Links from the main page from the last 100 days.
Thrilling Wonder Stories, the symposium of speculative architectures curated by Liam Young and Geoff Manaugh, is having a second outing later today/tomorrow at the AA. Like the first iteration of the event, the day will be packed with game designers, comic book creators, authors and other enthusiasts of the speculative.
The whole thing will be streamed live, (conveniently between midnight and 7am saturday morning here in Sydney; set your alarm!) at the AA website and liveblogged at Thrilling Wonder Stories.
Open Agenda. Exhibition opening Wednesday 20th October at Customs House, Circular Quay, Sydney.
Useful Strategies: How book designers get their favourite covers over the line.
Via @ArchitectureAU
The latest edition of AD, titled Post Traumatic Urbanism and edited by UTS staff Charles Rice, Anthony Burke and Adrian Lahoud has been released:
Urban trauma describes a condition where conflict or catastrophe has disrupted and damaged not only the physical environment and infrastructure of a city, but also the social and cultural networks. Cities experiencing trauma dominate the daily news. Images of blasted buildings, or events such as Hurricane Katrina exemplify the sense of ‘immediate impact’. But how is this trauma to be understood in its aftermath, and in urban terms? What is the response of the discipline to the post-traumatic condition? On the one hand, one can try to restore and recover everything that has passed, or otherwise see the post-traumatic city as a resilient space poised on the cusp of new potentialities. While repair and reconstruction are automatic reflexes, the knowledge and practices of the disciplines need to be imbued with a deeper understanding of the effect of trauma on cities and their contingent realities. This issue will pursue this latter approach, using examples of post-traumatic urban conditions to rethink the agency of architecture and urbanism in the contemporary world. Post-traumatic urbanism demands of architects the mobilisation of skills, criticality and creativity in contexts in which they are not familiar. The post-traumatic is no longer the exception; it is the global condition.
The Fire Department is an opt-in emergency service in Obion County, Tennessee. If residents of the county want fire protection, they must pay an annual fee. Recently, the Canick family watched their house burn to the ground with fire fighters standing alongside them doing nothing to stop the blaze because they had not paid their fees. When the fire spread to a neighbours house, who had paid their dues, the fire fighters stepped in to put out that fire.
Absolutely extraordinary.
1933 Slaughterhouse by C.H. Stableford 1933. Once a slaughterhouse, now an upmarket mixed use development complete with design bookstore. Photo by l-l-l-l-l.
Robert Sullivan, writing for the NYMag on how cities and forests may not be as mutually exclusive as previously imagined. That the assumption that urbanism is inherently detrimental to natural systems is being rethought as we observe new natural landscapes developing within urban environments:
Recently, however, scientists have come to suspect that urban forests have thrived not despite their urban environment but because of it. “The old idea was that urban areas are not ecologically interesting or don’t have ecological processes, and that’s false,” says Richard Pouyat, who studies urban forests for the U.S. Forest Service. “The difference is, it’s been altered.” And altering the natural landscape isn’t always a bad thing.
Via Mammoth, of course.
Dan Hill visits Finlandia and finds a couple of intriguing ‘benign errors’ on the building. Firstly, that the subtle bowing of the marble panels on the facade is in fact a defect resulting from the extreme weather differential in Helsinki, a ‘mistake’ that the building is all the better for. And secondly, that seen across Lake Töölönlahti from a certain position, Finlandia morphs into the tower of a distant museum forming a odd hybrid of the two, that seems strangely purposeful.
+
Note - must go to Finland soon.
Matt Seneca on a panel from Francois Schuiten’s Nogegon:
There’s a massive, airy openness to this picture, denying the spotted blacks that don’t actually exist in real life for the panoply of slightly different tones that do. (An airy openness, I might add, that dovetails quite nicely with the picture’s subject matter.) Too, the hand painted (watercolored, I believe) hues accomplish more in the way of texture than the flats or spangles of mechanically-applied colors can: there’s absolutely no rendering lines at all in this panel, and that’s because the dimensionality of it is so richly created by the paints that there’s simply no need. And even here the print process is as helpful as ever, fading the too-sharp focus of the meticulous line art and deep hues into the vaguer blur of real life seen through bright sunlight.
Charles Holland, writing about the Sterling Prize (awarded to Zaha Hadid’s Maxxi in Rome), and how it awards architects for buildings ignoring the role of the many hundreds of other people involved in the actual manifestation of a building:
There is an enormous gap between the process of designing and the physical reality of building. Architects get so used to equating drawings and models with buildings – despite the vast scale, material and factual differences – that they assume an equivalence between them. Perhaps it is this sense of equivalence that allows them to gloss over the work done by other consultants and contractors and claim sole authorship. This equivalence affects architectural education in particular, where buildings and images are discussed as if they are literally interchangeable.
The Sydney Architecture Walks website has had a facelift. And now they have bike tours too! If you have not been on one of Eoghan’s walks around Sydney (the Utzon Opera House walk in particular is excellent) you are missing out.
Images up online for DRAW’s interior refurbishment of the UTS Great Hall. More on the project at DRAW’s website.
Bracket is calling for entries for its second issue, this time concentrating on ‘Soft Systems’:
Bracket 2 invites the submission of critical articles and unpublished design projects that investigate physical and virtual soft systems, as they pertain to infrastructure, ecologies, landscapes, environments, and networks. In an era of declared crises—economic, ecological and climatic amongst others– the notion of soft systems has gained increasing traction as a counterpoint to permanent, static and hard systems.
Bracket is produced by Infranet, Archinect and Actar and their first issue on Farming is available for preorder.
Keiichi Matsuda’s Augmented City looks at an urbanism overlaid with 3D interface elements where clothing and architecture may be user adjusted on the fly:
See also, Matsuda’s earlier project, Domestic Robocop.
Matt Huynh and Gallery 4A are compiling stories of Sydney’s Chinatown that Huynh will rework into a comicbook. An earlier project by Huynh, took a similar approach, chronicling stories around his hometown in the Cabramatta/Canley Vale area. If you have a story to tell about this district in Sydney, send Matt and email.
+ Unrelated but great—Matt’s ‘Ghostrider’ ink drawings:
Monocle Magazine reports on the Venice Architecture Biennale. Includes a short section on the Australian pavilion as well as a short interview with Koolhaas, a look at Audi’s city of the future exhibition and Singapore’s pavilion concentrating on the compact city.
Openhaus and darch are running a competition to design a poster advertising architecture:
On an international stage the global financial crisis and the current economic instability in Europe is shaping the built environment for future generations. Here in Australia, housing affordability, environmental sustainability and the development of regional and urban areas to house an increasing population are key issues currently facing everyday Australians.
Architecture plays a pivotal role in providing solutions to these concerns. To promote this role to the wider community OpenHAUS Exhibitions and DARCH invites design professionals and design students to create an ‘Advertisement for Architecture’.
The authorities in southern Sudan have unveiled a $10bn (£6.4bn) plan to rebuild the region’s cities in the shapes of animals and fruit.
The southern capital, Juba, is to be relocated and shaped like a rhinoceros, while Wau will become a giraffe whose neck will form the city’s main boulevard. Appropriately, the city sewerage treatment plant is to be located under the giraffe’s tail.
Speaking of Inception, Observations on Film Art has the best review of Inception I have come across so far:
So we ought to recognize that Inception is relying heavily on motivation from these two sources, genre and commonsense realism. Science fiction grants the possibility of entering people’s dreams through a futuristic technology. Likewise, we have all experienced dreams, so the film can appeal to folk wisdom about them. I suggest, though, that the purpose of the film not to explore the dream life but rather to use the idea of exploring the dream life to justify creating a complex narrative experience for the viewer. That is the purpose of the film; the dreams operate as alibis.
+ This is a handy infographic for the various characters timelines in the film. via @butterpaper
“Remember, this is the country of the duck-billed platypus. When you are cut off from the rest of the world, things are bound to develop in interesting ways”.
John Slater in ‘My Life as a Fake’ - Peter Carey 2003
Hermes has begun breeding its own crocodiles in order to meet demand for its handbags. #not_the_onion
(Old news, yes, but I found this hanging out in my drafts folder and thought it worth linking to)
There is a 100km, nine day traffic jam outside of Beijing.
Surely after nine days stuck between the same group of motorists, some form of economy and community must emerge. China Mielville’s novel ‘Iron Council’ (not his greatest novel…) comes to mind, set on a train that is a linear, kinetic city.
Glitches and The End of the Virtual World, by Robert Overweg. A series of artworks set in the borderlands of video games; the unfinished peripheral areas not meant to be found by gamers.
via Mammoth
A fascinating read and well laid out page.And, it turns out that the game is fairly accurate in detailing the life of the yakuza.
M: I like the fact that you power up by eating real food. Shio ramen gives you a lot of power — CC Lemon, not as much. It all makes sense.
S: The breaded pork cutlet bento box is like mega power. More than ramen. That’s accurate.
David Neustein on the role of architecture in Inception.
It is no surprise that we react so enthusiastically to Inception ’s frenzied scenes of demolition and detonation. It is also why the film’s protagonists seek to burrow down further and further into the dream realm: each dream-within-a-dream is less tethered to the waking world. In the deepest recesses of dreaming, time itself (which has been victimised by the relentless spectacle of consumption), runs increasingly slowly.
Alan Moore on Super Heroes in an interview at The Quietus:
I’m interested in the superhero in real life, but not the comic book version. I’ve had some distancing thoughts about them recently. I’ve come to the conclusion that what superheroes might be — in their current incarnation, at least — is a symbol of American reluctance to involve themselves in any kind of conflict without massive tactical superiority. I think this is the same whether you have the advantage of carpet bombing from altitude or if you come from the planet Krypton as a baby and have increased powers in Earth’s lower gravity. That’s not what superheroes meant to me when I was a kid. To me, they represented a wellspring of the imagination. Superman had a dog in a cape! He had a city in a bottle! It was wonderful stuff for a seven-year-old boy to think about. But I suspect that a lot of superheroes now are basically about the unfair fight. You know: people wouldn’t bully me if I could turn into the Hulk.
Al Baxter, tight-head prop for the Australian Rugby team and architect has a blog. Al graduated from Sydney University in the year ahead of me and has been playing for the Wallabies for the last seven years. So far there are a number of rugby related posts and one on his twin pursuits of sport and architecture.
Sam Jacobs reviews Sex and the City 2 for Icon:
Manhattan has been SATC’s leading character, but SATC 2 kills it off halfway through. Like OMA, SATC ups its skirts and leaves Manhattan for the Gulf. Like many an architect, Samantha exclaims: “Two years of bad business and this bullshit economy – I’m done! I need to go somewhere rich!”
I will be speaking at Adelaide University on August 4th as part of their 2010 Speaker Series. I hope to see you there!
Quick update. We are now in Monument Valley on the border of Arizona and Utah, home to the Navajo and John Wayne, as part of my Byera Hadley Scholarship looking into monolithic landscape and architecture. Photos of our travels through San Diego, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Flagstaff and Monument Valley can be found at my Flickr page. (Flickr Set) oh, and Twitter updates as wireless internet allows.
Hiroshi Sugimoto will be delivering a keynote address for the Sydney Biennale next week (Thursday 13th May) at Angel Place. Sugimoto has a large installation at Cockatoo Island for the biennale, that continues his work involving exposing photographic plates to electromagnetic fields.
In contrast to yesterday’s link to Dan’s piece on the San Fransisco Panorama,the 48 Hour Magazine looks to create a rapid, crowd-sourced print magazine in two days:
Welcome to 48 Hour Magazine, a raucous experiment in using new tools to erase media’s old limits. As the name suggests, we’re going to write, photograph, illustrate, design, edit, and ship a magazine in two days.
Here’s how it works: Issue Zero begins May 7th. We’ll unveil a theme and you’ll have 24 hours to produce and submit your work. We’ll take the next 24 to snip, mash and gild it. The end results will be a shiny website and a beautiful glossy paper magazine, delivered right to your old-fashioned mailbox. We promise it will be insane. Better yet, it might even work.
City of Sound on the San Fransisco Panorama; issue 34 of McSweeney’s.
After seeing Dan’s copy I had to order my own, and I can confirm that it is an extraordinary publication. Whether it is performs as a prototype for the new newspaper is up for debate, given the amount of content in it and the content specific art direction, it is difficult to imagine something of this ilk being published monthly let alone weekly or daily - but if someone managed to pull it off, then well, that would be awesome.
A fantastic playground by BASE in Belleville Park, Paris. + I remember a playground somewhere in Canberra that we used to go to as kids that had in my memory at least had a similar quality to this. It had tunnels and a multilevel fort and felt dangerous and massive. Qualities that I would be surprised if children found in contemporary playgrounds.
The Archigram Archival Project.
the work of the seminal architectural group Archigram available free online for public viewing and academic study. The project was run by EXP, an architectural research group at the University of Westminster. It was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and made possible by the members of Archigram and their heirs, who retain copyright of all images.
Wonderful.
Hipster Runoff on contemporary workplaces: “I want to be self-employed and work in a conceptual work space / modern cubicle.”
For the unaware, Hipster Runoff is a unique and consistently spot-on commentary on current trends/memes, simultaneously lampooning and engaging them in spectacular fashion.
Angelo Candalepas along with staffers, Andrew Scott and David Neustein have been announced as the creative directors of next year’s Australian Institute of Architects National Conference. They have set up a website where they are calling for suggestions for speakers to invite to the conference.
A Roadmap for a lowcarbon Europe by 2050, the Practical Guide to a Prosperous Low Carbon Europe has been released. The third volume of the report, the ‘Graphic Narrative’, has been prepared by OMA with the European Climate Foundation. This narrative after establishing the data goes on to reframe Europe as ‘Eneropa’ with the continent’s boundaries reshaped according to the sustainable energy industries they could potentially host (Solaria, Isle of the Winds, Geothermalia etc) all connected by a unified European Energy Grid.
Curiously, there are two versions of the report available on the site, the second of which titled ‘Version A’ has identical content to the first but omits the entire section on Eneropa. Were the new regions deemed too whacky/provocative for some audiences?
via Infranet.
Dan Hill has been blogging his entry for the Now+When exhibition at the Australian Pavilion for the 2010 Venice Biennale. In full-flight Marco Polo mode, his entry, (foolishly!) overlooked by the selection panel, imagines 14 future cities in Australia. Each is a delight, familiar and exciting, positing tangibly fantastic places like the Darwin Special Economic Zone and The City of Glasses:
Yet on other side of the glass, Sydney in 2025 is quite different. In fact, there are so many Sydneys in 2025 as to render the idea of one Sydney ridiculous. The city is experienced as an immersive projection, with data overlaid onto the physical fabric to the extent that only the most desirable built elements remain visible at all. All other items are cloaked by the glasses, just as all urban noise is filtered by the headphones. These remove unwelcome noise whilst heightening others, all set against a soundtrack of music, displaced ambient sounds, and a stream of commentary from other users.
Investment in the visual design layers of physical structures had plummeted as people began to inhabit other spaces in these places, overlaying their own architectures.
The ever energetic Linda Bennetts of Archininja has an interview up with me up on her site. Check it out, and while you are at it take a look at the now long list of great interviews Linda has chalked up on her site.
“Exactly. That’s what we like about it. We like dual carriageways and parking lots. We like control tower architecture and friendships that last an afternoon. There’s no civil authority telling us what to do. This isn’t Islington or South Ken. There are no town halls or assembly rooms. We like prosperity filtered through car and appliance sales. We like roads that lead past airports, we like air-freight, offices and rent-a-van forecourts, we like impulse buy holidays to anywhere that takes our fancy. We’re the citizens of the shopping mall and the marina, the internet and cable TV. We like it here and we’re in no hurry for you to join.”
JG Ballard, Kingdom Come
Co-Isolated is a group exhibition in a giant shed in Alexandria featuring a new work by SC buddy David Burns together with Richard Goodwin and Michael Snape. Adrian Lahoud’s catalogue text for the catalogue has this to say of Burns:
David Burns is a junkie for repetition; his work is an aesthetic k-hole.
Ketamine is an anaesthetic; pharmaceutically speaking it belongs to the class of drugs known as dissociatives which operate by blocking signals to the brain. According to frequent users, the slight overdose called a ‘k-hole’ is the closest one can get to death without actually dying, its effects include an inability to think, extreme tunnelling of vision and an overwhelming sense of cold dread. If ecstasy is a ‘tactile temptress’ full of baroque intricacy, ketamine is pure Miesien box.
Towering.
Lights on.
No one inside.
David Burns is a junkie for repetition; his work is an anaesthetic for the ecstasy generation, a generation hooked on sensational intensity.
Co-Isolated opens Friday 16th April
Monolithic. Late notice, I know, but I will be in Brisbane tomorrow night talking at the University of Queensland Architecture School’s 2010 Public Lecture Series. UQ St Lucia Campus, Tuesday March 30 6pm.
Proposition 2065: AR is launching its next in the postcode monikered design competitions, this time concentrating on a mixed-use site in St Leonards, Sydney. There will be briefings in Sydney (1st April), Melbourne (7th), and Brisbane (16th).
Nancy Levison writing for Design Observer on the state of architectural criticism.
You can see the point. Cheap and easy access to a virtually limitless catalogue of artworks is no guarantee of great arts criticism — but it makes possible the sustained engagement and encyclopaedic learning that inspire it. (I am convinced that the incomparable David Thomson has seen every movie ever made.) How can architecture criticism compete? How can the individual critic amass the disciplinary equivalent? To write with in-the-bones insight about the output of any one of our era’s peripatetic architectural stars, let alone the collective production of the whole constellation, would take endless international travel and an unlimited expense account — and those are just the logistics. To claim with conviction that this artwork or that artist is at the top of the game is only convincing if you’ve paid keen attention to the rest of the field.
I think this helps explain why Nicolai Ouroussoff’s criticism is so unsatisfying. It’s the unexpected trap of inhabiting the tower of the Times. You’ve got the editorial charge to be national and international, like the rest of the paper, and you’ve got the budget to roam. So you rack up the datelines: Los Angeles, Miami, Boston, Moscow, Stuttgart, Basel, etc. etc. But the view from the tower is broad not sharp, panoramic but not particular. The inevitable result is that you are writing at the thin edge of scant knowledge: you are critiquing places you know only as a tourist, and buildings you know only from brief and usually tightly programmed visits, often in the company of the watchful designer. This is no way to gain meaningful experience or serious knowledge of a building or landscape or how it fits within its local setting and larger environs.
Via Mammoth.
Simon Knott on the RRR radio show, The Architects, talking about the failings of Melbourne’s Docklands, articulating my primary fears for Barangaroo in Sydney:
“If you look at the Melbourne city grid and the land parcels in the 1830s they were small parcels of land, they were small titles so it allows hundreds of different owners, so you might get a hundred different owners around a block and they would all have diff businesses there, and if they want to build a big building they’ll aggregate them, together. Docklands gave acres of land to one developer and said you developer the whole lot, so there is no diversity.
And theres no fine grain, nothing happens on a smaller level, its all this picture developer stuff an what that creates is this monoculture that is there, therese no ability for smaller uses, theres no social housing there, theres no affordable housing, its all one demographic right the way through.”
While the debate around Barangaroo continues to centre on Keating’s Disneyheadland and the Sydney Morning Herald’s campaign against the hotel—that may well prove an ambit claim—the more crucial non-design related questions remain to be answered. Primarily, the details of the financial deal between the government and the developer. Yes, this will be a matter of public record in time; a moot point given that the contracts have already been signed.
+ John de Manincor and Adam Russell assess the situation at Australian Design Review with a level head providing a good overview of the current circumstance.
Orhan Ayyüce writing on Twin Buildings for Archinect:
As you can see from the diagram above, a developer can build two buildings with twin concept. He can save a lot of cash from the architectural billing and contract time, from the material purchases and double discounts, and, from the ease of proven installation and erection, all of which translate into large sums of monetary gain whose importance in American urbanism is paramount.
Next time you drive by a twin concept building, take a look at them and say, “Thanks Orhan, I see what you mean.”
Open Agenda: A new competition run by UTS for recent architecture graduates.
Open Agenda will award seed funding to three exceptional design research proposals that explore new positions in architecture for critical consideration.
We are looking for text and graphic based proposals that seek to develop research through architectural design. Proposals will be evaluated on the strength of their research topic, their innovative approach to design as research, design quality and their potential for development as a public exhibition, lecture and publication. Proposals that explore new forms of media and communication in this context are welcome.
The Guardian reports on the new American Embassy in London, which the US state department says has been designed to “reflect the values of the American people”. Those values it seems are reflected by a 12-storey cube clad in a blastproof glass and plastic façade with a moat running halfway around the building, which the architects freely admit was modelled on a medieval fortress.
A film on the recently completed Rolex Learning Centre by sanaa. More images of the building at Space Invading.
Architecture Insights. A handsome new website from the NSW Architects Registration Board collecting local (predominately NSW) architecture content and news. Of particular interest to me is the event calendar which will hopefully fill a gap locally by providing a collated event resource.
Millenium People on ‘Super Critical’, the first in a new series from the Architectural Association, AA Words:
“I wouldn’t want you to cry for having had to come here tonight for this conversation, because nobody dragged you here.”
- Peter Eisenman to Rem Koolhaas.So ends Supercritical, a little volume that documents the rare meeting of two architect friends/enemies/rivals/(whatever) – Rem Koolhaas & Peter Eisenman. It accurately transcribes the two’s complete inability to say anything meaningful to each other, and their ultimate decline into dressed-up name-calling. This spectacular failure on the part of their dialogue has forced me to split this review into two posts: one on the discussion itself, and one on the novel medium through which this piece presents itself.
Via City of Sound
Issue 3 of Junkjet (a favourite of mine) is out now:
Junk Jet n°3 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 dugin landmarks, for curtains, mobiles, house boats, bubbles, zeppelins, flying saucers …
… it received 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.
Ordered.
Australia is Big. Correct. And with a population of 22 million people, one of the least densely populated countries on the planet.
Greenland is competitive in this market also.
Regarding the new waterfront city of Tanjong Pagar in Singapore, The Economic Strategies Committee makes a case for a planning framework for underground space:
“The committee said there is also a need for an underground master plan.
It said the government should catalyse the development of underground space over the next decade.
The committee also emphasized a need to develop subterranean land rights, a valuation framework and to establish a national geology office.”
via Warren Ellis
Strange Harvest uncovers a spate of Souvenir Eiffel Tower Trinket related injuries and their corresponding X-Rays.
A 3 year old boy presented to our accident and emergency department with an obvious penetrating head injury. He had tripped and fallen onto a metal model of the Eiffel Tower which then became rigidly lodged into his skull.
Unhappy Hipsters. Comprised of well groomed serious people in photoshoots from Dwell magazine, with a couple of witty captions. I guess style of photographing architecture is better than the empty, pristine, shells that we are used to, but a guy walking around knitting a scarf is really a bit too much. (thanks Adrian)
The 2009 Unbuilt Architecture awards were announced in Sydney last night. Like most years, there is a good selection of unsuccessful competition entries, and aborted projects to peruse. And special props to SC buddies, Tribe Studios, Welsh+Major and Room 11 for getting special mentions!
Mammoth’s spot-on list of the best architecture of the decade. Including a list of the Large Hadron Collider, the Svalbard Seed Vault, the iphone, and one of my favourites the Quinta Monroy housing by Elemental.
CNN’s interactive 360° videos of Haiti. I have not come across this technology before, using your mouse, you can look around while the video plays. The effect is a little unsettling, given the content, like having access to a surveillance camera surveying the devastation, while I sit in an air-conditioned office drinking tea.
A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter: An artwork by Caleb Larsen comprising of an internet connected black cube that perpetually auctions itself on ebay.
Every ten minutes the black box pings a server on the internet via the ethernet connection to check if it is for sale on the eBay. If its auction has ended or it has sold, it automatically creates a new auction of itself.
If a person buys it on eBay, the current owner is required to send it to the new owner. The new owner must then plug it into ethernet, and the cycle repeats itself.
Infranet on post-peak phosphorous:
Phosphorus is at the heart of modern farming; an essential ingredient of agricultural fertilizers. It has no synthetic alternative and is being mined, used and wasted as never before. Inefficiencies in the processing of food and the soaring demand for meat and dairy produce across Asia is fuelling demand for phosphorus faster than anyone had predicted.
…
Significant Phosphate reserves exist in only a few nations: Morocco holds 32 per cent of the world’s proven reserves, with Western Sahara, South Africa, Jordan, Syria and Russia holding the other significant reserves. A new geopolitical map may be drawn around the remaining reserves – creating a small number of new “resource superpowers” with a pricing control over fertilisers that some suspect could end up rivaling OPEC’s control over crude oil.
Dubai Debt Crisis Halts Building Of World’s Largest Indoor Mountain Range.
“Maybe this cold hard dose of reality is what Dubai needed,” said Sheikh Hamdan, adding that he remained “hopeful” his mountain range would one day be completed. “Maybe it’s time for us to pull ourselves up by the straps of our handmade custom-fitted patent-leather Italian boots and put our slaves back to work. Only through ingenuity, perseverance, and forced labor can Dubai get back to being Dubai again.”
“And mark my words,” he added, “We will still put a man on the artificial moon we’re building by 2025.”
Google to cease censoring its search results for China, following cyber attacks on their servers originating from China and targeting Chinese Human Rights activists. Should the Chinese Government not allow the search results through uncensored, Google is threatening to pull out of China completely.
Is this the first trade embargo placed on a nation by an advertising company?
Church Machine—A must watch 16 minute film by Harvard GSD student Matt Storus for the ‘Mediums’ studio. The film brilliantly captures the application-hopping and short attention span of the current workplace, while delivering a critique of and response to parametric design. More at Mammoth and Serial Consign.
The Third and the Seventh—a short, meditative, sentimental film on architectural photography and space. Beyond the striking imagery and cinematography, the film is notable in that it is entirely CGI.
Archi-Ninja’s Linda Bennett displays some excellent cartooning skills in her strip “Top 9 Ninja Characteristics of Awesome Architecture Blogs.” I hope these comics become a regular feature on the site…
And we are of course chuffed to have been granted the gift of Super Strength…
Daniel Neville shows the logo and stamp set for the United Nations Climate Change Conference taking place in Copenhagen. The design by NR2154 is a densely woven ball of lines suggesting the interconnectedness of ecological systems, nations and international legislature.
Archinect are hosting a competition in response to Switzerland’s bizarre banning the construction of minarets within the country. The competition—Switzerland, We Have a Problem—calls for proposals for a deployable minaret:
“To address this impasse between the rightful expression of the Muslim religion and the value of Switzerland’s overwhelmingly scenic environment we challenge you to design a solution that allows the best of both worlds. Can you design a minaret as event rather than object?”
Elsewhere, Sam Jacobs, draws a parallel to that country’s taste for minimalism in which the ideology of purity can not sustain such decorative elements:
“It’s interesting to see the language of architecture caught up in this ideological crossfire. This episode underlines how architectures language is part of wider culture. That what it represents and how it represents it is deeply significant.”
This is embarrassing. New Australian houses are, on average, the largest in the world with an average size is 214sqm. Even worse, NSW has the highest national average at 262.9sqm. The USA is close behind Australia at 202sqm.
I guess, we architects are partly to blame for this—alterations to existing buildings are very rarely undertaken with the intention of reducing area, and we are complicit with clients who view floor space ratios as targets to be hit with as high a degree of accuracy possible.
08:47:46 Arch [0901509] B ALPHA Someone just told me there was an explosion at
08:47:48 Arch [0901509] B ALPHA wtc….BR
08:50:25 Arch [0901509] B ALPHA A plane crashed thru the twin towers. Real bad..BR
wikileaks has released half a million pager intercepts from the New York and Washington DC area on the morning of the September 11 attacks. Mass confusion, misinformation, militarisation and the collapse of architecture rendered as text messages. There is some good discussion of some of the more relevant messages taking place on reddit.
Related: Jan Utzon, son of Joern, is a 9/11 sceptic.
Dan Hill at City of Sound on The CLOUD, a massive interdisciplinary proposal for an observation deck and giant data display over London for the duration of the Olympic Games.
Extra Ordinary—the Australian Institute of Architects 2010 National Conference. The conference under creative director Melanie Dodd, will have a focus on collaborative practice with Urban Splash, Sean Griffiths of F.A.T, and Elemental among others lined up to speak.
A photo series of the interiors of the fridges of: Nurse, Crossing Guard, Science Teacher, Bartender, Short Order Cook
Steven Holl Architects’ Linked Hybrid towers in Beijing has been named the “Best Tall Building Overall” by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat.
We like this project.
A librarian visiting the Des Moines Public Library has learnt that David Chipperfield has made moves to forbid people to photograph the building without prior permission. After visiting the library and being told not to take photographs, Jessamyn West sent a letter to the library asking why. The response was that the architect had asked for photography of the building be forbidden lest the photographs be used for commercial purposes:
Our photo policy is part of our meeting room policy which I will attach. This meeting room policy was rewritten just prior to our opening of the building in April of 2006. At that time, the architect was very sensitive to photos being taken and the possibility of them being used for commercial purposes, so we added the following:
“Permission to photograph the library reading rooms and other public areas of the building may be granted by the library director or her designee. Photographs and videos may not include library signage or the library logo, and photographing may not disrupt library customers’ use of the library. Library employees on duty may not be photographed for political campaigns. Fees for commercial photographs of the library may be established by the library director, subject to the approval of the Board of the Trustees.”
The extended conversation that follows on Archinect tracks the issues of privacy, the disruptive potential of photography and the right to take photographs on government owned land.
In the their next step towards their ultimate goal of realtime one to one replication of the planet, Google has started crowd-sourcing the production of its 3D content for google earth with its new product Google Building Maker. I suppose that at some point the streetview van will be able to contribute to the effort also. Just scan for outline as you hurtle down the street, wrap a texture over it, upload it and allow people to tweak from there.
via Butterpaper.
But Does it Float show us a collection of illustrations of morphologically disturbed insects. The work of scientific illustrator Cornelia Hess-Honeggar, they the effects of insects in the fallout area of chernobyl and other nuclear installations. The beautifully rendered drawings and the sometimes subtle
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In our previous flat, we had a cockroach infestation where all kinds of chemical warfare was waged on them in an attempt to gain ascendancy over their species. We were largely unsuccessful until we moved out when the pest man with organic super gel managed to deal with them once and for all. When we asked about the some of the odd looking roaches we had occasionally seen, the pest guy informed us that these deformed, asymmetric, crazy-winged insects were the direct result our chemical warfare. A fascinating and awful discovery of unplanned evolutionary experiments.
