Technicolor Tokyo
“The total mightiness of this organism is what I want to resemble with my pictures. To achieve this I climbed countless fire escapes in Tokyo and tried to capture the complete force of nature. The photos are not about single buildings, they are about the completeness of the urban jungle. All elements have the same importance, and the further you look into the image, the more windows can be seen per square centimetre.
The pictures were shot mainly in twilight. The magic hour, where the houses are shining as bright as the residual daylight in the sky and the colourful neon signs melt with the green-blue of the beginning night. For me this is the most beautiful colour theme a city can offer.” - Thomas Birke
Architecture with Biological Response
An Engineer’s Plan to Use Swarm Robots to Make Smart Buildings Behave More Like Super-Organisms
Using swarms of robotic sensors that “chase” a structure’s human occupants, he wants buildings to understand everything about us, down to our emotional state.
These robot sensors will learn from their mistakes, self-regulate using digital “hormones”, and record information over the course of years, building up a record of experiences to be used as “DNA” to program future versions of themselves, or even other buildings.
“Living organisms give birth to the next generation, and have immunity to viruses such as influenza,” says Mita in a video promoting his work. “Our idea was that we wanted to give architecture this kind of biological response capability.”
(via BBC - Future - Technology - Robot swarms aim to bring buildings to life ht Kurzweil AI)
Zaha Hadid’s Z Boat
Commissioned by art dealer Kenny Schacter, “The asymmetrical design is sculptural in appearance while practically affording more seating accommodations. In a sense, the bespoke boat is as much a work of art as a Cisitalia sports car in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The idea is to think of vessels and vehicles as highly individualistic expressions of art, architecture and design reflecting the edge of what is possible using the most advanced means, including materials, software systems and methods of fabrication.” - Zaha Hadid
Superstudio collages
The radical architectural collective from the late 1960s saw that architects needed to be involved in different kind of conceptual thinking. Not only did they need to think about how to build a building to house a certain kind of human activity, or produce a luxury object, they needed to think about political issues such as “What is architecture?”
Superstudio was founded by Adolfo Natalini and Cristiano Toraldo di Francia. They proclaimed their manifesto at the Superarchitettura exhibit in 1967. Natalini famously wrote, “…if design is merely an inducement to consume, then we must reject design; if architecture is merely the codifying of bourgeois model of ownership and society, then we must reject architecture; if architecture and town planning is merely the formalization of present unjust social divisions, then we must reject town planning and its cities…until all design activities are aimed towards meeting primary needs. Until then, design must disappear. We can live without architecture…”
Despite all their criticism of the megastructuralists’ expansionistic attitude, their collages and texts still betray a fascination with the idea and what this could mean for space on a large urban scale.
Metropolis Magazine: “Superstudio: Pioneers of Conceptual Architecture”
Thanks for The Tanks
Last night, The Tanks opened at Tate Modern. The converted oil tanks are now devoted to showing time based media such as performance, film, and sound works. This marks a pivotal moment for contemporary art, as the biggest space devoted to this kind of media. Artists must respond to the spaces they are given to show in, so as galleries get larger, so do the artworks. The Tanks will allow artists to realize ambitious works in ephemeral media to one of the largest art audiences in the world.
They were designed by Herzog & de Meuron who also designed the pavilion at the Serpentine this year with Ai Weiwei.
The Telegraph: “The Tanks, Tate Modern, review”
Networked Cities
Computer networks are merging with the physical infrastructure of the city in order to track how people use the city space. This makes once passive objects, like streets, active producers of data informing decisions about urban planning and policy. Embedded sensors are currently producing a large amount of data. The network technology can visualise city traffic flow, see where people move during the day, see how people use their cell phones as they are on the move, track criminal activity and allow us to communicate with one another. As Popupcity.net notes, “Often this data is not stored or collected. Often it is stored without being shared.” We are just beginning to explore the possibilities of a networked city, where ”objects will cease being passive and evolve into being active, responding to activity happening in real time and facilitating and contributing to networks of social exchange and discourse, rearranging the rules of occupancy and patterns of mobility within the physical world.”
“We are surrounded by objects and spaces that have their own network and identity. their own informational shadow… Our urban places are increasingly becoming characterised in formats that are machine readable, human readable. They are telling us about themselves. They are speaking themselves to us. We are surrounded by objects that are capable of gathering, processing, transmitting information.” - Adam Greenfield
His company Urbanscale makes cities easier to understand, more pleasant to use and live in and more responsive to the desires of their inhabitants.
A talk from Adam Greenfield that gives a good overview of how public objects can be connected - click here to watch.
An essay presenting possibilities for the networked city: A Manifesto for Networked Objects - Cohabitating with Pigeons, Arphids, Aibos in the Internet of Things
Renaissance man Vibskov
“I’d been doing music for 14 years, and I thought, I need to do something different, I need to do something more.” Renaissance designer, Henrik Vibskov seamlessly unites his disparate artistic practices of artist, musician, fashion and stage designer. He has an eponymous clothing line that is used as the focal point to bring together his ideas, but the fashion is just one aspect of a larger vision of his. His shows are always wild happenings that, in the past, have featured unfurling picnic tables, men pushing mechanical wooden boats, a conceptual transparent garden shed, models walking inside zebra striped hamster wheels, and models walking down the runway on push pedals that activate a wall of drums behind them. These are just some of the fantastical set-ups he has created.
“I like when people are part of something, walking away with a new feeling or a new vision. Imagination to try and do something off track, twisted from daily life….It’s as much about how you present creativity, for example, if you build something, you probably also need music.” - Henrik Vibskov
He has a new book coming out that shows the last 15 years of his work, published by Gestalten.
Get the book HERE.
