Phillip Rahm i-weather
i-weather.org is an open source, speculative architecture and art project created by Philippe Rahm and fabric | ch. It proposes an artificial climate, which satisfies the metabolic and physiological requirements of a human being in an environment partially or completely removed from earthly influences: mediated reality, networks and netlag, air travels and jetlag, as well as with extra-terrestrial trips and holidays.
Accessible everywhere and to everybody thanks to the Internet, I-Weather acts as a kind of personal digital sun, oscillating over a 25-hour 7 minutes and 40 seconds period between a minimum wavelength of 460nm (blue) and a maximum wavelength of 597nm (orange), which helps to control the melatonin regulation by producing an artificial circadian rhythm synchronised to match the inner cycle of the human hormonal and endocrine system.
Maker Faire and Open Hardware Summit
Two upcoming events in New York that will be of interest to members of the studio (and others):
The Open Hardware Summit is a one-day conference at the New York Hall of Science on the subject of open source hardware and related business models, manufacturing, legal issues, and design. Speakers are affiliated with the Media Lab, Eyebeam, Arduino, Big Labs, and others. September 23. See the schedule here.
The Maker Faire is a two day event sponsored by Make Magazine at the NY Hall of Science as a showcase for the maker/tinkerer community. It’s a great event for anyone interested in home made robots, bikes, 3d printers, open source/hacked SEM microscopes, etc., etc. September 25-26. NYTimes feature here.
(thanks to Shawn for the tip)
Wind Farm Radar Confusion
The Times reports today on a host of monitoring-related hiccups and the related resistance to wind farms from agencies and organizations with concerns ranging from national security to meteorology to air traffic control. Apparently wind turbines create conditions and operate at elevations that confuse those other systems. Talk about cognitive dissonance.
Geotaggers’ Atlas
Great maps from Eric Fischer, thanks to Terence.
Final Review April 30th
Thank you to all the guest critics who took time out to join us on Friday, and thank you to all the students for their hard work.
Students:
Guest Critics:
The Military and Powerpoint
An absolutely hilarious article from today’s Times on the increasing and frustratingly byzantine nature of American military commander Powerpoint presentations. Required reading for all of the digital presentation slide-makers among us.
“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina…“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”
Secret Subway
58 Joralemon Street—a three-story brownstone on a pristine Brooklyn Heights block—is actually home to electrical equipment and secret subway tunnel access. We do love a good decoy.
via Curbed
Second Ave Subway Boring Machine
Videos and images of the tunnel boring machinery for the Second Ave subway line.
Cartographies of Time
In their new book “ Cartographies of Time,” Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton dissect and track the methods people used when attempting to record the passage of time. These timelines, lists and antiquated infographics reveal particular attitudes and novel approaches to documenting history.
Rosenberg and Grafton organize Cartographies, naturally, in chronological order, tracing the earliest timelines from ancient Greece all the way to modern reinterpretations. Expertly showing the evolution of the form, the book’s fascinating swathe of cartographic imagery will appeal to history buffs and data visualization fans alike.
Energy Generating Roadway
The makers of the Solar Roadway just got a little closer to their dream of making every road in the United States a high-tech thruway that carries more than just cars. They’ve completed their first prototype and unveiled the photographs of the revolutionary energy-generating road surface. If installed on a real thoroughfare the Solar Roadway would carry vehicles, generate electricity for messages to drivers, self-heat to melt snow and ice, and deliver high speed phone and internet cables to the front steps of every home.
Big Picture_Expo 2010 Shanghai
The Boston Globe’s Big Picture blog has posted construction photos from the about to open Shanhgai World Expo 2010. Seen here, Thomas Heatherwick’s British Pavilion.
CO2-Fixing Concrete
Dwellers of modern cities often have to deal with the problems of industrial pollution, which leads to a host of problems ranging from thick and ugly smog to health issues like asthma. But a team of Italian inventors may have a new solution to this problem that urbanites have had to deal with since the 19th century — use pollution-eating cement. Buildings and streets across Western Europe are just starting to use TX Active, which has been in development for a decade. According to an article in BusinessWeek, the town of Segrete in northern Italy has repaved a street that sustains 1,000 cars per hour with TX Active. A spokesman for the company, Italcementi, said that it had measured a 60 percent reduction in nitric oxide on that street. According to Italcementi, the cement has a photocatalyzer that speeds up the natural oxidation process of pollutants in the presence of natural or artificial light, making it more environmentally-friendly by “transforming them into less harmful compounds such as water, nitrates, or carbon dioxide.”
Amphibious Cities and Floating Islands for the Maldives
The Maldives government and Dutch Docklands/Dutch Watervalley just signed an agreement today to develop several floating facilities for the islands, including a convention center and golf courses. Designed by architect Koen Olthuis of Waterstudio.NL, the people who brought you the Citadel floating apartment complex and these amazing floating homes, the renderings for the amphibious mini-cities appear depict star-shaped, tiered islands with indoor spaces hidden under lush green-roof terraces, complete with interior pools and beaches.
Philippe Rahm Interview
Archinect has posted a series of interviews with Philippe Rahm, who has done tremendously interesting research into architecture, biological and environmental systems. Certainly of interest to everyone in the studio. Check it out here: archinect
Food Print Manhattan by T?F
Food Print Manhattan was presented at Pioneers of Change, a festival of Dutch design, fashion and architecture on New York’s Governors Island. Commissioned by Droog Design Amsterdam and produced by The Why Factory, a think tank for future cities and a collaboration between MVRDV and Delft University of Technology.
Temporary Bar by Diogo Aguiar and Teresa Otto
This is a temporary bar that was made out of 420 empty IKEA storage boxes. This was built as an entry for a competition organized by the architecture faculty at the Universidade de Porto in Portugal. The structure was built by students and could be transformed into a bar by partly folding open one of its walls.
Dezeen is also a pretty cool blog that has a bunch of other subjects, not just architecture.
http://www.dezeen.com/2010/02/25/temporary-bar-by-diogo-aguiar-and-teresa-otto/#more-66460
FoodPrintNYC
Sarah Rich and Nicola Twilley host this years FoodPrintNYC. They are the creators of The Foodprint Project, which was created in a response to two topics: the issues of city zoning and access, and the ways in which food and eating behaviors influence the physical shape of the city. This interview by Urban Omnibus asks the pair to talk about their inspirations for the Foodprint Project and to discuss how the design community can get involved with food systems and how one can see, understand and analyze a city through the lens of food.
http://urbanomnibus.net/2010/02/food-and-the-shape-of-cities/
Tomás Saraceno at Bonniers Konsthall
Artist Tomás Saraceno who has produced some extraordinary installations in recent years is developing a new one at BonniersKonsthall in Stockholm this spring.
“In collaboration with spider researchers and astrophysicists, Tomás Saraceno has spent several years developing the 400 cubic metre installation that is exhibited at Bonniers Konsthall. Am enormous model of the poisonous spider the Black Widow’s web, the point of departure for the new work is how scientists use images of spiders’ webs to describe the origin and structure of the universe. The gigantic spider’s web, especially made for the main gallery of Bonniers Konsthall, consists of elastic black rope which will span floor to ceiling.”
The gallery’s website is a good jumping off point for images of other projects.
Crowdsourcing Urban Models
“Computer science researchers at theUniversity of Washington and Cornell University are deploying a system that will blend teamwork and collaboration with powerful graphics algorithms to create three-dimensional renderings of buildings, neighborhoods and potentially even entire cities.
The new system, PhotoCity, grew from the original work of a Cornell computer scientist, Noah Snavely, who while working on his Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Washington, developed a set of algorithms that generated three-dimensional models from unstructured collections of two-dimensional photos”
“The visualization technology is already able to quickly process large collections of digital photos of an object like a building and render ghostly and evocative three-dimensional images. To do this they use a three-stage set of algorithms that begins by creating a “sparse point cloud” with a batch of photos, renders it as a denser image, capturing much of the original surface texture of the object, and then renders it in three dimensions.
To improve the quality of their rendering capabilities, the researchers plan to integrate their computing system with a social game that will permit competing teams to add images where they are most needed to improve the quality of the visual models.”
Bluejake
Some tremendously beautiful images of informal New York City infrastructures, abandoned structures, street scenes, etc from Photographer Jake Dobkin.
DECODE at the V&A
Currently at the V&A in London through April 11
Decode: Digital Design Sensations showcases the latest developments in digital and interactive design, from small, screen-based, graphics to large-scale interactive installations. The exhibition includes works by established international artists and designers such as Daniel Brown, Golan Levin, Daniel Rozin, Troika and Karsten Schmidt. The exhibition features both existing works and new commissions created especially for the exhibition.
Decode is a collaboration between the V&A and onedotzero, a contemporary arts organisation operating internationally with a remit to promote innovation across all forms of moving image and interactive arts.
The exhibition explores three themes: Code presents pieces that use computer code to create new works and looks at how code can be programmed to create constantly fluid and ever-changing works.Interactivity looks at works that are directly influenced by the viewer. Visitors will be invited to interact with and contribute to the development of the exhibits. Network focuses on works that comment on and utilise the digital traces left behind by everyday communications and looks at how advanced technologies and the internet have enabled new types of social interaction and mediums of self-expression.
Contemplating the Void
Opening this week and capping off a year-long 50th anniversary celebration, the Guggenheim presents Contemplating the Void: Interventions in the Guggenheim Museum. For this salon-style installation, the museum invited nearly 200 artists, designers and architects to submit their dream proposals for interacting with the iconic Frank Lloyd Wright-designed building’s central rotunda, or “void.” The central space, famously encompassed by the circular exhibit hallways, gave these world-renowned and up-and-coming and creatives plenty of space for interpretation, and the resulting exhibit features renderings of their visionary solutions.