While clearing several months' worth of accumulated bookmarks, we rediscovered an article from The New York Times about laser scanning in Glasgow — or to be more precise: laser scanning the city itself.
A few years ago, we read, a group from the Glasgow School of Art “began surveying a swath of the center of Glasgow, along the River Clyde, creating 3-D digital representations of some 1,400 buildings and dozens of streetscapes.” The project led to commissions from the Scottish government's heritage agency to scan other historical landmarks in the country. And later this spring, the group will be part of a team that will scan Mount Rushmore to create “the most complete and precise three-dimensional models ever of the site, millions of times more detailed and accurate than the best photographs or films, precise down to the tiniest fraction of a millimeter.”
So precise are these digital models that they can be used not only to facilitate much needed restoration work of deteriorating monuments but also to recreate them if they are completely destroyed by natural or man-made disasters. In other words, if the Bamiyan Buddhas had been laser scanned before they were obliterated by the Taliban, they could now be reconstructed with unbelievable accuracy.
We're inevitably led to fantasize a team of laser scanners shooting billions of pinpricks of light at the Acropolis or Machu Picchu, converting them into deterrestrialized point clouds. Not waiting until the buildings get corroded down to bedrock by an abrasive mixture of tourists and climate change, or even until the scans are completed to start reconstruction, the surveyors connect their data servers to a distant swarm of Pike Loop robots, which immediately begins to fabricate these ancient sites in foreign terrain. It's BLDGBLOG's wettest wet dreams.
Better yet, forget those surface monuments. How about something subterranean like the underground necropolis of Domitilla outside Rome or La Subterranea in Guanajuato, Mexico? Both of these places have been laser scanned, and their ghostly digital facsimiles await to be physicalized.
There are also those abandoned sewers, stormwater tunnels and subway tunnels. Day and night, laser scanners that have gone mobile will be deployed into these voids, and bit by pinprick bit, these labyrinths that once confounded, concealed and even consumed trespassers with their disorienting mazes will resolve into total comprehensibility. Every detail will be known to you.
Simultaneously, disembodied limbs out in some vast tract of land will get to work replicating these filigreed abysses. Once completed, it will look like a city eroded down to its subsurface infrastructure. It'll be the playground for urban explorers who might be looking for more muted thrills and for architects who could no longer wait for the mythical Golden Age of WPA 2.0 to play out their desires.
For the month of February, including the two weeks when the 2010 Winter Olympic Games will be staged, you can participate in the fifth and latest installation of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's Vectorial Elevation in Vancouver.
Twenty robotic searchlights have been spread out along the English Bay, and via a three-dimensional interface on the installation's website, their positions can be reconfigured by anyone. From anywhere in the world, you can redesign the skyline of Vancouver.
You can render the intricate vaulting system of a Gothic cathedral or the geometric tessellation of a Persian mosque; inscribe cryptic constellations onto passing clouds; or cultivate a photonic bouquet for Valentine's Day.
Perhaps someone might want to recreate a childhood memory of searchlights that once beckoned them to a glamorous Hollywood movie premier while another might one to evoke the torched nighttime skies of London during the Blitz. Indeed, searchlights add spectacle and a sense of excitement to any event, thus making them perfect additions to the festive environment of the Olympics. But they are also harbingers of violence and destruction, and of course, the Olympics have a long urbicidal track record.
In any case, all designs will be placed on queue, then projected for everyone to see on site or on webcams, and finally given their own webpage with photographs as documentation of your participation.
The fabulous Junk Jet has just released their third issue, and it sounds amazing. They asked for:
Fluxing architectures, boogie, buildings, rolling rocks, flying architectures, provisory pyramids, and temporary eternities; for all kinds of practical concepts and conceptual practices, for stable happenings and unstable thoughts, for lifted cellars and dug in landmarks, for curtains, mobiles, house boats, bubbles, zeppelins, flying saucers.
And they got:
Fantastic forms of material, immaterial, physical and mental flux. Not only were immovables made movable, but also were put forth moving ideas of aesthetic, social, and political concern. We recognize that it is in microarchitectures, where architecture resides today, that speculations cannot be hilarious enough, and that the post-digital is the era we already live in.
We're thrilled that one of the contributors is David L. Hays. His piece will give an update on his investigations into thermally-responsive, dynamic structural systems, a research project which he had begun for his 2001 thesis work, Sentient Architecture, and then continued during an academic career predominantly occupied with landscape history and theory.
“As a practice of design in which boundaries between art and technology are fully dissolved and in which form is both motivated and modified by shifting conditions of environment,” Hays wrote in his project statement, “sentient architecture conflates concepts of structure and environment that have hitherto been at odds, thereby allowing architecture and landscape to be theorized as a single discipline.“
It is exactly what Junk Jet was looking for.
Meanwhile, we were asked to submit a piece to the issue, but unfortunately we found ourselves in several kinds of fluxes and couldn't get around to it. Sorry Junk Jet!
1)This American Life on people bidding for the contents of abandoned self storage units in California. According to the Self Storage Association, there are 2.35 billion square feet in the United States. That's 7.4 square feet of self storage for every man, woman and child in the country, meaning all of us could stand inside self storage units at the same time. Plus: underwater Byzantine archaeology.
3) On the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver: Will one venue be foreclosed before/during/after the games? Will another even have enough snow or might it necessitate a nightly Busby Berkeley meteorological extravaganza of snow machines billowing an artificial blizzard? Will you be among “the anti-capitalist, Indigenous, housing rights, labour, migrant justice, environmental, anti-war, community-loving, anti-poverty, civil libertarian, and anti colonial activists to come together to confront this two-week circus and the oppression it represents?”
5)Low-tech Magazine on the history of trolley canal boats. A short concluding section argues for bringing them back as a zero-emission transport system. Be sure to read this comment thread at The Oil Drum for counter-arguments.
7) On February 27, Foodprint NYC, an event organized by Nicola Twilley and Sarah Rich, will touch upon “how our urban food systems work today, how historical forces have shaped them till now, how they might develop in the future — and how these food systems, in turn, have shaped our environment and ourselves.”
8) Also on February 27 but on the other coast, the Los Angeles Urban Rangers will be wrapping up their 3-year Malibu Public Beach project by offering 3 mini-safaris. They're free and no sign-up is required. Just show up for any one of the tours, but don't plan to join mid-safari.
9) An exhibition on the 1910 Great Flood of Paris. If the flash website drives you up the wall, there is Paris Under Water, both the book and the blog.
10) Year-old NPR piece on grain silos converted into ice climbing walls.
To launch its 14th anthology, Water, Alphabet City has organized a series of events this week in Toronto, two of which are the HYDROCity symposium and its accompanying exhibition at the University of Toronto. Another event is a lunchtime talk in which Jeroen Bodewits will discuss Waterpleinen, a project designed by Florian Boer and Marco Vermeulen to reconfigure the stormwater infrastructure of Rotterdam.
In Florian Boer and Marco Vermeulen's proposal, rainwater runoff isn't funneled into a complex system of underground pipes, a system that is rather expensive to build and maintain, but is managed instead through a network of surface reservoirs, the Waterpleinen, or Watersquares. These storage spaces will be dry for most of the year, but during storm events, they will collect water from the surrounding neighborhood. If one reaches capacity, excess water will overflow into another basin. After the rain, the collected water will slowly recede into nearby bodies of water or seep into the soil.
So instead of being buried in concrete, excised from the daily life of the city and only experienced by municipal workers, urban hydrology is visibly, even prominently, incorporated into the surface fabric of the city. Programmed with recreational opportunities when its dry and even while inundated, its infrastructure provides active public spaces for the local area, not dark playgrounds for a handful of urban explorers. It even becomes an event, its frolicking rivulets and interior lakes staged for the young and old.
Originally developed in 2005, this concept has since become official urban policy. At least 25 watersquares are planned for Rotterdam in the coming years, with a prototype to be constructed soon.
Coinciding with the next issue (#18) of Kerb, the annual landscape architecture journal edited by students at RMIT, Melbourne, is their first ever international design competition, PlastiCity FantastiCity. The competition brief sounds wildly open ended, which could frustrate some but hopefully will only foster astonishing visions of the future city.
Imagine the limitless world of a child. Creative boundaries have not yet been conceived, limits not yet understood. We want to see your city in all its wildness. A child can compose a world of immeasurable fantasy and pleasure yet the regulations that we currently adhere to have diminished our ability to make this our reality.
What if when you take a lunch break, parks literally broke from the earth, airlifted above the clouds escaping into the sunlight, landing within the hour leaving you at peace with the world?
PlastiCity FantastiCity is remodeling the constructed city at any chosen scale to become a world of playful opportunity, where nothing that manifests itself in today's cities is present. This ideas competition seeks a multidisciplinary approach to discover new potentials and possibilities within the world and in particular for the Landscape Architecture profession.
The registration deadline is December 18, 2009, and the submission deadline for panels is January 18, 2010.
Winners will receive cash prizes in addition to page spreads in Kerb 18.
Speaking of augmented game spaces, here is an interesting interactive installation set to come online at the end of the month in three UK cities. Created by KMA, Great Street Games [dead link] will be a “huge, participatory, high-tech athletics tournament” in which participants in Gateshead, Sunderland and Middlesbrough compete against each other virtually in real-time using the city as platform.
KMA will use projected light and thermal-imaging technology to create interactive 'courts' in which human movement triggers light effects. The physical movements of players determine the outcome the games, which will run on ten-minute cycles. Participants develop their game-playing skills as they progress through a number of levels to help their area to victory or to simply have fun.
The parameters of this urban sport are described thus:
The ‘courts’ created by projected light; each court comprising a central playing area and two zones representing the other two locations. Balls of light appear from the centre of each court – these projected images can be moved by players physically ‘touching’ them. The aim of the first game is for each location to gain points by moving as many balls as possible to the other locations. Games last 90 seconds and 5 games make a series – through which the games increase in complexity as players become more familiar with the rules. The town or city with the most points at the end wins.
You're walking home alone one night through pedestrian unfriendly, darkly lit corridors. All of a sudden, you trigger a sensor and projectors spray the pavement with technicolor lights. Ebullient geometries seemingly float above the asphalt.
“Wanna play,” a disembodied voice rings out from a speaker.
“Umm, sure,” you instinctively respond, even if you don't how to play what is to be played. “I'll learn along the way,” you say to yourself.
And then it's hours later; the sun is about to rise and wash out the lights. The two of you promise to return the following night (tonight, actually) to continue the game, with friends to make it a team competition. It'll be Chicago vs. Manchester.
“Is this some sort of a next generation MMORPG game?” you wonder.
A week or two later, you find out on Twitter that there are other similar game spaces installed throughout the city, but their locations are a secret. There's no iPhone app for it yet. So you set on a walkabout, hoping that you might again trigger a sensor.
