property’ or ‘ownership’.
Even so, as I just averred, there was one rule that the natives generally acknowledged and mostly conformed to. They called it “The Rule”.
The Rule: No Bullying!
By ‘bullying’ the natives seem to have meant, roughly, hurting other people or using force or the threat of force to compel others to do what they would otherwise not do. But not every use of force or infliction of harm was regarded as bullying.
It was, for example, not considered bullying to use force or its threat to defend oneself or someone else against a bully. The Rule permitted self-defense and “other defense” and this had important consequences for all of tribal life.
For the next 306090 book, guest editor David L. Hays wants to know, “What is essential knowledge for architecture?”What is essential knowledge for architecture?
This frequently posed question targets fundamental principles of design, those basic criteria and priorities through which disciplinary stability is ensured. Yet, insofar as relevance is a core value of architecture, in both theory and practice, the contingent nature of the future guarantees that some forms of knowledge not presently considered essential will eventually become indispensable.
With that condition in mind, the editors of 306090 15, (Non-)Essential Knowledge for (New) Architecture, seek contributions that envision possible futures for architecture through speculations about new disciplinary knowledge. What specific methods, materials, or understandings—tools, ratios, formulas, properties, principles, guidelines, definitions, rules, practices, techniques, reference points, histories, and more—not presently considered essential to architecture could, or should, define its future? Pertinent knowledge might be previously forgotten, currently undervalued, generally misunderstood, or not yet recognized. Architects have long looked both to the outmoded traditions of their discipline and to other fields altogether when imagining possible directions for their work. In blurring the boundary between essential and non-essential knowledge, this inquiry seeks not to codify the contemporary state of the art for architecture, nor to assert the value of multidisciplinarity, but to envision, and potentially catalyze, new disciplinary approaches.
(Non-)Essential Knowledge for (New) Architecture will serve as both a gauge of contemporary concerns and a manual for emergent theory and practice. Submissions are sought from practitioners, theorists, historians, critics, artists, activists, and anyone else with direct or indirect interest in the future of architecture.
Click HERE to submit and for more information.
Deadline: Friday, March 30, 2012
The Deleted City is a digital archaeology of the world wide web as it exploded into the 21st century. At that time the web was often described as an enormous digital library that you could visit or contribute to by building a homepage. The early citizens of the net (or netizens) took their netizenship serious, and built homepages about themselves and subjects they were experts in. These pioneers found their brave new world at Geocities, a free web hosting provider that was modeled after a city and where you could get a free “piece of land” to build your digital home in a certain neighborhood based on the subject of your homepage. Heartland was – as a neighborhood for all things rural – by far the largest, but there were neighborhoods for fashion, arts and far east related topics to name just a few.
Around the turn of the century, Geocities had tens of millions of “homesteaders” as the digital tenants were called and was bought by Yahoo! for three and a half billion dollars. Ten years later in 2009, as other metaphors of the internet (such as the social network) had taken over, and the homesteaders had left their properties vacant after migrating to Facebook, Geocities was shutdown and deleted. In an heroic effort to preserve 10 years of collaborative work by 35 million people, the Archive Team made a backup of the site just before it shut down. The resulting 650 Gigabyte bit torrent file is the digital Pompeii that is the subject of an interactive excavation that allows you to wander through an episode of recent online history.
The installation is an interactive visualization of the 650 gigabyte Geocities backup made by the Archive Team on October 27, 2009. It depicts the file system as a city map, spatially arranging the different neighborhoods and individual lots based on the number of files they contain.
An interview by soso Magazine about sexual attraction to urban objects, featuring the love story between Erika Eiffel (aka. Mrs. Berliner Mauer) and the Berlin Wall: A radical extreme of literally appropriating public space.
Generations of chain-smoking writers, skinny-jeaned bloggers and people with guitars have howled on about the subject. Love. Why do we love when all heavenly odds seem to be working against us? Why do we love after the other has disappointed us? Heck, why do we even love at all? During 5½ hours worth of tea, Erika Eiffel and I attempted to answer the unanswerable. It took us just that long to realize that, well, it’s beyond us, but we’ll probably never regret that we tried.
Erika’s objectum sexual – the sexual orientation of individuals engaged in romantic relationships with objects. Meaning, like your friend Benny can love boys, and your friend Andrea can love girls, your friend Alex can love his broomstick, or floorboard, or loudspeaker. Erika’s partner, her soul mate and love of her life, is the Berlin Wall. Now, this is not an easy object to love. It’s chipped, it’s graffiti-smeared, it’s crooked and it’s disappearing. It tore the city of Berlin – and the world – in two, ripped apart families, cost countless lives and helped define decades of a very chilly war. Erika’s Wall may be the human equivalent of that boyfriend with a terrible past. The one who ended up in jail, or the one who lied and cheated and hurt everyone you cared about. Yes, the one you loved anyway.
Before the Wall, Erika had a string of successful relationships with truly inspiring objects of affection. The kind that looks great on paper, at least. There was her love for a bow, which earned her two world champion titles on the US national archery team. Then there was the Japanese sword that made her the youngest world champion in the art of Iai-batto-jutsu. And her relationship with the admittedly very sexy F-15 jet got her one rare congressional nomination to the US Air Force academy. Finally, in 2007, she settled down and had a public commitment ceremony with the Grand Madame of Paris — the Eiffel Tower. Everyone agrees the tower is beautiful. With its straight lines and sturdy steel it’s an architectural marvel. Although she loves the tower to this day, she now knows that the ceremony was her attempt to have an at least somewhat accepted, mainstream objectum sexual relationship. It didn’t feel quite right. So just like I moved on from my eerily beautiful, learned and sophisticated ex-boyfriend to be with someone I had loved for years, Erika packed her bags and moved to Berlin to be with her Mauer.
[Interview conducted by Jennifer Hofmann; photographs by Anastasia Loginova]:
Okay, let’s get to it. When did you first realize that you were objectum sexual?
Well, I always knew. I used to hate manufactured toys so I built my own. For example, I found these two small planks of wood that I really connected to. So I nailed them together and took them with me wherever I went. To school, to bed, to play dates…everywhere. Of course, people thought it was cute then.
This installation was created with protocells, DNA-less chemical systems that can be programmed to form structures. Is this what you’re going to live in in the future?
New symbiotic algae and seafood/fish farms generated in Crane Greenhouses
ANCIENT HISTORY: The layers of sediment excavated in Denisova Cave (top left) and its surroundings have yielded such artifacts as chipping tools (top right), a fragment of a pinky bone, and a molar. DNA in the bone and molar led to the identification of a new hominin group, the Denisovans.Photos: Courtesy of David Reich (top left, top right, bottom right); Courtesy of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (bottom left, middle right)
DOWN TO EARTH: Excavation of Denisova Cave, a site overseen by the Russian Academy of Sciences, is an ongoing venture involving international teams of researchers. Photo: Courtesy of David Reich
A mysterious band of hacker-artists is prowling the network of tunnels below Paris, secretly refurbishing the city’s neglected treasures. Photo: UX
The unauthorized cinema that UX built beneath the Palais De Chaillot. Photo: UX
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