Werner Sobek at Cooper Union

I attended a lecture by Werner Sobek at Cooper Union last night titled “Eco-radicalism – Architecture Tomorrow”  (part of the Architectural League’s Franzen lecture series).  Despite the poor sound quality (even by the standards of the Great Hall), I found two interesting takeaways:

1. Recyclable Buildings: Building material re-use has been something that we’ve been thinking about a lot lately.  We recently visited Build It Green in Queens, a building recycling and re-use operation run by Justin Green.  Though their warehouse is overflowing, I got a sense of frustration from  Justin that they were just skimming the cream off of the construction waste stream – a river of sheet rock and mangled steel studs that will never be recovered.  Sobek talked about banishing glue from the construction toolkit – materials should remain separate and identifiable within the construction matrix.  When I pressed him on this – material science seems to be moving towards more composite materials rather than fewer – he mentioned the concept of single-material composites: combining different forms of the same material (say, a woven material and a solid binder).  The composite could then at least easily be separated into piles of like materials.
2. Substituting Energy for Structure: I admit this idea is still somewhat improbable to me – I think many conservationists have a deep suspicion of buildings that require power for vital functions.  Sobek rationalized “active” structures by pointing out that, given the realistic lifespan of most buildings today, energy saved in the construction process or kept out of the embodied “grey” energy in the building had a greater effect than energy saved on day-to-day operations.  His examples were a twirling umbrella-shade that avoided spokes by using the force created by the rotation to keep the shade open, and a railroad-bridge concept that used mechanical ‘muscles’ to pre-stress the structure when it sensed that a train was passing over it.

Gilly Folie

I recently completed a competition entry for the Jardins de Metis Festival with fabulous, talented sculptor Alex Zealand.  Here’s a quick, raw look:

Conceptual Approach:
In “Gilly Folie” we approach the idea of Paradise as a narrative. Paradise is not simply created in the here-and-now, it must be reached through a transition in space or time.  From the Mines of Moria in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, to the rabbit hole of Alice in Wonderland this transitional space is a mirage, a space whose inside is impossible to estimate from its outside.

We are proposing an alternate entry to the Festival, a gateway for the experience of Paradise.  Our installation is a passageway approximately 20m long, constructed from a spiral of identical yellow-painted wooden members, 3.8cm x 3.8cm and 5.5m long, joined with stainless-steel bolts.  We have proposed a site, but the generative system is site-specific and would have to be re-generated given the final site dimensions and actual tree locations.

Look Ma, No Flash!

There’s something delightfully raw about this work – everything is stripped away but raw… animated GIFS?!? Elna Frederick’s work reminds me of some early video work:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

via todayandtomorrow

Ok Do

How to make a design think-tank

Some people you feel an immediate affinity for, even at a distance:  Ok Do is a design think tank based in the Finland (at least, as near as I can determine).  I thoroughly enjoyed their website (maybe because they listed The Whole Earth Catalogue as a formative influence).

Severn

Gap Gardens

SLB’s first community project has been launched:  Gap Gardens aims to bring temporary vegetable gardens into vacant lots in Brooklyn that are either unused or belong to development projects stalled because of the economy.  Check it out.

Gap Gardens, Brooklyn

Arctic Drifting

Arctic Perspective Initiative

Arctic Mobile Media-centric Habitation and Work Unit

International Open Competition 2009

Drifting on the Wind

The Arctic Drifter is designed to travel on the prevailing winds above the Arctic Circle, rolling across the landscape gathering images. When fully inflated, the Drifter presents a 15 m diameter profile, cushioned by Hypalon air-bags (a similar material is used for heavy-duty inflatable boats). Because of its size and buoyancy it is able to cover almost any flat terrain, including ice, water and small crevasses. It is able to travel in extreme wind speeds and weather conditions that would ground most travellers.

With the air-bags mostly deflated, however, the Drifter presents a much smaller dome-shaped profile, giving it stability. The inner roll-cage ensures that the crew capsule is able to remain upright. To exit the capsule, the crew deflates a section of the air-bags completely and detaches them.

Bike Daemons

This was originally a competition entry for the NYC DOT CityRacks bicycle rack competition with Daniel Ramirez and Nathan King.  It has since been re-printed in Pratt Institute’s graduate architecture journal, TARP.
Because of their speed and efficiency, bicycles may well be the future of transportation in the 21st Century city. For cycling to reach its full potential in the urban milieu, a locking strategy must be developed that  meets the needs of all cyclists. The traditional bicycle rack simultaneously accommodates and explicitly limits the urban cyclist: here you may bring your bike on the sidewalk, here you may park your bike safely, here you are allowed.   It is a familiar type of urbanistic intervention: clearly delineated, appropriately proportioned within the streetscape.  It belies, however, the opportunistic nature of urban cycling: rather than a simple replacement for driving a car, cycling fills the gaps between walking, public transportation and driving.

Re-theorizing the Glove, or, What’s Learned in Las Vegas Should Stay in Las Vegas

An earlier version of this essay appeared in the Spring 2008 issue of Pratt Institute’s graduate journal of architecture, TARP.

“Architecture is like the design of mittens, not gloves. Gloves are too tightly shaped to the fingers of a single hand; mittens give you wiggle room for the future.”

Robert A.M. Stern

The glove, a functionalist stalwart from the beginnings of modernism, has been much maligned by the post-modernists. In the course of research for a studio project I began to look at gloves, and discovered something quite startling – they don’t fit the old modernist cliché anymore. I found myself looking at specialized motocross gloves by Troy Lee Designs (specifically, the “Pro Apex” model, available in black or white leather). Granted, these $80 gloves are not your typical fleece-lined “leather” one-size-fits-all winter glove, and RAMS would probably not be caught dead in a pair; but what could these gloves possibly tell us about the direction of contemporary architecture?

Tokyo Biennale

Natatorium Project to be Exhibited at Tokyo Biennale

The Rouse Hill Natatorium, a project that I designed with Francis Bitonti (FADarchitecture) and Brian Osborne (BOTH) will be exhibited from April 7 to May 17, 2009 in Turin Italy, and then travel to Tokyo in May of 2010 as part of the Advanced Architecture Settimo Tokyo Biennale:

The House of Arts and Architecture Association CASARTARC  in Settimo Torinese, Turin, is developing a project called ‘Advanced Architecture Settimo Tokyo’ (AAST), a group of Generative Architecture events: workshops, a two days conference and an exhibition with venues in Settimo , Tokyo,  Cagliari and London. The events of AAST focus on the approach to design through parametric design tools, such as Rhinoscript, Grasshopper, Mel, DP, GC. The first stage of the exhibition will run from 7 April to 17 May 2009 in Turin, Italy. The opening conference for the exhibition will be made by Patrik Schumacher (partner at Zaha Hadid Architects).

Open Source Publishing

I’ve been reading this blog by some graphic designers in Brussels, and have found some of their writing on the use of open-source tools particularly interesting.  I carried a copy of this article around in my briefcase for several weeks:

http://ospublish.constantvzw.org/wp-content/uploads/awkward_gestures.pdf

I would like to see a similar discussion started with architectural software – our profession, at least in the States, is equally bound to the fate and profit motives of one software company (Autodreck).

Here’s the link to the main blog:  http://ospublish.constantvzw.org/