Edifici Fòrum Barcelona

James Turrell meets Anish Kapoor pimped by Yves Klein - as seen by swiss architects -
all of which are not necessarily bad things...

FOA Parque Litoral Barcelona

Make your own mind up.... does this look as good as the concept and drawings suggested?

Herzog + De Meuron Winery

nice gabion walls...

Fighting Robots

A little light relief - maybe one for Odysseus?

FREE SOIL

Free Soil is an international hybrid collaboration of artists, activists, researchers and gardeners who take a participatory role in the transformation of our environment. Free Soil fosters discourse, develops projects and gives support for critical art practices that reflect and change the urban and natural environment. We believe art can be a catalyst for social awareness and positive change.

Links to loads of stuff, architectural exhibitions, texts, etc......

LEARNING SITE

Learning Site pays attention to the local conditions it finds in the place where it chooses to work. In the past years Learning Site has mainly worked with resource materials and economies related to the specific situations where work has been carried out. Economic, environmental, labor, property rights, and many other issues are investigated in tandem to produce a variety of perspectives.

Learning Site takes part of a discussion of how knowledge is distributed and produced.

N55

Introduction:

N55 works with art as a part of everyday life.



Construction:

N55 is a platform for persons who wants to work together, share places to live, economy, and means of production.
N55 is based both in Copenhagen, and in LAND.


Production / distribution:

N55 has its own means of production and distribution.
Manuals for N55 things are published at www.N55.dk and in the N55 periodical. Furthermore, N55 things are implemented in various situations around the world, initiated by N55 or in collaboration with different persons and institutions.


Economy:

N55 is non-commercial. N55 is financed primarily by exhibitions, grants and educational work.


Politics:

N55 suggests respecting conditions for description: logical relations and facts, as a basis for politics.
Ideologies, religions, subjective opinions, social conventions, and habitual conceptions do not necessarily respect conditions for description.
An example of a decisive logical relation is the logical relation between persons and their rights. Persons should be treated as persons and therefore as having rights. If we deny this assertion it goes wrong: here we have a person, but this person should not be treated as a person, or: here is a person, who should be treated as a person, but not as having rights. Therefore we can only talk about persons in a way that makes sense if we know that persons have rights.
An example of a decisive fact is that concentrations of power characterise our society. Concentrations of power do not necessarily respect person's rights.
Concentrations of power force persons to concentrate on participating in competition and power games, in order to create a social position for themselves. Concurrently with the concentrations of power dominating our conscious mind and being decisive to our situations, the significance of our fellow humans diminishes. And our own significance becomes the significance we have for concentrations of power, the growth of concentrations of power, and the conflicts of concentrations of power. It is decisive that persons try to find ways of existing with as small concentrations of power as possible.


History:

In 1994 a non-commercial exhibition space and lab was initiated in Nørre Farimagsgade 55, Copenhagen. N55 grew out of this collaboration. In 1996, a number of persons started living together in an apartment located in the center of Copenhagen, trying to "rebuild the city from within" and using their everyday life situation as a platform for public events and collaborations. In the year 2000 FLOATING PLATFORM and N55 SPACEFRAME were constructed in the harbour area. N55 SPACEFRAME served as a starting point for local initiatives and interventions, a workspace and living space for the group until 2004. It now serves as a living space.In 2005 co-founder of N55 Ingvil Aarbakke died. N55 continues activities locally and elsewhere in collaboration with various persons.

URBAN PRESCRIPTIONS

Santiago Cirugeda Parejo exploits gaps in administrative structures, governmental bodies’ supervisory energies, official procedures, and where the law falls short. As Benedicte Grosjean writes in ArchiLab’s Futurehouse (2002): “(Cirugeda) formulates realistic and empirical strategies to push the law to its limits and find pockets of non-law in which to develop a possible habitat.”

more maya stuff

Hi - heres a link to Columbia's maya resources - mostly quite basic but there is a laser cutter wizard and a couple of other interesting bits - so something for n00bs and others...
enjoy.
j

LINK!!

Biomimetics: Design inspired by nature

Biomimetics is an enabling discipline which looks towards nature for ideas that may be adapted and adopted for solving problems:

The burr on a dog's fur was the inspiration for Velcro!

An interesting site, with many links and information on ideas borrowed from nature applied in fields as innovative material research from aeronautical, submarine engineering to architecture etc

TheVeryMany

Hi all.
John you might know this guy from your time at the AA. Mark Fornes. His research, some of which is displayed on his blog, is all about parametric/scripted/encoded processes in design. There's a couple of rhino scripts that can be copied and tested in the comfort and safety of your own home!

GM

Morpho-Towers---Two Standing Spirals

Morpho Towers--Two Standing Spirals is an installation that consists of two ferrofluid sculptures that moves synthetically to music. The two spiral towers stand on a large plate that hold ferrofluid. When the music starts, the magnetic field around the tower is strengthened. Spikes of ferrofluid are born from the bottom plate and move up, trembling and rotating around the edge of the iron spiral.

LANDSCAPE URBANISM WEBOGRAPHY

heres a list of weblinks to interesting Landscape Urbanism projects and designers. might just be useful.......

Projects
MFO Park, Zurich, Switzerland
Multi-tiered vine park
http://www.burckhardtpartner.ch/english/projekte/mfo/projekt.php

Parque de Diagonal Mar, Barcelona Spain
Misting Vine Pergola
EMBT
http://www.mirallestagliabue.com/project.asp?id=51

Palio de Bougainvilleas
Wind Adapted Road Canopy Strcuture
West 8
http://biennale.cp-artspace.com/2005/featured_west_8.html

Olympic Structure Park, Seattle
Mechanically stabilized landform
Weiss/Manfredi Architects
http://www.weissmanfredi.com/projects/index.php

Wonder Holland, Rome
Floating Glass Plain
West 8
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&client=firefoxa&
channel=s&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-
GB%3Aofficial&hs=Tko&q=wonder+holland+west+8&btnG=Search&meta=

The High Line, Section I, New York City
Field Operations
Navigate from website via projects:
http://www.fieldoperations.net/

Safe Zone, 7th International Gardens Festival, Reford Gardens, Grand Metis
StoSS landscape Urbanism
http://www.stoss.net/metis.html

Maritime Youth House, Sundby Harbour, Copenhagen
Surface Inversion
PLOT=BIG+JDS
http://www.big.dk/

Allianz Arena Munich Stadium, Munich
Vogt Landschaftsarchitekten + Herzog + de Meuron
Weaving Porous and Nonporous surfaces
http://www.vogt-la.ch/en/aussenraum/landschaft/projekte_1587.html

Shoulder Hedge, The Lurie Garden, Millenium Park, Chicago
Hedge Trimming Armature
Gustafon Guthrie Nichol Ltd + PPPiet Oudolf + Robert Israel
http://www.ggnltd.com/frame-sets/portfolio-fset.htm

Hybridized Hydrologies, Erie Street Plaza, Milwaukee
Artificial Winter Microclimate for a Bamboo Garden
StoSS Landscape Urbanism
http://www.stoss.net/metis.html

Former British Petroleum Park
Bio-Remediation Park Design
McGregor + Partners
http://mcgregorpartners.com.au/mcgnp_alternate.html

Daimler Chrysler Potsdamer Platz, Berlin
Water-Cleansing Biotope
Atelier Dreiseitl
http://www.dreiseitl.de/index.php

Sidwell Friends School, Washington
Andropogon Associates + Kieran Timberlake Associates + Natural Systems
International
http://www.andropogon.com/home.htm

Cultuurpark Wetergasfabriek, Amsterdam
Strategic Contaminated Soil Replacement
Gustafson Porter
http://www.gustafson-porter.com/

Ephemeral Structures, Olympic Games, Athens
Pneumatic Body
ONL
http://www.oosterhuis.nl/quickstart/index.php?id=349

Courtyard in the Wind, Munich
Powered by wind, the ground is turnable
Acconci Studio + Wolfgang Hermann Niemeyer
http://www.acconci.com/

Harvey Milk Memorial, San Francisco
Responsive Cloud Machine
Christian Werthmann + LOMA architecture.landscape.urbanism
http://www.loma-design.de/loma2/indexe.html?http://www.lomadesign.
de/loma2/projekte.asp?l=e

Pitterpatterns, Stuttgart
Computer Animated Rain
J. MAYER H. Architekten
http://www.jmayerh.de/home.htm

Wind Veil, Mesa Arts Centre, Mesa, Arizona
Dynamic Thermal Wind Wall
Ned Kahn
http://nedkahn.com/wind.html#

Exhange Square,Manchester
Martha Schwartz Inc.
http://www.marthaschwartz.com/prjts/civic/manchester/exchange.html

The Aesthetics of Urban Renewal
Online slide show review of MOMA’s exhibition Groundswell
http://www.slate.com/id/2114188/

Shanghai Carpet
Tom Leader Studio + Skidmore owings & Merrill LLP
http://www.tomleader.com/

Southeast Coastal Park, Barcelona
Foreign Office Architects
http://www.f-o-a.net/

Duisburg-Nord Landscape Park
Latz+partner
http://www.latzundpartner.de/L3/eng/e-4-du.htm

Northeast Coastal Park, Barcelona
Abalos + Herreros
http://www.abalos-herreros.com/#

Maya tutorials

Hi All,

some of you have asked where to find online Maya tutorials:
here are some places. Enjoy...your eyes may look like this, after a while, though.

http://www.thegnomonworkshop.com/tutorials.html

http://www.zoorender.com/?page_id=26

http://www.highend3d.com/

http://www.purplestatic.com/courses/maya/

Park & Jog - Buschow & Henley

Park + Jog regenerates its surroundings, bringing activity and value to blighted sections of the city, and it radically alters the political situation for the suburb and the heartless commute it makes inevitable. In 2006 it was shown at the Van Alen Institute in New York as part of the international exhibition “The Good Life - New Public Spaces for Recreation”.

Our utopian scheme is envisioned for a 1km stretch of the A6 road between Salford University and Manchester city centre. The road is transformed into a 4-lane linear park. One lane is grassed, another a water channel, another sand and the last a running track. Parking their cars in a multi-storey car park, commuters can change in the facilities provided and head east into Manchester walking, jogging, cycling, rollerblading, horse riding, swimming or rowing.

Web http://www.buschowhenley.co.uk/projects/regeneration/006.htm

Another 'Smashing' article on Data Visualization

It has a lot of the same examples as below and also includes an interesting interview

PingMag

SmashingMAGAZINE

Wish i'd found this earlier! :) still, loads of ideas for data visualisation and diagramming.

Architecture and Situated Technologies

Online results from a 3-day symposium bringing together researchers and practitioners from art, architecture, technology and sociology to explore the emerging role of "situated" technologies in the design and inhabitation of the contemporary metapolis.

Some of the presentations are worth a look and the bibliography is ok too....

Sky-Rail

Intereseting in relation to diagrams as interactive machines.

link

AkrYls

Hi all.
I thought i would post this for those of you interested in CG. It's one of my favourite indie animations of all time :)

link

smoke signals

This is a nice project from an old colleague of mine - Theo Spyroupolous.

“Participants engage in a collective act of writing space through the use of light as a virtual writing machine onto ephemeral plumes of smoke,” explain Minimaforms. In other words, onlookers can text messages which are then displayed using light projected into plumes of smoke. Their texts “are fed through dynamic coding that recognizes, archives and plays back a real time visualization. This visualization is then grafted onto trajectories of smoke that form a dynamic ephemeral field that is affected by all external forces in the space of performance. Through turbulence the smoke writes or erases the grafting of the inputted text.”

link

Asymptote building stuff - surely not?

image: Asymptote

Asymptote has unveiled another major Asian project, extending the complexity and scope of their kinetic work with a 10.8-million-square-foot mixed-use, zero-carbon complex in Penang, Malaysia. In a statement, Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi called the project, known as the Penang Global City, “a high-caliber development” that will serve as “a catalyst for the NCER and an important factor in the Malaysian economy as a whole.” The NCER is the Northern Corridor Economic Region, a recently created development zone along Malaysia’s northern border.

“It’s certainly a place that’s off the map, but it’s trying to get on there,” Asymptote principal Hani Rashid told AN. He said that in ambition, the city’s goals are analogous to those of Bilbao, Abu Dhabi, and Kuala Lumpur, all of which have used architecture to raise their global profile in one way or another. “When people think of Malaysia, they uually think of the Petronas Towers,” Rashid said. “Now the government wants to bring that attention to the northern corridor.”

I wonder who is drawing the construction set??

from here

McGametastic

Paolo Pedercini is a mad bastard, and the McDonald's game is his sharp, procedural satire of how fast food is a corrupt industry by necessity. The game is set up so that you cannot win without compromising. Try it, you'll see. While you can maintain mild growth without using hormones or genetically modified crops, your bosses will not be satisfied. To really succeed, you have to employ what some might call "unnatural" means, though at Corporate, they call it "McFriendly growth measures".

The game is drawn with a crazy flair, the blood splattered happy meal at the title screen should be some indication. There are subtle touches, like the joint perpetually hung out the mouth of a marketer, or the fact that some of your customers are men with beards wearing skirts -- a byproduct of the randomly combinatorial nature of the character generation system. Watching the constant flow of people getting their trays, then walking off, is sickly hypnotic; it's the core pulse of the game's system, where the commodities turn into cash and complete the play loop, and its also an abstraction of something that is going on all over the world, many times a second. The illustrations and writing are pretty on-point as well (hint: before you bulldoze the Amazonian village to plant more GMO soy, start a "McDonald's for the Third World" campaign).

via Playthisthing

Cross River Park

Mat & Kevin, I said that I would send you this link at the end of last year (there is a huge amount of info, embedded in here)

Cross River Park, Thames Gateway. This is the product of a Diploma Unit running at London Metropolitan (run by CHORA)
http://crp.urban-gallery.net/
http://www.chora.org/2005/?page_id=9

The Architecture of Parking

Neil the book I was talking about was 'The Architecure of Parking' (they have 3 copies in Waterstones Canterbury; to flick through). The last chapter with the contemporary stuff is very interesting.
http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/WEBSITE/WWW/WEBPAGES/showbook.php?id=0500342377

They have a fair amount of info on the BD site
http://www.bdonline.co.uk/feature.asp?featurecode=12025

The two projects that jumped out were:

OMA, Souterrain Tram Tunnel, The Hauge (the linking of 2 transport hubs, underground, plus parking)
http://www.oma.eu/index.php?option=com_projects&view=portal&Itemid=10&id=183

Aranda/Lasch, 10 Mile Spiral, Las Vegas (the beauty of parking at 55 miles per hour)
http://www.terraswarm.com/vegas/
http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2006/08/10-mile-spiral.html

Building Design Class 0f 2007

Just in case anybody missed it BD has an overview of some of last years student shows and student diploma work.
http://www.bdonline.co.uk/section.asp?navcode=2058

Plus you can download Paul Maich's full project from dezeen (bottom of the page 2 pdf files)
http://www.dezeen.com/2007/09/28/architect-murdered-in-his-own-building-cognitive-dwelling-by-paul-maich/#more-5482

First review of the year...

Light works - crit and selection for exhibition.

please be pinned up and have projectors on standby ready for a prompt start. It is your responsmibility to get projectors if needed for animations - sharing would make sense..

I draw your attention to the output specifications in the brief -

For individuals working alone
A minimum of 5 full colour, high quality full bleed images on semi gloss photo-grade paper, cropped and mounted for exhibition on 3.5mm foam board.

For groups
A minimum of 5 full colour, high quality full bleed images on semi gloss photo-grade paper, cropped and mounted for exhibition on 3.5mm foam board.

Also a minimum 30 second animation presented as Quicktime movie, size 720x594 px 16:9 aspect ratio

MAKE SURE YOU FOLLOW THEM PRECISELY.

Any work which does not meet submission requirements will be disregarded and may be summarily destroyed in an extravagant and public ceremony.

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

But - hey - lets have some fun...

Tuesday 2nd October 12.30 for 1.00pm in the Atrium

Sao Paolo Mayor---genius or.....?

At the beginning of this year the mayor of Sao Paolo Brazil passed a law to make all forms of public advertising, from the mega-billboard to the flickering neon sign of the liquor store illegal.

The result speaks for itself---check out the photo set on flikr:

http://flickr.com/photos/tonydemarco/sets/72157600075508212/

GM

gentlemen, start your bookmarks...

This is a Dutch Tax office - it would be better/more fun if it was in the UK when it would certainly leak - however its kinda cute, no?
more details and many more-or less- groovy projects at thecoolhunter

If you don't know this site - you do now.

Robodock 07

The 10th Robodock Arts & Technology Festival that took place in Amsterdam last weekend. Interesting as event architecture... have a look

link

There is an mp4 slideshow here

photo by PharPhoto / Aaron Butler

Lets get to it...

Hi - UCCA diplomanauts, I am sending you all logins so you can post to this blog. I hope it will build over the year into a valuable resource. Post often - and anything you feel worth seeing - architectural or not (In case you're wondering the pic is one of mine).
J