2) On March 9, the Landscapes of Quarantine exhibition will open at the Storefront for Art and Architecture. “[T]he practice of quarantine extends far beyond questions of epidemic control and pest-containment strategies to touch on issues of urban planning, geopolitics, international trade, ethics, immigration, and more. And although the practice dates back at least to the arrival of the Black Death in medieval Venice, if not to Christ’s 40 days in the desert, quarantine has re-emerged as an issue of urgency and importance in today’s era of globalization, antibiotic resistance, emerging diseases, pandemic flu, and bio-terrorism.”
3)Bustler on the winning concept for the revitalization of Toronto’s Lower Don Lands.
4)Alphabet City on urban public baths. “When the public bath moves into the city, it may frame natural landscapes, as in an indoor wave pool or a Japanese open-air rotenburo, or amplify the elemental qualities that buildings usually try to moderate, such as heat and cold, wet and dry, darkness and light. These urban bath cultures, like the Roman thermae and balnae, Turkish hammam, Japanese sento, and Russian banya, have formed a cornerstone of their cities’ spatial forms and their citizens’ daily rituals.”
7)The Guardian on damming the Amazon. “The Brazilian government has given the green light to the construction of a controversial hydroelectric dam in the Amazon rainforest that environmentalists and indigenous activists claim will displace indigenous tribes and further damage the Amazon basin.” The Belo Monte Dam will be the third largest hydroelectric dam in the world, behind the Three Gorges Dam in China and the Itaipu Dam shared by Brazil and Paraguay. And according to the BBC News it is one of “at least 70 dams” planned for the Amazon basin.
9)e360 on rewilding. “A Marshall Plan for the environment, rewilding promotes the expansion of core wilderness areas on a vast scale, the restoration of corridors between them (to fight the “island” effect of isolated parks and protected areas), and the reintroduction or protection of top predators.”
To the ever growing list of computer interfaces now infesting our bodies like viral prosthetic limbs, you can add another, one that's far less arthritic than a keyboard, less prosaic than a tablet/stylus combo, and while without that technolicious sheen of a multi-touch screen is nevertheless as immersive and unconventional as one can get.
By sloshing, squishing, pulling, punching, etc, in a tub of mud (yes, wet dirt), users control games, simulators, and expressive tools; interacting with a computer in a new, completely organic, way. Born out of a motivation to close the gap between our bodies and the digital world, the Mud Tub frees the traditional computer interaction model of it’s rigidity, allowing humans to use their highly developed sense of touch, and creative thinking skills in a more natural way.
Gerhardt further describes how this interface might work.
Where the Mud Tub differs from [other experimental interfaces] is its use of a richly textured organic substance that takes advantage of human ingenuity and complex sensory ability; pioneering a new open-ended interaction typology where prescriptive goals are centered around states, rather than specific user manipulation. I.e., instead of having a user click a mouse button with their pointer finger, or gesture with two fingers in a specific way, he or she is simply asked to create a state in the Mud Tub surface, which can be accomplished in any manner of ways, including digging, molding, pressing, piling, etc. This creates a “buffer” between physical user action and digital result that allows for user improvisation and makes the system inherently adaptable.
So can we soon tweet by playing in the mud? Our tweets will just be gibberish, meaning there won't be much difference from the norm.
When might we expect to be able to go to our neighborhood park, find a patch of wet or merely damp earth, plug in our iPad and update our blog, all the while using the soil for power?
Can we use our (muddy) backyard garden to create a digital 3D model of our next landscape project?
We're reminded here of David Gissen's chapter on mud in his marvelous book Subnature. Mud, he writes, is “a type of unstable ground that must be overcome in the construction of foundations. In the development of modern cities, rather than discussing mud as something wanted or desirable, it was identified as the product of poor drainage and ineffective engineering.” It “signifies a type of failed engineering” and “operates against modern concepts of circulation; it slows the city down like slush.”
[T]he development of ideas about mud is intimately related to the rise of modern economies, industrialization, urbanization, and the birth of the modern state. Mud has run counter to virtually all of these formations. When economic prospects went bad, in a sense, they turned into mud (or dust); urban routes were slowed, and mud infiltrated all manner of economic enterprises, from farms to mines.
It's interesting, then, that Gerhardt is using mud to facilitate communication, enable commerce and bridge distances. By lessening the disconnect between our physical bodies and our network identities, this mud liberates rather than bog us down. Rather than neutralize the city, mud is seen as engendering community, virtual or otherwise.
Here's another competition, and it's organized by the Chicago Architectural Club. The site is the Chicago Spire hole.
The Chicago Architectural Club is pleased to announce the 2010 Chicago Prize Competition: MINE THE GAP, a single-stage international design ideas competition dedicated to examining one of the most visible scars left after the collapse of the real estate market in Chicago: the massive hole along the Lake Michigan shore that was to have been—and may yet be—the foundation for a singular 150-story condominium tower designed by an internationally-renowned Spanish architect, a tower which was to have become a new icon for the city and region. What to do with the gap? Whether or not the project is resuscitated, what else can we do with this strategic and highly-charged site? Once the motor of real-estate speculation has stalled, what can we use to propel ourselves, and the discipline, forward?
The goal of the competition is to design and construct Land Art / Environmental Art installations that have the added benefit of large scale clean energy generation. Each sculpture will continuously distribute clean energy into the electrical grid with each land art sculpture having the potential to provide power to thousands of homes.
Note that this is foremost an art competition, meaning “the installations are art first, power plants second. There may need to be sacrifices to be made in terms of efficiency of energy generation in order that the design function primarily on a conceptual and aesthetic level. The objective is not to design and engineer a device that provides the cheapest KWh or the most energy per square meter of land.”
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!
