Super Colossal

You might expect to find a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow and not bone fractures and shock but that is what 30 Scandinavians discovered when the Rainbow ride at Goteborg’s Liseberg theme park collapsed on Tuesday. IHT. GP Images.
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The Independent reports that thieves have stolen 3,000 of Paris’s self-service vÃ©lib’ bicycles with sightings in Romania, and yes, even Australia, while another 3,000 have been deliberately destroyed or damaged. Tour de France indeed.
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More construction images of Gehry’s Serpentine Pavilion.
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Guardian article on the role that the city of Baltimore plays in the series The Wire. “Just as the detectives in the show look for the hidden connections between the city’s problems – tapping phones, following paper trails, deciphering gangster codes – so, too, the series maps the city’s hidden workings and reveals its underlying problems.”
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Baarle-Hertog is a town in the Netherlands with 20 Belgian enclaves scattered through it. These Belgian enclaves, in turn, contain 7 Dutch enclaves within them.
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Wallpaper Design Directory 2008

Wednesday, 16th July 2008 Tweet

Wallpaper Magazine has released their annual Design Directory for 2008.

And gosh, who is that in the Australia section?

To be honest, we are even more surprised than you are to see our office featured in such a venue given our extraordinary limited portfolio and track record, and are extremely thankful to the fine people at Wallpaper for including us.

We are not in the print version, but the website is worth poking around — there are a number of great practices in there that you may not have come across before.

Walkscore tracks the walkability of US cities by calculating proximity to shops, restaurants, parks, schools and so on. The heat map interface for Seattle is pretty rad. ~~So, when are service like this and EveryBlock going to make their way outside of the USA?~~ [Update] Angus points out in the comments that, Walkscore does indeed work in Sydney…
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Targeting connectors in social networks (actual, you know, physical ones) to stop the spread of pandemics. “The strategy is to disintegrate the network”
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Building demolition in Japan. Meticulous as expected.
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It turns out that the designer of the original Nike Air Max — Tinker Hatfield — was originally an in-house architect for Nike. In this pretty interesting interview he talks about the influence the Pompidou Centre had on his shoe design.
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Today is World Youth Day, the Pope is in town, and the State Government has introduced ridiculous laws against annoying or inconveniencing the pilgrims. An Inconvenient Youth is an online confessional to vent your frustrations with the Catholic take-over of the city.
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House of Cards

Tuesday, 15th July 2008 Tweet

Radiohead have just released a film clip for their song ‘House of Cards’ which was filmed by capturing environmental data and recreating a 3D scene from the information. The outdoor scenes are particularly compelling, showing fleeting, pointilised versions of urban space.

“No cameras or lights were used. Instead two technologies were used to capture 3D images: Geometric Informatics and Velodyne LIDAR. Geometric Informatics scanning systems produce structured light to capture 3D images at close proximity, while a Velodyne Lidar system that uses multiple lasers is used to capture large environments such as landscapes. In this video, 64 lasers rotating and shooting in a 360 degree radius 900 times per minute produced all the exterior scenes.”

[image source: HDL-64E Manual]

The Velodyne Lidar system is a roof mounted rotating camera that spins on its axis while shooting lasers in every direction. As the vehicle it is attached to drives through the (your) streets, it gathers data about the immediate physical environment both static and moving that is then transferred into 3D spatial data. This technology coupled with google street-view is an obvious extension of the service generating deep models of city streets accessible from any web browser or mobile device. All generated by a quick drive down the road.

[image source: Velodyne Website]

Lactose intolerant? Then Copenhagen’s Hotel Nimb may not be for you. The hotel boasts its own on-site dairy. Monocle.
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Goodness me, I was there last week, and it certainly didn’t look like that… Pierre Huyghe installs a forest in the Sydney Opera House concert hall.
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Jan Gehl is at it again, banalifying New York this time; creating outdoor dining areas in Times Square and of course structured bike lanes. The lasting impression I have of my visit to that city was of relentless car horns and it seems that if any city should be Gehl-proof, it ought to be New York.
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The Mail on Sunday is claiming to have revealed the identity of street artist Banksy as Robin Gunningham, a 34 year old former public school pupil. Via BBC.
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Renzo Piano supports plans by the NYT to alter the facade of their new tower to prevent further climbers scaling the ceramic rods that sheathe the 52-story Manhattan tower. “I’m frankly quite worried about this new fashion of going up on buildings,” Piano said in the interview. “This is what I call an inappropriate use of the building.” IHT.
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Alice Rawsthorn discusses a new Isamu Noguchi exhibition at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park that explores his life as an artist and designer. IHT Article. Slideshow.
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Nicolai Ouroussoff on the new architectural landmarks reshaping China’s national identity. NYT Article. Interactive Graphic.
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Either this book and pen are ridiculously large or Tadao Ando is really, really small.
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Benjamin Schwarz reviews Sty liane Philippou’s forthcoming Oscar Niemeyer: Curves of Irreverence as a work of rich historical, cultural and aesthetic assessment. “…in authoritatively assessing Niemeyer’s work and its place in architectural and Brazilian cultural history, she has marshaled such diverse subjects as 18th-century colonial Portuguese architecture, bossa nova, the topography and cultural geography of Copacabana Beach, and the design-selection process for the UN headquarters”. The Atlantic Magazine.
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Brooke Hodge reviews the new John Lautner exhibition at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. NYT.
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Anish Kapoor and Cecil Balmond have unveiled plans for the world’s largest public art project, the Tees Valley Giants. The Guardian.
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David Rakoff reviews Disney ´s new Innoventions Dream Home. â€˜To get to the front door of the Elias family, the inhabitants of the new Dream Home at Disneyland, you must step onto a revolving walkway and glide past Tom Morrow, a Nathan Lane-voiced robot with a face like a machine-age Arcimboldo and a brush cut of stiff copper-colored wire. Tom’s body is an exposed skeleton of hydraulics, wires and transistors, and his one concession to modesty, a clear plastic lab coat, adds an unwittingly pornographic grace note’. NYT Article. Audio Slideshow.
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