BLDGBLOG

Augmented Metropolis

Published on 2010-08-23 12:00:00

Keiichi Matsuda, a recent graduate—with distinction—from the Bartlett School of Architecture, whose film Domestic Robocop was featured on BLDGBLOG several months ago, has a new project out: Augmented City. And it's in 3D.The film "focuses on the deprogramming of architecture and the spontaneous creation of customised, aggregated spaces," Matsuda writes. We see its central protagonist surrounded by pop-up menus and projected touchscreens, able to switch urban backgrounds—graffiti to gardens

Pallet House

Published on 2010-08-22 14:29:00

[Image: The Palettenpavillon by Matthias Loebermann, photographed/copyright by Mila Hacke, Berlin].The Palettenpavillon by Matthias Loebermann is a structure made entirely from shipping pallets, ground anchors, and tie rods. Designed to be easily assembled and dismantled, and then entirely recycled at a later date, the resulting building is intended as a temporary meeting place.[Image: The Palettenpavillon by Matthias Loebermann, photographed/copyright by Mila Hacke, Berlin].As the architect wri

Hives and valves, filters and membranes

Published on 2010-08-21 23:09:00

[Image: Detailed view of Hylozoic Ground's "Protocell" assembly; courtesy of Philip Beesley Architect].Philip Beesley's Hylozoic Ground installation opens this coming Friday at the Venice Biennale, where it is installed inside the Canadian pavilion. It is a "suspended geotextile that gradually accumulates hybrid soil from ingredients drawn from its surroundings."As Beesley explains, "Hylozoic Ground is an immersive, interactive environment that moves and breathes around its viewers... Next-gener

Car Jack Planet

Published on 2010-08-21 01:06:00

An article published today in the Los Angeles Times contains several fascinating details, including scenes of researchers from the Southern California Earthquake Center digging trenches into land surrounding the San Andreas fault. [Image: Photo by Ricardo DeAratanha, courtesy of the Los Angeles Times].There, they use "carbon dating and sophisticated imaging technology known as lidar to find signs of earth movements," and, in the process, are "able to detect earthquakes dating back to the 15th ce

Soundlog

Published on 2010-08-17 11:27:00

[Image: Woodworms by Zimoun].While we're on the subject of acoustic botany, it's worth recalling Swiss artist Zimoun's Woodworms installation, whose minimalist set-up simply reads: "25 woodworms, wood, microphone, sound system." You can watch—and listen to—a video of the piece here.Don't miss Zimoun's other work, however: a machinic delirium of motors mounted on walls and tabletops, all oscillating in and out of phase with one another and ebbing with the off-kilter sound of endless drones. (

Acoustic Forestry

Published on 2010-08-17 10:22:00

[Image: From Acoustic Botany by David Benqué].We saw David Benqué's Fabulous Fabbers project here on BLDGBLOG a few months ago, but his more recent work, Acoustic Botany, deserves similar attention. Acoustic Botany uses genetically modified plants to produce a "fantastical acoustic garden," where sounds literally grow on trees. "Desired traits such as volume, timbre and harmony are acquired through selective breeding techniques," the artist explains.[Image: From Acoustic Botany by David BenquÃ

On the Road Again

Published on 2010-08-10 20:33:00

[Image: Muscovites forced to masks against smoke from the burning forests and peat bogs of a drought-stricken Russia; photo by Alexander Demianchuk/Reuters].I'll be on the road for the next week or more, driving west, reading The Dead Hand on our long-delayed move back to Los Angeles, so things will be a bit quiet here. In the absence of regular posts, however, some links worth checking out include Pruned's proposal for a "conflict zoo," or a wildlife arena "that only exhibits animals affected b

Documents, Maps, and Files of a Fictional Architecture

Published on 2010-08-04 12:19:00

[Image: The Nesin Map by Protocol Architecture].One of the more interesting student projects I've seen in a long time used a "document-based" approach to architecture to fabricate an entire fictional world—one in which top secret underground research labs, militarized bacteria, artificial earthquakes, and much more were all found conspiring beneath the streets of Berlin, Baghdad, and Istanbul. A group project by three students at Columbia's GSAPP—Yuval Borochov, Lisa Ekle, and Danil Nagy, un

Working the Line

Published on 2010-08-03 11:32:00

Tomorrow night in Los Angeles, at the Center for Land Use Interpretation, David Taylor will be presenting his project "Working the Line." [Image: U.S./Mexico border marker #184; photograph by David Taylor].Taylor has been documenting "276 obelisks, installed between the years 1892 and 1895, that mark the U.S./Mexico boundary from El Paso/Juarez to San Diego/Tijuana. He will present this work, and describe his experiences along this often remote and dramatic linear and liminal space." As geograph

The Encounter Circus

Published on 2010-08-03 10:33:00

The following project by Lys Villalba Rubio—then a student at ETSAM's Departamento de Proyectos Arquitectónicos in Madrid—is pitched as a way of using architecture as "an active element" in the "regeneration of degraded places." [Image: From a project by Lys Villalba Rubio].Based on my own non-existent Spanish (and the help of Babelfish), it seems that the project specifically proposes a "hospital of cities." Villalba Rubio suggests that this is a new building type; acting like a social enz

Sussex Dew Mine

Published on 2010-08-02 20:46:00

John Becker, a former student of mine from the Glacier/Island/Storm studio at Columbia's GSAPP, has had his final semester project published on Dezeen. John's intensely detailed images depict "the future headquarters of a fictional company that sells bottled water harvested from dew." [Image: From An Atmosphere Excavated by John Becker].He approached the whole thing as a false-historical narrative told through a variety of representational styles; these ranged from stippled and picturesque rural

Transcendent City

Published on 2010-08-02 10:47:00

Richard Hardy, a recent graduate from the Bartlett School of Architecture in London, produced this eye-popping video—exploring an all-encompassing machine-forest populated with mechanical flowers and fluttering urban biotechnologies, with architectural sponges perched high atop masts—for Nic Clear's Unit 15. Called The Transcendent City, the film documents what Hardy describes as "an autonomous artificial machine that extends across the earth adapting to the natural eco-systems it encounters

Buried buildings, like icebergs in the ground

Published on 2010-07-31 07:55:00

[Image: Watership Down by Maier Yagod and Jon Reed at the Cleveland Public Library].In a project for the Cleveland Public Library, designed by Toronto-based architects Maier Yagod and Jon Reed, "domestic fragments" have been embedded in the pavement, forming a surreal new kind of public bench:Watership Down creates a scenario where five houses are frozen for a moment in a process of complete submersion into the ground of the Eastman Garden. Placed throughout the Garden, the gables of these house

Quick Links 14

Published on 2010-07-28 07:10:00

[Image: A film still from Wolfen]. Reduced to Rubble | Cartographies of the Absolute: There are a myriad of films that came out in the seventies and eighties that depicted, documented, exploited, and/or contributed to this dystopian image of a section of one of the world’s greatest cities reduced to rubble, not through aerial bombardment but so-called ‘benign neglect’ and ‘planned shrinkage’: Bonfire of the Vanities, Fort Apache, The Bronx, 80 Blocks from Tiffany’s, etc. Most of th

Live and direct

Published on 2010-07-26 19:18:00

As some of you might know, I am @bldgblog on Twitter—but I've also started an account called @bldgbloglive so that I can live-tweet events, lectures, sites, interviews, panel discussions, and more without clogging up @bldgblog and driving readers insane with an avalanche of instant messages. So far, I've covered graduate research presentations here at the CCA given by Léa-Catherine Szacka, Zubin Singh, S. Faisal Hassan, and Molly Wright Steenson, but I hope to post at least a few live notes f

Indefinite in number, but of certain fixed shapes

Published on 2010-07-22 15:58:00

[Image: One of many pages from the voluminous archive of Richter's toy manuals at the CCA].While down in the CCA archives last week, I had some time to explore a number of old instructional booklets for wooden children's toys. One such book, called The Art of Architecture of Building With Given Model Stones, explains that "It will be seen from the title of this book that it is intended to be a guide in the construction of larger buildings with the aid of model stones, indefinite in number, but o

Gunnery Pagodas / Manhattan Niagara / The University of War

Published on 2010-07-20 16:33:00

[Image: By Tsunehisa Kimura, from Tsunehisa Kimura's Visual Scandals by Photomontage].A well-maintained copy of the 1979 book Tsunehisa Kimura's Visual Scandals by Photomontage, now out of print, popped up the other day in the CCA library, and many of the images are jaw-dropping. I photographed quite a few of the book's glossy pages—as the scanner system here doesn't really make sense to me—and I thought that three images, in particular, were of sufficient architectural interest to warrant p

The Design Future of the Sacred Grove

Published on 2010-07-20 16:04:00

[Images: Ships botanically assembling themselves in the forest, from "Growing a Hidden Architecture" by Christian Kerrigan, a proposal that actually seems to grow more interesting every time I think about it].I've got a longish post up over at the CCA about sacred groves, trees that fruit machine-parts, forests that twine their canopies together through collars, tourniquets, corsets, and belts to form sea-ready ships ready for harvesting, the Moon Trees of Apollo, and much more. [Image: From "Gr

Foodprint Toronto

Published on 2010-07-20 09:56:00

[Image: The Ontario Food Terminal; image via Pruned].Foodprint Toronto is coming up fast—the afternoon of Saturday, July 31—and it will be well worth attending. Pruned has just posted an interview with the event's curators, Nicola Twilley and Sarah Rich, who explain the origins and purpose of the Foodprint series. As Nicola describes it: "The Foodprint Project is basically an exploration of the ways cities and food shape each other. So far, it's taken the form of panel discussions, one city

Slow City

Published on 2010-07-19 08:32:00

There's an interesting article in the New York Times today about the design and implementation of "aging-improvement districts"—that is, "parts of the city that will become safer and more accessible for older residents."[Image: Photo by Emily Berl for The New York Times].One particular detail that stands out is also the first they mention: "New York City has given pedestrians more time to cross at more than 400 intersections in an effort to make streets safer for older residents." While most

Michigan Deep Woods Triangle

Published on 2010-07-16 05:57:00

[Images: The forests of northern Michigan, via Google Maps].In the woods of northern Michigan, near Hiawatha National Forest, is a massive triangle, unnamed and unlabeled on Google Maps. [Images: Geometry amidst the forest, via Google Maps].But, despite its anonymity (it even disappears from view altogether when you switch from "Satellite" to "Map"), this is not some underground HQ for a secretive cult of aerially-minded geoglyph-builders, and it's not more scientological circles—it's a former

Lost Ships of New York City

Published on 2010-07-15 09:49:00

[Image: Photo by Fred R. Conrad, courtesy of The New York Times].An 18th-century ship has been discovered deep in briny muck "flecked with oyster shells" at the bottom of a World Trade Center construction site. As the New York Times reports, archaeologists called in to investigate the find soon realized that "a wood-hulled vessel had been discovered about 20 to 30 feet below street level on the World Trade Center site, the first such large-scale archaeological find along the Manhattan waterfront

Stratford Kiosks

Published on 2010-07-15 09:26:00

[Image: Partial site plan for the Stratford Kiosks design competition].An interesting design competition has been announced to produce a suite of minor buildings at the 2012 London Olympics:The Architecture Foundation is pleased to announce the launch of an open international competition to design a permanent yet flexible, free standing group of kiosks in Meridian Square, Stratford, London, for use before, during and after the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Situated at the front of St

Ice Patch Archaeology

Published on 2010-07-14 16:10:00

[Image: From The Thing, directed by John Carpenter].As glaciers and mountain snow packs recede, their disappearance sometimes reveals archaeological evidence of earlier human settlements, with tools and other implements dropping out of the melting ice. As LiveScience reported back in April, "patches of ice that have been in place for thousands of years in the mountains of the Canadian High Arctic" are disappearing, revealing "a treasure trove of ancient hunting tools" in their wake. The forensi

Offshore Oil Strike for All the Family

Published on 2010-07-13 13:09:00

[Image: Offshore Oil Strike by BP; photo by BLDGBLOG].One of the most extraordinary—and timely—subcollections in the archives of the Canadian Centre for Architecture can be found resting on a few metal shelves in the basement, where you will discover stacks of old, oil exploration-themed board games. Cartel: The International Oil Game. La Conquête du Pétrole. King Oil: Combine Luck and Strategy to Control the Oil Fields. Oil: The Slickest Game in Town.Total Depth: An Oil Man's Game.There's