architecture - Yule Heibel on Diigo

07 Oct 09

Storefront for Art and Architecture | Pike Loop, a Robot-Built Installation in NYC

QUOTE
Gramazio & Kohler's work represents the cutting edge of innovation in the field of digital fabrication in architecture. For many years architects have relied on digital manufacturing processes such as CNC milling or 3D printing as a tool for formal research at model-scale. For the first time, Gramazio & Kohler’s work explores the potential of mobile digital fabrication techniques that can fabricate at 1:1 scale on site.
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robotbuilt architecture design

11 Sep 09

AIArchitect This Week | Pushing the Limits: Contemporary Parisian Architecture in Historic Contexts

Hillis's article looks at how historical and contemporary architecture is "blended" in a "historically centric city such as Paris." Focus on Les Halles; new Ministry of Culture building; Le Fouquet Hotel on Avenue George V; etc.

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architecture heritage paris wendy_hillis

29 Aug 09

Seattle Channel Video Player: POPOS (Privately Owned Public Open Space)

QUOTE:
Seattle's Privately Owned Public Open Spaces: A Walking Tour
8/26/2009: Councilmember Nick Licata defines POPOS: Privately Owned Public Open Space. Under Seattle city zoning laws, building developers can engage in zoning tradeoffs that may allow them to build bigger or higher, if they provide a specified amount of space for public use. Landscape architect Guy Michaelson, representing Seattle Architecture Foundation, leads a walking tour highlighting POPOS buildings, historic landmarks, public art and other public amenities. For more information on POPOS and monthly tours offered by SAE, visit:seattle.gov/council/issues/public_space.htm, seattlearchitecture.org
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www.seattlechannel.org/...video.asp - Preview

seattle urban_amenities urbanplanning urban_parks architecture

13 Jul 09

Inside the Exteriors of the Architect Toyo Ito - NYTimes.com

Profile of architect Toyo Ito, who tries, in his work, to capture qualities that (it seems to me) relate to embodiment (“I sometimes feel that we are losing an intuitive sense of our own bodies" - Ito). Ouroussoff describes the following aspects, really resonant:
QUOTE
His career can be read as a lifelong quest to find the precise balance between seemingly opposing values — individual and community, machine and nature, male and female, utopian fantasies and hard realities.

His ability to find such balances consistently has made him one of our great urban poets, someone who has been able to crystallize, through architecture, the tensions that lie buried in the heart of contemporary society. It makes his work especially resonant today, when much of the world is drawn to one form of extremism or another.
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toyo_ito architecture japan tokyo embodiment nicolai_ouroussoff nyt

10 Jul 09

Architecture - Kisho Kurokawa’s Future Vision, Banished to Past - NYTimes.com

Ourossoff raises some important question regarding heritage and preservation - who gets to decide (and why) that something should be preserved, and why is 20th century modernism still neglected?
QUOTE
How old does a building have to be before we appreciate its value? And when does its cultural importance trump practical considerations?
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www.nytimes.com/...07capsule.html - Preview

tokyo architecture modernism kisho_kurokawa nicolai_ouroussoff metabolism capsule_tower

How old does a building have to be before we appreciate its value? And when does its cultural importance trump practical considerations?
Those are the questions that instantly come to mind over the likely destruction of Kisho Kurokawa’s historic Nakagin Capsule Tower.
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- A rare built example of Japanese Metabolism, a movement whose fantastic urban visions became emblems of the country’s postwar cultural resurgence, the 1972 Capsule Tower is in a decrepit state. Its residents, tired of living in squalid, cramped conditions, voted two years ago to demolish it and are now searching for a developer to replace it with a bigger, more modern tower. That the building is still standing has more to do with the current financial malaise than with an understanding of its historical worth.
- The Capsule Tower is not only gorgeous architecture; like all great buildings, it is the crystallization of a far-reaching cultural ideal.
- Founded by a loose-knit group of architects at the end of the 1950s, the Metabolist movement sought to create flexible urban models for a rapidly changing society. Floating cities. Cities inspired by oil platforms. Buildings that resembled strands of DNA. Such proposals reflected Japan’s transformation from a rural to a modern society. But they also reflected more universal trends, like social dislocation and the fragmentation of the traditional family, influencing generations of architects from London to Moscow.
- The Nakagin Capsule Tower was completed as the movement’s influence was beginning to wane. Composed of 140 concrete pods plugged into two interconnected circulation cores, the structure was meant as a kind of bachelor hotel for businessmen working in the swanky Ginza neighborhood of Tokyo.
- But the project’s lasting importance has more to do with its structural innovations, and how they reflect the Metabolists’ views on the evolution of cities. Each of the concrete capsules was assembled in a factory, including details like carpeting and bathroom fixtures. They were then shipped to the site and bolted, one by one, onto the concrete and steel cores that housed the building’s elevators, stairs and mechanical systems.
- In theory, more capsules could be plugged in or removed whenever needed. The idea was to create a completely flexible system, one that could be adapted to the needs of a fast-paced, constantly changing society. The building became a symbol of Japan’s technological ambitions, as well as of the increasingly nomadic existence of the white-collar worker.
- But the issue is not just the fate of this one building; it is why certain landmarks — in Japan and throughout the developed world — are preserved, and others are not. Dozens of private houses, after all, from Palladian villas to late Modernist masterpieces, have been lovingly restored over the years, some in worse condition than the tower. Government agencies and nonprofit groups have also put significant amounts of money toward the restoration of important civic works.
- But when an aging Kurokawa pleaded with the apartment owners to save his masterpiece, he got nowhere. And after his death two years ago, few preservationists rallied to the building’s defense. There’s been no serious effort to look into what exactly it would cost to retrofit the 140 units. Nor has any institution, public or private, stepped up with a viable plan for how to save it.
  Why is that so? Partly it is because all over the world, postwar architecture is still treated with a measure of suspicion by the cultural mainstream, which often associates it with brutal city housing developments or clinical office blocks. Partly, too, it has to do with the nature of housing blocks in general. They are not sexy investments; they do not feed an investor’s vanity or offer the cultural prestige that owning a landmark house does.
  But another concern is that all too often, private developments like the Capsule Tower, no matter how historically important, are regarded in terms of property rights. They are about business first, not culture. Governments don’t like to interfere; the voices of preservationists are shrugged off. “Want to save it?” the prevailing sentiment goes. “Pay for it.”
  Until that mentality changes, landmarks like Kurokawa’s will continue to be threatened by the wrecking ball, and the cultural loss will be tremendous. This is not only an architectural tragedy, it is also a distortion of history.

22 Apr 09

Welcome to Vancouver 2.0 :: Photo Essay :: thetyee.ca

It starts as a photo-essay, but this being the Tyee, the comments muscle their way in to center stage, too. (An aside: I'm getting fed up with all the negative commentary that craps all over all newspaper - including Tyee and my local paper, Times-Colonist - articles that allude to anything creative, innovative, or full of change. It brings out all the usual suspects, who waste no time burying a good idea under cyncism and negativity. Ugh.)

thetyee.ca/...FormShift - Preview

thetyee vancouver eco_density architecture green_buildings futurismo

01 Apr 09

Susan Sontag and Philip Johnson - myarchN

Susan Sontag chatting with Philip Johnson in NYC's Seagram Building. Johnson makes NIMBY noises about how his view will be blocked when a surface parking lot across the way finally gets redeveloped. Too funny. (This video is from ...?, the 60s.)

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video philip_johnson susan_sontag seagram_building nyc architecture nimbyism

18 Jan 09

Greg Lynn | Profile on TED.com

Portal page to Greg Lynn's TED talk.

www.ted.com/...greg_lynn.html - Preview

greg_lynn ted_conference architecture calculus video symmetry

Who says great architecture must be proportional and symmetrical? Not Greg Lynn. He and his firm, Greg Lynn FORM, have been pushing the edges of building design, by stripping away the traditional dictates of line and proportion and looking into the heart of what a building needs to be.
Who says great architecture must be proportional and symmetrical? Not Greg Lynn. He and his firm, Greg Lynn FORM, have been pushing the edges of building design, by stripping away the traditional dictates of line and proportion and looking into the heart of what a building needs to be.

Exchange Morning Post: "Greg Lynn: How calculus is changing architecture"

Questioning symmetry:
QUOTE
Greg Lynn talks about the mathematical roots of architecture -- and how calculus and digital tools allow modern designers to move beyond the traditional building forms. A glorious church in Queens (and a titanium tea set) illustrate his theory.

Greg Lynn is the head of Greg Lynn FORM, an architecture firm known for its boundary-breaking, biomorphic shapes and its embrace of digital tools for design and fabrication.

Who says great architecture must be proportional and symmetrical? Not Greg Lynn. He and his firm, Greg Lynn FORM, have been pushing the edges of building design, by stripping away the traditional dictates of line and proportion and looking into the heart of what a building needs to be.
UNQUOTE

www.exchangemagazine.com/...0112018.htm - Preview

exchange_morning_post greg_lynn ted_conference architecture calculus video symmetry

Who says great architecture must be proportional and symmetrical? Not Greg Lynn. He and his firm, Greg Lynn FORM, have been pushing the edges of building design, by stripping away the traditional dictates of line and proportion and looking into the heart of what a building needs to be.

A series of revelations about building practice -- "Vertical structure is overrated"; "Symmetry is bankrupt" -- helped Lynn and his studio conceptualize a new approach, which uses calculus, sophisticated modeling tools, and an embrace of new manufacturing techniques to make buildings that, at their core, enclose space in the best possible way.
Greg Lynn talks about the mathematical roots of architecture -- and how calculus and digital tools allow modern designers to move beyond the traditional building forms. A glorious church in Queens (and a titanium tea set) illustrate his theory.

Greg Lynn is the head of Greg Lynn FORM, an architecture firm known for its boundary-breaking, biomorphic shapes and its embrace of digital tools for design and fabrication.

Who says great architecture must be proportional and symmetrical? Not Greg Lynn. He and his firm, Greg Lynn FORM, have been pushing the edges of building design, by stripping away the traditional dictates of line and proportion and looking into the heart of what a building needs to be.
1 more annotations...
- Who says great architecture must be proportional and symmetrical? Not Greg Lynn. He and his firm, Greg Lynn FORM, have been pushing the edges of building design, by stripping away the traditional dictates of line and proportion and looking into the heart of what a building needs to be.
  
  A series of revelations about building practice -- "Vertical structure is overrated"; "Symmetry is bankrupt" -- helped Lynn and his studio conceptualize a new approach, which uses calculus, sophisticated modeling tools, and an embrace of new manufacturing techniques to make buildings that, at their core, enclose space in the best possible way.

08 Jan 09

Asian Designers Are Schooling American Architects--Here's How

A bit of a fluff piece (this is the "printable" page - FastCompany has so much annoying flash & crud on its front pages), but there's an interesting thought about *im*permanent architecture here.
QUOTE
One of Ma's core ideas -- the impermanence of architecture -- has particular appeal for anyone who would be happy to see Los Angeles' relentless sprawl bulldozed. Ma, 43, views today's Western architecture as a descendant of the Greco-Roman tradition, which is all about building in stone and erecting things that are intended to last forever. (Which makes it all the more amusing that he's an occasional collaborator of Koolhaas, creating mind-bending buildings, such as Beijing's CCTV headquarters, that look as if they might fall down.) Clearly a son of modern China, he questions the West's preservationist reflex. "Everything has a life cycle, as should buildings," he says. "Preservation is an action in sacrifice of future possibilities. The future needs its own space."
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fast_company architecture los_angeles asia

07 Jan 09

Modular Kit Houses-PreFab Housing Modular Construction,Manufactured Homes

Portal page for a number of outstanding in-progress prefab/ modular housing projects.

www.scrapbookscrapbook.com/...modular-kit-houses.html - Preview

architecture prefab modular housing manufactured_housing

29 Dec 08

NYT: No Furnaces but Heat Aplenty in Innovative ‘Passive Houses’

The New York Times gets & spreads a clue about Passivhaeuser.

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nyt passivhaus ecology passive_heating architecture germany buildings darmstadt

And in Germany, passive houses cost only about 5 to 7 percent more to build than conventional houses.
Ironically, however, when California inspectors were examining the Berkeley home to determine whether it met "green" building codes (it did), he could not get credit for the heat exchanger, a device that is still uncommon in the United States. "When you think about passive-house standards, you start looking at buildings in a different way," he said.
- heat exchangers are relatively better known in Canada, though - I think...? - on 2008-12-29
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- "We've found it's very important to people that they feel they can influence the system," Mr. Hasper said.
- In Germany the added construction costs of passive houses are modest and, because of their growing popularity and an ever larger array of attractive off-the-shelf components, are shrinking.
  But the sophisticated windows and heat-exchange ventilation systems needed to make passive houses work properly are not readily available in the United States. So the construction of passive houses in the United States, at least initially, is likely to entail a higher price differential.

03 Dec 08

The Glass Stampede: A Building-by-Building Survey of New York's Last Great Architecture Boom, by Justin Davidson -- New York Magazine

Looks to be a great & informative article, but it's annoying that New York Magazine spreads these pieces over so many many pages. File under "will read later"?

nymag.com/...49959 - Preview

nyc architecture buildings critique nymag justin_davidson

30 Nov 08

"Is a little history worse than none?," by Christopher Hume (TheStar.com)

Hume looks at facadism - when it works, and when it doesn't.

www.thestar.com/546013 - Preview

thestar christopher_hume heritage preservation architecture facadism toronto

- - example of facadism at its worst - on 2008-11-30
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Every major city – Paris, Dublin, New York – does it. It's just that Toronto does it so often.
"We have a lot of façadism in Toronto," admits one of the city's leading heritage architects, Michael McClelland. "And almost no one likes it. But it's indicative of Toronto's political climate. Though it's easy to deride façadism, what do these people propose in its place? People who simply dismiss it don't understand. It's often the agreed-upon compromise."
It has also become an acceptable method of balancing civic growth and architectural history. And despite the obvious drawbacks, it's a strategy that can work.
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- "What really bugs me is that people make a fuss about how clever we are at recycling the little things, yet it would never occur to us to recycle whole buildings. People merrily do away with whole buildings but feel good because they religiously recycle all the little things around the house. Recycling a building the size of Riverdale Hospital is the same as recycling 72 million pop cans."
- It's a conundrum: How do you do this ethically? How do you provide a sense of historical development?"

08 Oct 08

Inhabitat » Herzog and de Meuron’s Stunning Triangular Skyscraper

Photos & text about the planned 200 m. tall triangular skyscraper (called Le Projet Triangle) by Herzon and de Meuron, for the Porte de Versailles in Paris. Allegedly so slim that it will hardly cast a shadow, it will also incorporate solar and wind power components.

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herzog_demeuron paris architecture starchitecture skyscrapers inhabitat

Paris’ new pyramid will be the first high-rise to be approved for construction is the city’s center since 1977, thanks to the recent lifting of a 31-year-old ban established by the previous Mayor of paris, Jacques Chirac.
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- Their latest project is expected to restore flow to it’s environs by reconnecting the rue de Vaugirard and avenue Ernest Renan at the site of the building.
- This first of many high-rise buildings currently being planned for Paris, Projet Triangle will incorporate shops and restaurants at the ground level in addition to offices, a conference center and a 400 room hotel. Upon completion in 2014, the project will be the third tallest structure in the inner city after the Eiffel Tower and Tour Montparnasse. The pyramid’s construction may be a point of contention for many Parisians, as polls have found that 62% do not favor high rises within the city,

03 Oct 08

Instant Suburb of Prefabs Hits New York

Andrew Blum's article describes Cellophane House, a 5-storey prefab going up in Manhattan at the corner of 53rd and Sixth.

www.wired.com/...st_prefab - Preview

prefab wired_magazine andrew_blum architecture nyc

Cellophane House is five stories tall, with floor-to-ceiling windows, translucent polycarbonate steps embedded with LEDs, and exterior walls made of NextGen SmartWrap, an experimental plastic laminated with photovoltaic cells. Its aluminum frame was cut from off-the-shelf components in Europe, assembled in New Jersey, then snapped together in 16 days on a vacant lot next to the Museum of Modern Art — joining four other full-size houses onsite through October as part of the exhibit Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling. It looks as if a suburban cul-de-sac took a wrong turn at the Holland Tunnel.
Prefab is "modernism's oldest dream," curator Barry Bergdoll says. Since the industrial revolution, architects have been in thrall of the idea that houses could be built in factories, like any kind of widget. But reality hasn't been extremely cooperative. Whether because of conservative public tastes, unachievable economies of scale, or designers' less-than-stellar business acumen, their utopian visions have mostly remained fantasies.
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- But the strange subdivision next door to the museum suggests that prefab's time has finally come. The difference now is bits, not bolts. "Digital fabrication has become one of the key flash points for architects thinking about the way things are made," Bergdoll says as we tour the houses. On an upper floor of Cellophane, two riggers saw a crossbeam amid a flurry of sparks. (It was fabricated too long.) Nearby, a team of MIT students hammer at a cottage made of computer-cut plywood with grooves and joints ready to be fit together like puzzle pieces.

09 Aug 08

How Buildings Learn | PSFK - Trends, Ideas & Inspiration

PSFK's Piers Fawkes writes an entry that provides the links (now available on Google Video) to the BBC series, "How Buildings Learn," by Stewart Brand. In addition to the six parts (each ~30 min. long), Fawkes includes some choice quotes.

For those who know and appreciated Stewart Brand's book, this series is a great addition.

www.psfk.com/...how-buildings-learn.html - Preview

psfk piers_fawkes architecture stewart_brand buildings television bbc

Only 1 in 10 buildings are revisited by the architects after they’re in use.
Buildings change and change and change because all the people who use them have their own ideas - and that’s good… but we need a better understanding of the organic change that happens to buildings.
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- The central problem is that architects don’t want change - but change is inevitable. People who use them change how they want to use them - but we have to understand that.
- this lack of confidence that has been fostered in the population is a manipulation that has been caused partly by the media, largely by the [architectural] profession - and this endangers the fabric of society because if people lose confidence in themselves to that degree then the adaptation of the environment to common sense and everyday use disappears.

01 Aug 08

Emotional Architecture - Using Psychological Profiles to Design Houses - NYTimes.com

At some level -- perhaps because this article is about residential architecture in what looks to my eyes like an 80s "Dallas" (TV show) model (i.e., very expensive custom McMansions -- emphasis on "custom" and "expensive") -- the article gives me a "yuck" reflex. At the same time, there are some links and points I need to take a closer look at, and try to think about this in terms of urban design vs. in terms of very privileged people having shrink sessions with architects by commanding super-sized SFHs.

www.nytimes.com/...17emotional.html - Preview

nyt architecture residential

The idea of an emotional architecture is not a new one; it has long been the counterbalance to another fundamental architectural principle, that of “rational” space. Karrie Jacobs, an architecture writer and the author of “The Perfect $100,000 House: A Trip Across America and Back in Pursuit of a Place to Call Home” (Penguin, 2007), said she thought emotional architecture was a redundancy, like emo rock. “I mean, if architecture isn’t emotional, what good is it?” she said. “This may be a minority opinion, since many Modernists liked to think of themselves and their buildings as utterly rational, but I think that all good architecture, no matter the style or period, has emotional power.”
Interestingly, the Modernist architect Richard Neutra practiced a method similar to Mr. Travis’s, extracting detailed biographies from his clients in a take-home questionnaire, said Alice T. Friedman, professor of the history of American art at Wellesley and the author of “Women and the Making of the Modern House” (Yale University Press; 2006).
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- “It shows real forward thinking, but I don’t know how realistic that is,” said Toby Israel, author of “Some Place Like Home: Using Design Psychology to Create Ideal Places.” Ms. Israel is an environmental psychologist in Princeton, N.J., who, like Mr. Travis, helps clients reach “emotional goals” through the décor and layout of their spaces; a lot of her work deals with childhood memories of place. Her method uses one-on-one sessions, like therapy, usually three three-hour marathons, she said, that she conducts herself.
  “I totally accept that the story of a house is the story of a life,” she said. “But interpreting that story is not just a science, but an art.” She said it sounded like Mr. Travis was an artful interpreter — clearly “a connector,” she said — and she wondered why he would want to develop his method beyond his client base.

17 Jul 08

architecture for hertzian space | varnelis.net

Fascinating essay by Kazys Varnelis, which takes as its jumping off point the potential discrepancy between designing for "hard" stuff (whether factories, industrial production, or ...architecture/buildings) vs. designing for networked stuff and software and mobile technologies. After this initial set-up, Varnelis then quickly goes into describing some very specific site- and urban-intervention type projects that subvert the "hard" aspects of planning & building via software/ new technologies. The former points are not that difficult to address, using predictable interventions and affordances (see my notes/ annotations), but the latter are mind-blowing and difficult to contain within predictability.

varnelis.net/...rchitecture_for_hertzian_space - Preview

varnelis.net futurismo architecture urban_design portals

Krushchev promised to outdo the industrial production of the United States within two decades. By the 1980s, the Soviet Union had achieved that goal, producing more steel, more cement, more oil, more fertilizer and more pig iron than its Cold War rival. At the same time, however, the USSR utterly missed the revolution in information technologies.
the PC revolution simply never came in a country tied to a paradigm of information centralized under government control.
- "information centralized under government control" could be corollary to this article's later description of the Windows on the World project, which subverts "information centralized under city planning departments"...? - on 2008-07-17
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- Today, however with the boom on the wane, we ask what does this pursuit of the material have to do with the increasing dominance of immaterial forces in everyday life? Is architecture—much like the Soviet Union in the early 1980s—pursuing the wrong path utterly?
- Coinciding with the twin cultural ruptures of the dot.com crash and 9/11, Apple turned toward a studied minimalism, to designs that harkened back more to the Ulm School minimalism of Dieter Rams instead of conjuring a vision of the future. Dispensing with the notion that design is primarily a question of unprecedented form, these devices simply get out of the way so that individuals could use them.
  - "...get out of the way so that individuals could use them" is key, and in good urban buildings this might be matched by buildings that do a good job in how they "meet the street," creating / designing spaces or interactions that are good for people to use, so that it's not about the building as such, but about the user (pedestrian, urban dweller). - on 2008-07-17
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- The iPhone
  - - note that this, like so many other devices crucial to our networked world, is a *handheld* device. See comments/ highlights further down... - on 2008-07-17
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- Compare this to how today’s top architects think of computation in design, using advanced software to make ever-more-complex forms. The only debate seems to be whether these forms should be produced by scripts or whether they should be tweaked by hand to achieve a desired effect. This pursuit becomes an architectural equivalent of Moore’s law as each avant-garde designer tries to outdo the competition with a project previously impossible to build or model. Ultimately such a condition is unsustainable, producing research that has little day-to-day application and misses the point of a radically changed urban condition as much as the Soviet Union missed the PC revolution.
  - Immediately at the end of this highlight, Varnelis gets into Hertzian space, but I want to add the following before we leave the concrete world of city streets...
    Remember that iPhones/ iPods, etc. are all about the human hand: these are HANDheld devices. But then, for purposes of design, consider that the human hand is but synecdoche for the human being: these devices, manipulated by our hands, recreate our whole (virtual) being, from here to there. So, while they're designed for my hand, and I use only my hand to interact with them, they transmit, however, all of me (human being), albeit altered digitally, and conveyed in bits and pieces (or bytes and postings).
    
    Architecture might take that aspect of good handheld design: it can design for humans (whole body); it can focus on the street / pedestrian interaction, on how people enter and exit the building, and how people use the building once they're inside; and it can focus on how people perceive the building from the outside (by using biophilic design principles and evolutionary psychology). - on 2008-07-17
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- For beyond corporeal space, we increasingly also live in Hertzian space, a cloud of electromagnetic radiation that bathes us in information.
- What might an architecture that actively engaged Hertzian space look like?
- Two examples tentatively suggest ways in which urbanism might take into account our radically changed environment. The first of these forces us to confront the invisible forces in our environment. The second proposes to warp the very fabric of the city.
- In Osman and Omar Khan’s project “SEEN-Fruits of Our Labor,” the designers crafted an 8’ tall, 4’ wide black acrylic screen, reminiscent of the 2001 monolith or perhaps a massive iPhone (the iPhone was actually released a year after the first installation) and installed it in front of the San Jose Museum of Art.
- As the mysterious object incited viewers into photographing it, viewers saw a message that otherwise existed only in Hertzian space, invisible to the eye, on their camera screens. Repeated photographs yielded new messages and, as viewers stood in front of the monument with their cameras, the experience spread virally.
- By hiding the messages in plain view, however, the designers subtly expose our own complicit relationship to conditions that we prefer to keep invisible. The project does not so much make visible the invisible as force us to engage in it. We can’t help but ask what mysterious forces—Hertzian or economic—permeate the city?
- Robert Sumrell and I produced the second piece, “Windows on the World” at AUDC, an architectural and urban research think-tank in 2005.
- We were captivated by an earlier work done in November 1980 entitled “Hole in Space” by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz. A “Public Communication Sculpture,” Hole in Space turned two walls, one at Los Angeles’s Century City Shopping Center and another at New York’s Lincoln Center, into two-way portals. Video cameras transmitted images from each site to the other where they were beamed, full size onto walls. Microphones and speakers facilitated audio transmissions.
  
  Hole in Space lasted three nights. During the first night, encounters were casual and accidental. Many of the first visitors did not believe it was live or thought that the ghostly black and white spectres on the wall were actors on a nearby set. Disbelief soon gave way to the creation of a new social space, to the invention of games and the telling of jokes. As word spread, separated friends and family made arrangements to meet through the portals on the second evening. On the third night, after Hole in Space was featured on television news, so many people attempted to participate in this shared human experience that traffic ground to a halt and the experiment was forced to end by the authorities. Incredibly, Galloway and Rabinowitz's project is all but forgotten today.
  - The Kit Galloway/ Sherrie Rabinowitz project, "Hole in Space," could well be an example of something that was too early, too ahead of its time...? Although, what's really interesting is that it was so popular: there was a hunger for it, but at some level the technological infrastructure wasn't there, or was too cumbersome / clunky to allow it to manifest in such a way that people gridlock didn't cause shutdown? - on 2008-07-17
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- AUDC suggested that more than ever we need to radically reconsider the already existing. We accept the scale, setting, and privatization of telematic communication too easily and have ignored the fact that these conditions limit the ways by which we communicate.
- Windows on the World proposes to site multiple portals in multiple cities to create a true world planetary network, based not on capital and planning but on chance encounters. Remixing Hole in Space and Guy Debord’s map of the “Naked City,” we propose a telematic dérive, with each portal becoming what the Situationists called a plaque tournante, a center, a place of exchange, a site where ambiance dominates and the power of planners to control our lives can be disrupted.
  
  Windows on the World operates outside of commerce and planning. There is no advertisement. The project is at its strongest when it is by chance. Some portals are temporary, even hidden. Others are improbable or difficult to access. In a back alley in Prague is a portal to a zoo in Sao Paolo. From a dangerous street in the Bronx, a door opens onto the Champs-Elysees. Another portal, in Zurich, looks out onto a busy railroad yard in Rotterdam.
  
  Expenses are relatively small: each portal needs only a video projector, amplifier, speakers, microphone, webcam, computer, and a wireless link. Portals will be operated by groups following the model of, and in conjunction with the free wireless community networks that have sprung up worldwide. Connections can be easily made with free software and public servers.
- Eventually portals would be everywhere. The result would be a new city, a psychogeographic remapping of the Earth according to our desires

28 Jun 08

Architecture of Change - Sustainability and Humanity in the Built Environment (PingMag - The Tokyo-based magazine about “Design and Making Things”)

Ping Magazine interview with Berlin-based Kristin and Lukas Feireiss on their book, _Architecture of Change - sustainability and humanity in the built environment_, regarding the "conscious contradiction in the title — changing and sustaining. But how can I change and sustain at the same time? This challenge is what we try to put across."

QUOTE:
There’s more to architecture than its simple purpose of shelter or protection, a cast to architecture. However they are creating social environments, urban spaces and the public spaces where people actually interact. So they are the catalyst for social interaction, for society to work in. This is a big topic and we can go from dictatorial architecture to that of social engagement.
(...)
This book gives a broad overview of what’s possible in sustainable building practices or social practices in architecture. So it ranges from economically speaking very simple, modernistic architecture to very free-flowing, avant-garde forms; from small, private houses to school buildings to skyscrapers, to federal buildings. It’s not restricted at all to one certain section. And secondly it comprises all these ideas that are in a state of research or initiative.
UNQUOTE
Bonus: gorgeous pictures/ illustrations.

Wouldn't mind having a copy of this book!

pingmag.jp/...anity-in-the-built-environment - Preview

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