jargon, etc.

Slavoj Zizek on Al Jazeera

2011-10-30T20:25:00.000-04:00

Freidrich in His Studio, by Kersting

2011-09-04T23:46:00.001-04:00

Georg Freidrich Kersting.
Casper David Freidrich in His Studio - 1819
Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin
included in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rooms With a View: The Open Window in the 19th Century - 2011

Van Gogh, Enclosed Wheat Field with Rising Sun, 1890

2011-08-28T16:06:00.000-04:00

Earthquake Maps

2011-08-23T15:15:00.001-04:00

Maps of the Earthquake:

PEAK VELOCITY IN CENTIMETERS PER SECOND (courtesy USGS)

EARTHQUAKE LOCATIONS IN THE LAST DECADE (courtesy USGS)

INTENSITY MAY (courtesy USGS)

GEOLOGY OF THE PIEDMONT (courtesy The College of William and Mary)

ESTIMATED LOSS OF LIFE (courtesy USGS)

ESTIMATED ECONOMIC LOSS (courtesy USGS)

POPULATION EXPOSURE PER SQUARE MILE (courtesy USGS)

Earthquake!

2011-08-23T14:15:00.000-04:00

We just felt the shockwave from the Virginia earthquake here in NY. Almost a 6.0, the force was string enough to have the entire second floor WFM TriBeCa cafe shaking and send the dining public scampering.

Proper info from the USGS. Here

From the BBC "Smuggling drives Gaza's building boom"

2011-08-03T08:13:00.000-04:00

This article by Jon Donnison was featured today on the BBC. Have a quick read if you have the opportunity.

"I didn't have a job for four years because of Israel's blockade. Now I've got more work than I can handle," smiles Musla Embayed a chunky-looking builder, with a vice-like handshake." [FULL ARTICLE]

BBC News, Gaza City

Coming Today! BMW GUGGENHEIM LAB

2011-08-03T08:05:00.000-04:00

Later today I, along with thousands of other New Yorkers will be heading to the new temporary Guggenheim Laboratory Sponsored by BMW, the pavilion opens today at 1pm and will be on display through 16 October.

Atelier Bow-Wow of Japan has designed the carbon fiber structure that contains the museum. Later today I will be posting full coverage of the structure, its museum contents, and the series of surrounding programs.

In the interval, please check out the project site and plan your visit!

Changes

2011-07-12T16:05:00.000-04:00

Following months of stasis and investigation, Jargon is happy to report that we will be returning to new content and features in the imminent future.

Thank you for your patience during this break and stay tuned for much more to come.

Sincerely,
Mr. Grey

jargon, etc. reports from Berlin

2011-03-05T06:33:00.003-05:00

The front yard of the recently renovated Neues Museum

Inside one of Absalon's living units at Kunst-Werke

A view in the exhibition hall

Inside a rectangular, three-storey house unit

View of the cylindrical house unit

A model from the Absalon exhibition at Kunst-Werke

Subtle, "Long Vein of the Voice" featuring Mike Patton

2011-01-27T14:51:00.000-05:00

A morbid, beautiful video of dreams, Voo-doo, and consciousness. Directed by Rémi Pinaud. From Lex Records.

Gioachino Rossini - La gazza ladra, Overture

2011-01-08T18:40:00.000-05:00

From Steel To Tech, Pittsburgh Transforms Itself

2010-12-17T00:50:00.000-05:00

From NPR. [ link ]

The article includes comments by Steve Lee, Head of the School of Architecture at Carnegie-Mellon.

Download Audio

Qatar World Cup 2022 Stadia

2010-12-03T00:01:00.000-05:00

I just do not know what to think.

Issues of scale. Issues of sustainability. Issues of ... the too occasional and too conspicuous absence of architecture? Please weigh in.

jargon, etc. reports from Buenos Aires

2010-11-24T09:23:00.001-05:00

The Plaza de Mayo, the first square established in the original Spanish colony around 1580, has undergone many transformations over the centuries. The Cabildo, first constructed in the early 17th century, is the oldest standing structure there.

In the 19th century, Buenos Aires adopted a number of European planning principles. In this photograph, we see the influence of the 19th century boulevards that diagonally cut through the square grid of the city.

A playground and square constructed in marginalized neighborhood in the south of Buenos Aires.

Typical luxury high-rise apartments in the northern part of the city.

The Ciudad Universitaria was built in the 1950s, displacing student upheaval far outside the city proper.

House of the family of Argentine writer José Hernández.

A view from the second story terrace of the Cabildo.

Cross Cultivation

2010-09-07T23:21:00.060-04:00

The following is the jargon, etc. team's entry to the 2010 USGBC Natural Talent Design Competition. The project was awarded second place in the New York City USGBC Chapter's Emerging Professionals category.

Domestic architecture is capable of engendering one’s sense of belonging to networks of humans and nature, fostering a distinctly personal place for its inhabitants by strengthening their relationship to surrounding people, places, and climates. A relationship on any number of social, emotional, and sensory levels is evident in a gathering of neighbors around a crowded dinner table, a conversation between loved ones in the dappled evening light of a veranda, or a solitary afternoon of reading amongst the pleasant scents of a fragrant garden. In each case, the quality of the connective experience is inseparable from the character of the domestic space in which it occurs; architecture is the moderator between the individual and the collective, between private and public, between the cultivated growth of the exterior and the conserved consistency of the interior.

Prevailing practice in contemporary domestic architecture has shifted architecture’s dynamic capability for moderation towards an unnatural condition of separation. As technological advances enable the more efficient creation and control of an artificial interior environment, they do so at the expense of the relationships that once existed between an inhabitant’s “indoor” and “outdoor” existences.

Once, we varied our daily activities according to the weather and the season; we now take for granted a more narrow, predictable range of tasks around the house. Once, we depended directly upon knowledge of Earth’s soil composition and growth cycles for our sustenance; we now bring food into the home with little understanding about where it came from or how it was made. Sharing and community once played a significant role in our individual abilities to survive; instead domestic architecture now propagates consumption and insularity.

Our project recognizes the need for a re-engagement of the exterior: a reanimation of the sustainable balance between interior and exterior spaces and the diverse activities that can take place across them both. For this focus, there could be no better setting than the city of New Orleans, which possesses a remarkably diverse outdoor culture as an a priori condition. Front lawns and stoops directly engage a house’s denizens with their neighbors. Street vendors migrate around town selling local food products and crafts. Lush gardens extend out from courtyards and balconies, introducing densely vegetated outdoor spaces that become integral to a domestic culture as any interior room.

The proposed house enumerates the best qualities of New Orleans’ outdoor traditions while incorporating them with the fundamental traits of the city’s famous housing typology, the Shotgun. A linear series of enclosed rooms with direct connection to each other, it represents the most prevalent type of domestic architecture in New Orleans. However, the narrow limits of its typical site preclude the Shotgun house from participating in the city’s many garden gestures. This has been the case since the early development of New Orleans’ garden culture in the 1800s, when the Shotgun house garden was merely an adjacent afterthought, possessing “purely utilitarian character, if it existed at all”[1].

Two aspects of the USGBC program allow us to rejoin the garden to the rooms of the Shotgun house. First is the requirement that the finish floor be elevated at least seven feet from ground level for flood protection. This raising up frees the entire site as a growing plane, open to sources of light and air. Second, the house is intended for just one or two occupants, minimizing square footage requirements and yielding more potential open space to the site itself.

Given these considerations, the Shotgun structure is reworked to include a series of diverse outdoor spaces as a part of its notoriously abrupt sequencing of rooms; altering this sequence from a linear “Exterior, Interior, Interior” to the musical “Exterior, Interior, dal segno al fine.” Outdoor rooms are included in a carefully arranged landscape that engages all of the senses: fruit, vegetable, and herb plants produce an abundance of tastes, fragrant swaths of jasmine, gardenia, and lavender provide perfumes day and night, tree species attract songbirds, rocks that radiate heat offset any slight chill in the air, and deciduous plantings change color and density across the seasons. The species and cultivars of the plants and trees have been selected for their nutritional and functional value. In addition to these elements, a subsurface wetland winds across the length of the site, acting as a powerful filtration ecosystem for the redistribution of rain and grey water supplies towards irrigation. Taken together, these strategies echo both the exquisite excesses and efficient utility of the New Orleans garden tradition, consistently providing food, water and sensory delights to the house’s occupants.

As the outdoor rooms of the house evolve over time, they engage in a dialectic with its interior rooms - an interaction that benefits both in a number of ways. Tall operable windows and doors, a tested New Orleans method, regulate the flow of freshly tempered garden air into each of the spaces, which act as mixing chambers for the diversity of fragrances and air temperatures coming from the various garden rooms all around. The deciduous plants provide interior shading and humidity control in the long summer months and allow transmission of radiant solar heating in the short winters. These measures are combined with the high insulation, thermal mass, and moisture control of thick walls, forming an entirely passive conditioning strategy for the house. Moreover, the abundant growing infrastructure of the outdoors is constantly cultivating a diversity of food items that can be cooked, consumed, or conserved in the protection of the interior spaces.

Site Level Plan

Elevated Level Plan

Planting List

In turn, the interior rooms provide a reliable environment for storing and preserving many of the products that are grown outdoors, extending the usefulness of these items from short term yields of a specific growing season to long term sources of sustenance. Additionally, the very structure of the interior rooms provides a degree of protection to the surrounding gardens in potentially damaging weather conditions, and their gently sloping roofs accept and direct rainwater toward a ground cistern for later irrigation use in dry conditions. The center of these roofs is strategically oriented to catch the maximum amount of incident light, and features an array of Solar Hot Water panels to offset the project’s electrical demand.

Site Section (North - South)

Detailed Section (East - West)

Conservation & Cultivation

This indoor/outdoor dialectic of the house serves as a crucial prerequisite for its low energy consumption, encouraging the use of non-mechanical means for achieving comfort and moderating the amount of time spent indoors, where most of a household’s energy use is concentrated. More importantly, the dialectic will be crucial in sustaining the longevity, health, and well-being of the house’s designated inhabitants. This has been shown in numerous studies on elderly individuals, which have reported that increasing a subject’s level of daily outdoor exposure brings an associated improvement in motor functions, resilience to sickness, and lifespan [2],[3],[4]. In the proposed home, days filled with gardening, beekeeping, surveying crop yields with neighbors, and resting in the shade of a pecan tree transcend a mere exposure to the outdoors, insisting that these outdoor spaces can act as the primary setting for one’s everyday life, a condition that is punctuated only by periodic returns to the relative stability of the interior realm.

Sustainability

Primary Systems

Urban Ventilation Scheme

In general, the proposal for an exteriorized domestic space calls for a direct and meaningful interaction between human inhabitants and their immediate environment, to the point where each grows with the other in a dynamic process of cross cultivation. If today’s typical home encourages complacency through the seemingly effortless provision of an artificial way of living, the exteriorized home counters this by challenging its inhabitants to actively participate in the attainment of their own comfort and sense of belonging via connections to the natural and human networks that can best provide these things. The resultant architecture is no longer characterized in terms of arbitrarily imposed separations and neatly defined ranges of predictability. Rather, much like the city of New Orleans itself, the house is an exercise in a messy vitality – a partly wild and continuously growing platform for the sustainable interaction between inhabitants, their neighboring communities, and the natural environment.

House & Garden from street

Middle Room

Garden Room

[1] Lake Douglas, Gardens of New Orleans: Exquisite Excess (New York: Chronicle Books 2001, n.d.).

[2] Ayumi Kono, "Frequency of going outdoors predicts long-range functional change among ambulatory frail elders living at home," Archives of Gerontology and Geriatrics (2007): 233-242.

[3] Sonia Ancoli-Israel, "Identification and treatment of sleep problems in the elderly," Sleep Medicine Reviews (1997): 3-17.

[4] unknown, The Elderly's Environments for Physical Activity - urban planning for increased physical activity and healthy ageing, 04 03 2009, 12 03 2010 .

FOG in NYC

2010-08-18T19:00:00.012-04:00

Frank Gehry's Beekman Tower at 8 Spruce Street in Lower Manhattan is coming along nicely. The tower has topped out and interiors are being constructed. Its curvaceous exterior has caused many New Yorkers to stop and look at this different arrival to the skyline.

Mr. Gehry has gone on the record to say that Lorenzo Bernini was the inspiration for the tower. This may be true, but its similarities are much closer to both an earlier piece of Renaissance theory and also to a 20th century masterpiece completed in New York by a different Frank.

When Frank Lloyd Wright completed his Guggenheim Museum off of Central Park, critics did not know whether to categorize it as being "of the city" or "of the park." Its soft curves and gentile circulation led to a dialectical admiration which continues today.

Like Mr. Wright before him, Gehry has created piece of architecture that challenges an urban status quo. While other towers rise unadorned in their urban context, Gehry's has more in common with surrounding nature than the monoliths of recent skyscrapers. Even the venerable Woolworth Building seems clunky in its detail when the two are compared.

To create this smoothness, the Beekman oscillates along its 76 stories. Each titanium facade panel is carefully placed in location with software optimization. Its southern face, chopped like a tree in section, rises uninterrupted in a single plane. The effect is that its shimmering facade catches light in a fashion that is of closer resemblance to the trees of City Hall park or the water of the East River than to the stoicism of carved masonry and monolithic glass which dominate they skyline. It is a piece of graceful mimesis set into a stoic neighborhood.

At the street level, Gehry has created a distinctly separate base for the tower. In a move that reads of the Palazzo Vecchio, the tower is set within an orthogonal brick perimeter. This perimeter is punctured by crisp, rectangular windows and will be filled with public facilities such as a school, shops, and gyms.

Mr. Gehry has created a great piece of architecture late in his career, one that deals with many issues in a sensitive and mature manner. He may claim that this is one last look at Bernini, but given how unique this tower is to his body of work, it may be better to cast it as the last great Gehry.

Beekman Tower from City Hall Park

The Tower and Base

Brick base as seen from Park Place

Beekman Tower set against the Woolworth Building

From Brooklyn the Beekman is distinctively of the East River
which forms a sharp contrast against the orthogonal city.

All pictures by W. Grey, 2010.

Do-ho Suh's Blueprint

2010-08-18T08:38:00.006-04:00

Designboom posted a preview of Do-ho Suh and Suh Architect's Venice Biennale installation today. See also a short video peeking in and around Mr. Suh's miniature dollhouse world, Fallen Star 1/5, at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts late last year.

designboom: photograph by stefano graziani, © do-ho suh, 2010

Excerpts from Hannes Meyer's "Building" (1928)

2010-08-04T19:24:00.007-04:00

Hannes Meyer's essay Building published in 1928 represents an undercurrent of the radical architecture that developed in the early 20th century. In it Meyer focuses on "life," processes and relationships, as an augmentation of the era's more prominent themes of plasticity, materials, and construction. However mechanic or discontinuous the work of the modern architects' may have been, or been branded, the aspiration to understand and orchestrate life bestowed a certain humanism to architecture, which in the past decades has regrettably been superseded by other interests. Mies expressed a similar position a year earlier: "Life is for us the decisive factor. In all its fullness, in its spiritual and real commitments."

building is a biological process. building is not an aesthetic process.

these are the only motives when building a house: sex life, sleeping habits, pets, gardening, personal hygiene, weather protection, hygiene in the home, car maintenance, cooking, heating, exposure to the sun, service.

we explore the relationships of the house and its occupants to the world outside.

we explore the relationships of human beings and animals to the garden, and the interrelationships between human beings, pets, and domestic insects. we determine the annual fluctuations in the temperature of the ground and from that calculate the heat loss of the floor and the resulting depth required for the foundation blocks. the geological nature of the soil informs us about its capillary capability and determines whether water will naturally drain away or whether drains are required. we calculate the angle of the sun's incidence during the course of the year according to the latitude of the site. with that information we determine the size of the shadow cast by the house on the garden and the amount of sun admitted by the window into the bedroom. we estimate the amount of daylight available for interior working areas. we compare the heat conductivity of the outside walls with the humidity of the air outside the house. we already know about the circulation of air in a heated room. the visual and acoustical relationships to neighboring dwellings are most carefully considered. we include in our calculation the amount of light reflection [paint] offers. we avoid using purely white finish on the house. we consider the body of the house to be an accumulator of the sun's warmth…

the modernness of such an estate does not consist of a flat roof and horizontal-vertical arrangement of the façade, but rather in its direct relationship to human existence. in it we have given thoughtful consideration to the tensions of the individual, the sexes, the neighborhood and the community, as well as to geophysical relationships. building is the deliberate organization of the processes of life.

Passive Cooling: A Call To Breathe

2010-08-01T21:47:00.008-04:00

Temperature in the Northeast United States remains high in these months following the Solstice. People have been trying in all ways to keep cool. Millions of window air conditioning units have been installed. People stay sheltered. Forced to go outdoors only on occasion, they walk briskly between cafes, the workplace, and the subway. Ties are loosened and parasols bob along, fair-skinned bodies shaded beneath.

Arriving at those destinations, they find the indoor temperature to be at first refreshing. A lower wet bulb clearing away the perspiration. Once adapted, their bodies find the realization of recycled air. It is too cold, too ridden with mites and soot. Desk workers find this condition almost intolerable. Those unlucky enough to have a desk below an vent are chilled to the point of donning sweaters. Nasal passages, forced to change production of mucus to control this concentrated attack of particulates while compensating for the hot weather outside, are always stressed organs.

Stress levels are high throughout the body from the experience of extremes in a day. This continual abuse gives credence to why so many people go on vacation about now. We are three months into this challenge to our systems. The toxins have built up and people go to the beach or woods to clear their senses.

This incredible loss in health, productivity, and comfort, all related to this challenge we have posed to ourselves. Too few consider this to be a problem; presuming it to be just a status quo of contemporary working. Even less people look for an answer from architects.

Architects are a group poised to make a profound recalculation about the methods we use to live. These methods have a long documented history, the subject of which will be addressed in a later post. However, despite the teleological potential, architects do not have a deep critical theory on this basis. This is a problem: we live in these giant pieces of architecture, ignorant that they poison.

It is too much to say that nature is toxin-free, but there needs to be more nature infused into our daily living. As we stand, even the 'Greenest' of people have parties in artificially conditioned spaces. Disillusion is rampant in a world where few dare to actually live in contact with nature.

Curing this requires a sturdy approach, crafted living. An approach that can adapt between climate extremes. I advocate the approach of passive conditioning. It will not ever create the 'spoiled' interior climate. Always adjusting a window or a series of openings exchanges new air. Minor side effects, including discomfort can be offset by altering daily choices. Eat more fruits to keep blood sugar and metabolism high. Wear light, breathable clothes, and sit in hard thinly structured wood chairs. Walk often, even in cotton suits, and drink lots of water. Along with the passive building, your body will breathe.

L.A. River declared a "river"

2010-07-31T11:03:00.005-04:00

The Los Angeles River, popularly known as the barren and polluted site of the Scorpions and T-Birds' ultimate duel, has been officially declared "traditional, navigable water" by the EPA earlier this month. This new designation opens the possibility to develop the 50-mile swath with a more nuanced and productive land uses. The watershed was originally envisioned as a "riparian corridor" for recreation, art, and environmental remediation, but commercial potential is being more strongly considered. Redevelopment will not be limited to the channel itself, but also the neighborhoods alongside it.

Some of the landscape proposals for the river have been more fanciful, illustrating a sort of thickly-forested and rich white water park--a far-fetched dream considering the reality of the trickle which constitutes the "river" most of the year. Nevertheless, at this point it is important that every possibility and concern is publicly raised so that support may be garnered for what could be a very important example of contemporary American land development and an impetus for similar projects around the country.

Below is a series of diagrams which I prepared for a presentation documenting the territorial history of the river since the 18th century. One of the first man-made transformations of the river was the creation of irrigation canals. The exponential growth of water demand for agriculture in the region prompted the "annexing" of water sources far displaced from the city. The canals and water table in general soon became polluted and increasing impermeable land development around the river necessitated those channels to be used for the diversion storm water runoff. After a series of floods, engineers proposed the concrete channel that exists today.

18 diagrams illustrating the typological transformation of the L.A. River since the 18th century

From the Earth Observatory III

2010-07-30T11:33:00.010-04:00

Schmaltz, Jeff. NASA. (2010, July 28). Deepwater Horizon Incident, Gulf of Mexico. Retrieved July 30, 2010. Instrument: Aqua - MODIS

This is the third post in a series of NASA Earth Observatory Images. I like them for the obvious reasons: large scale, lush colour, and provocative allusions. NASA posts the images daily, and has an entire series about the spill in the Gulf.

This specific image, as noted from Michon Scott's writeup, is showing the dissipation of surface slicks following the Tropical Storm Bonnie.

More importantly, the series presents us with the obvious effects of our cultural demands on the environment. We continually draw with little connection to the source. In spite of minor gestures, such as upcoming electric car releases from Chevrolet and Nissan, we retain this incredible dependence on oil. The ramifications of this spill will be felt for decades along that coast. Cultural types which are still recovering from recent hurricanes are once again stretched for sustenance.

Consider our architectural conditions existing here. Not in a bucolic field but in a fierce nature. A colossal force which will withstand even the most brutal of treatment, and still recover. The process will be great to watch from space.

"An atmosphere in bloom..."

2010-07-27T15:13:00.026-04:00

The aquarium is so blue, so lunar;
Infinite windows open onto which gardens?
Mirror of eternity whose sky is the backing tin.
How far deepens this visionary water,
And to which deepness does it go prolonging
Its blue ventilated by silver shivers?
It's like a hothouse atmosphere in bloom...
From time to time, in the silence, the water is embroidered,
By the passage of a slow fish
Who comes oblique, leaves, melts, becomes fluid;
Charcoal quickly erased on the screen becomes vacant,
An etching of a drawing stillborn on fabric.

Poem of Georges Rodenbach from Les vies encloses (1896) (source: Project Gutenberg)

Nicolas Dorval-Bory and Raphaël Bétillon's recent installation in Toulouse, France invokes a poetic and theoretical kind of space. Cleverly absorbing the paradigm of Diller Scofidio and Renfro's Blur Building, the architects, also realizing meteorological concepts of Philippe Rahm, have carried out a strong and spirited case for what Toyo Ito has called, "the essential contradiction that may be perceived in the format of architecture," or "an interior that equates to an exterior."

In order to achieve such an architecture, Dorval-Bory and Bétillon have not concentrated on static elements or fixed products, but processes which embody the realness of sensuality and ecology. Plants, nourished by a fine mist, grow in a spectrum of air temperatures from 19 to 25˚C and are picked up by visitors who, roaming, may replant them in a new habitat.

The "exterior" suggested by Ito is not the static opposite of the well-known "interior" of conventional architecture (a subject-object relationship of in-here and out-there), but a charged, dynamic and primal setting. The modern approach of architecture is to encapsulate this setting, to domesticate it--yet in doing so, the dynamism and primordiality vanish. The domesticated interior of Dorval-Bory and Bétillon's Paysages en Exil, however, conserves these essential qualities of the exterior. It is an optimistic outlook: the great outdoors can once again be colonized without at once denaturing it.

jargon, etc. interviews Philippe Rahm

2010-07-20T04:56:00.007-04:00

After discussing the work of Philippe Rahm on our blog for some years, we were very glad to personally interview him in Venice, during his design workshop, Synthetic Venice, at the University IUAV of Venice. The jargon, etc. team prepared a number of topics which I discussed with Mr. Rahm.

Philippe Rahm leads one of the most exciting and progressive architecture practices today, basing his work in the invisible and molecular to the astronomic and meteorological. The strength of his office's architecture lies in what we find as the basis in all the works: pure physicality. Whether by decomposing the light spectrum, providing diverse air temperatures and moisture contents, inducing pressure differentials, or taking advantage of material physics and chemistry, the proposed architecture makes real transformations inside and outside of the body, corporeal. As in D.H. Lawrence's The Man Who Died, we are freed from the obligation of symbols, refusing our antiquated cry, "noli me tangere!", awake and acting in the warm and raging ebb and flow, finally and directly living architecture as a tactile phenomenon.

Prompted from a few questions, Mr. Rahm discussed the ideas behind his creative process, his interest in the origins of architecture, how he approaches the interior world, and what science means in his practice.

Personally, it has been a rewarding and stimulating experience to work in his office this year and teach as an assistant in his recent workshop in Venice. I hope you enjoy the interview.

Philippe Rahm architectes
Synthetic Venice (Facebook group)

Previous related articles:
Rahm lecture at ETH Zurich
Architekturforum lecture review, part 1
Architekturforum lecture review, part 2
Obsolete drawings
Material problem

5 Frustrating Things about the Dallas Center for the Performing Arts

2010-07-08T18:38:00.093-04:00

It's been too long since I last had a stay in Dallas, but a recent trip finally gave me the chance to check out the AT&T Center for the Performing Arts, which was completed back in October. By now, plenty of articles (mostly positive) have been written on the two major new constructions here, Norman Foster's Winspear Opera House and REX & OMA's Wyly Theater. Far fewer words, however, have been dedicated to the Center's outdoor spaces, which are the only parts of the complex that are always accessible to the public. In my own visit to the site, I was shocked to find that the project planners, too, seemed to have forgotten about these outdoor spaces, leaving them with several inadequacies that effectively overshadowed the dizzying amount of starchitecture (Foster, REX/Koolhaas, Pei, Piano!) occupying these few blocks in the downtown area. Having eagerly awaited my first experience of this new urban space's heavily promoted grandeur, I left the Center feeling more frustrated than anything else. Here is why:

1.) The difficulty of a pedestrian approach from surrounding neighborhoods.

The Center for the Performing Arts is largely bounded by major highways that lead into and out of the downtown Dallas area. While this condition allows dramatic views of the complex from passing cars, it does so at the expense of the pedestrian approaching on foot.

My walk to the Center took a particularly arduous eastern approach. While the Center's northern edge is bounded by a sub-surface freeway, the eastern edge is defined by an enormous series of rumbling overpasses. These monumental constructions essentially cut off the site visually from its eastern surroundings, making it difficult to apprehend until you are right upon it. More problematically, they present an intimidating sensory barrier that is sure to discourage residents of East Dallas from considering their own walking trips towards the Arts District. Thick pillars shudder under the weight of the heavy traffic above, which bombards the spaces underneath with a constant and inescapable drone. The Texas heat, as unbearable as any, cannot be tempered in this concrete no man's land. Worse still, attempts for a quick escape are foiled by confusing surface-level traffic patterns and pedestrian signals. The city has evidently attempted to mitigate these problems by landscaping the underpasses with mulch, rocks, and small plants. However, these efforts appear as bandaids to a bullet wound.

The North Dallas Expressway provides a less than welcoming gateway

to the eastern edge of the Dallas Center for the Performing Arts.

Approaching the Center from the north and west is also a daunting task at present, as one must pass over the Woodall Rodgers Freeway via the noisy and barren N. Pearl St. bridge. Happily, the city and its private partners have recognized this problem and are already beginning construction on Woodall Rodgers Park, a 5.2 acre urban green space that will cover the existing Freeway between Pearl and St. Paul streets. The park, which is scheduled to open in 2011, is sure to make a walk from the Arts District to the burgeoning Uptown Dallas district more pleasant. However, I can't help but feel that like the Center's Sammons Park (see below), the promise of this new outdoor space is probably being overstated. It is especially suspicious that a park expressing "connectivity" as its central purpose is still surrounded on all sides by streets that are open to car traffic. More on this as the Woodall Rodgers Park develops.

2.) Flora Street, Fairmount Street, Leonard Street, & Crockett Street.

These four streets, which run directly through the Center for the Performing Arts, are perhaps the single most baffling element of the completed project. If a large part of the initial intent behind the Center was to create dynamic new outdoor urban spaces for Dallas, this goal was nullified the second that it was decided to allow car traffic into the heart of this site. Yes, the planners have attempted to soften the roads by varying material colors and textures, but this has done little to disguise the reality that these surfaces are rough, hot, and ultimately designed for cars instead of humans. Worse yet, the roads required that awkward metal barriers be installed along the boundaries of each individual building site, ensuring that each respective building would be further separated from the others by distinct visual edges.

Where dynamic and accessible green spaces could have tied together the Center's

competing starchitecture, we get only concrete, asphalt, and cars.

It's maddening to imagine how wonderful these public outdoor spaces could have been for the city of Dallas, which noticeably lacks any sizable downtown outdoor area for gathering or relaxing. Large swathes of trees, bushes, small plants, ponds, and rock gardens were certainly possible here, and would have provided welcome sources of relief from the surrounding areas of concrete and car congestion. Such outdoor spaces would have also established a clear link between the competing buildings of the Center, and their development in lieu of more roads would have delivered a whole new set of riders to the city's rapidly expanding public transit system.

Instead, the cars are invited in, and any chance of the Center becoming a place that people might want to hang around in after shows is forfeited. It's interesting that in the lead up to the project, the plaza between these buildings was boasted to be bigger than London's Trafalgar Square. That certainly sounded impressive back then, but now seems like an empty statement. In the end, size doesn't really matter much when it is dedicated to the automobile and not the pedestrian.

3.) Sammons Park.

Elaine D. and Charles A. Sammons Park is described on the DCPA site as a "10 acre urban park that will embrace and unify the venues of the AT&T Performing Arts center...a lush urban oasis, a dynamic cultural destination in downtown Dallas". The real thing is a far cry from that description. Surely the Park's planning was doomed to yield a piecemeal outcome once roads were brought into the mix, but even the small parts of the site that Sammons now occupies have not been well executed. The Park's trees, which are already at a mature stage, seem sparsely organized in a way that does not relate to the architecture. The "large expanses of grass" that DCPA promised are actually not very large at all, and get regularly interrupted by larger expanses of concrete. The largest designated outdoor performance space, Annette Strauss Artist Square, has been pushed to the northwestern corner of the Winspear Opera House (next to the highway), a move that appears to have been forced by the need to leave enough open outdoor space under the building's front canopy. A sloping ramp down into the Wyly Theater, which was intended to be covered with water and trees, has been reduced to yet another large, thinly planted concrete surface due to budgetary constraints.

And then there are the cars. Lexus, which is sponsoring the Broadway Series Inaugural Season, has made certain that its corporate support is well known by positioning three of its cars in the open spaces outside the venues - one car in front of the Wyly, the other two in front of the Winspear. Even the architectural efforts of Mr. Foster, Mr. Prince-Ramus of REX, and Mr. Koolhaas of OMA cannot trump the presence of these automobiles, which at the moment are the primary visual elements in the mostly empty space between their two buildings. It's almost as if the Center's benefactors were worried that the streets surrounding each of these buildings would not be enough to remind theatergoers that this town is dominated by a culture of cars. After all, what shame is there in a little redundancy to get the point across? Plenty, in this case.

The areas in front of the performance venues are reduced to mall-like shrines for Lexus automobiles.

4.) The Center's failure to reach towards a broader populace.

With its luxury car-park, expensive venues, and lack of substantial park space, the Center for the Performing Arts is going to have a tough time shedding the elitist label that it has been burdened with ever since private funding first started coming through in the earlier part of the last decade. The fact that luxury apartment buildings keep sprouting up in the general vicinity of the Center only reinforces the notion that the most common visitors to this site will likely be the wealthier urbanites that are primarily interested in seeing an occasional show and leaving. Even the best new strategy for pedestrian access, the aforementioned Woodall Rodgers Park, has been geared towards engaging the wealthy and expanding Uptown Dallas District, while connections to the poorer neighborhoods of East and South Dallas have been left unaddressed.

In between shows, the Center for the Performing Arts does not possess any sort of draw to those who might be passing by, and it certainly has not yet become an urban destination for Dallas residents. In fact, as I walked around the Center and its venues, I never encountered a single person, although the weather was pleasant and nearby streets in the city were full of activity. It was an eery reminder that more often than not, the character of the spaces between buildings and not the buildings themselves is what governs a sustained public presence in urban areas. Here, the close proximity of two glimmering new constructions by some of the most famous architects in the world was evidently of little consequence to the citizens of Dallas. Why would it be? The buildings themselves are closed during most hours, the outdoor spaces surrounding them are devoid of program, and the carefully manicured grass and rough concrete surfaces are hardly inviting places to sit down and take in the day.

Few people seem to be drawn into this "lush urban oasis"

5.) The project hype & associated imagery.

Over a year ago, I made a brief post about a series of models of the Center for the Performing Arts that were on display at the Trammell Crow Center in downtown Dallas. Looking at the images of these models now, I realize that they misrepresent the spaces between buildings. Many of the landscaping elements, including the trees and gardens, are either overstated or nonexistent. The reflecting pool in front of the Winspear Opera House, which is barely noticeable on the finished site, is modeled as a significant part of the approach to the building. No cars are shown on Flora Street, which is crowded with pedestrians that are spilling over from the Winspear Opera House towards the Wyly Theater, letting on a false sense of connectivity between the two buildings.

The text and renderings that accompany the Center are similarly misleading. Sammons Park is hardly the "lush urban oasis" that it is touted as, and might better be described as "the small amount of green space that could fit between the roads, cars, concrete, and buildings". The Center is not a "dynamic cultural destination" but rather an empty urban space that is periodically enlivened by the activities that occur within each respective venue. The spaces directly around each building, shown in various irradiant images (see below) to be bustling with life, felt much less invigorating on the day that I visited, when no special events were planned and the site was absent any people. To add insult to injury, the project imagery is abundantly displayed on large boards at the edge of the site, allowing the discrepancies between the dream and the reality to become much more apparent.

The glowing renderings of both the Wyly Theater and Winspear Opera House (above),

which continue to be displayed across much of the finished site, are overblown and misleading

The Dallas Center for the Performing Arts tries to have its cake and eat it too, and ends up suffering mightily from this strategy. While the city and its donors have made a bold move in devoting so much time, land, and capital to the cause of developing new public spaces, they have done so under the mistaken belief that these spaces could draw in crowds of pedestrians even as they continued to cater heavily towards those who would rather drive everywhere. Until the powers that be here can shed their focus from this convenience of the car, a most detrimental of cultural conceits, Dallas may never truly achieve the kind of world class public places for gathering and recreation that it has gone for so long without.

So to those orchestrating the continued development of the Arts District, I beg of you: Shut down these roads to anything but a pedestrian. Remove the obtrusive emblems to your corporate sponsors. Devote more space and resources to the "lush urban oasis" that is supposed to exist amongst these buildings. In short, return to the original purpose of this development, stated 32 years ago in the 1978 Carr-Lynch report: "...to bring the arts into the lives of the people of Dallas, in an immediate and personal way, in the course of everyday life" [1]. If things remain as they are, it's hard to see that happening.

Editor's Note: Parts of this article had erroneously credited the Wyly Theater to REX when in fact it should have been credited to both REX & The Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). Our apologies for the oversight.

[1] http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/ent/stories/DN-district_0608gl.State.Bulldog.222cdd6.html

jargon, etc. reports from Venice

2010-07-08T05:03:00.007-04:00

From Venice, the island is a mirage, an apparition of the gates of Heaven, a world with a single door. To go to San Michele is insistent, but at the same time, obscure. It occupies the entire horizon, precisely the boundary between Heaven and Earth, half here, half elsewhere.

Themes for architecture

2010-07-07T10:42:00.007-04:00

Production
Agriculture
Culture
Domestication
Economy
Freedom
Garden
Orchard
Photosynthesis
Plus-energy
Programming
Robots
Wi-fi

Recycling
Ecology
Hunt
Vegetable soup

Conservation
Conserves
Curing
Fermentation
Gather
Harvest
Husbandry
Slow
Surplus

Physics
Air
Decomposition
Heat
Water

Body
Biology
Botany
Chemical compounds (caffeine, alcohol, etc.)
Chemistry
Eating
Exercise
Outdoors
Perfume
Real

Land use
Agriculture
Geography
Infrastructure
Park
Public
Rural
Storage
Urban
Wilderness

Migration
Day
Night
Seasons
Rhythm
Weather

Drawings: Set 2

2010-07-01T04:10:00.000-04:00

SET 2

Vicissitudes. The grid encounters a choatic system.

This extremely powerful dialectic, draws out a visible example of the mimetic. Directionality in the relationship is difficult to establish. These chaotic elements could be of ecology or sociology. They can be both signifiers or scents. Rationalism of the cube dominates in some circumstances and others have it ripped open. Each system triangulates the other.

-- text end --

Drawings: Set 1

2010-06-25T23:18:00.001-04:00

PREFACE

This is the first in a series of posts in which I am publishing a set of drawings. These drawings were completed in a two month span earlier this year. All drawings react to a set of rules.

RULES
1 - Orthographic and Isometric Projections
2 - Facilitate multiple readings of any drawing. Plan/section, adjustable isometrics, elevation/section, etc.
3 - Objects are semi-autonomous, occupying space of the 3"x 5" Page
4 - .005 pen only
5 - Modulations of the octave, 1.5 octave, and logarithmic octave units (1, 3, 5, 9)
6 - Origin line or materiality are not defined with specificity
7 - Symmetry, the Echo, and the Mimetic, here transcribed as the Square, the Circle, and the Triangle, are important to the compositional study
8 - Minimal Annotation. Some text is placed, but it is not directly relevant to either the final product or the original orientation for the drawing.

I can not finish this preface without giving credit to the obvious references. This set is not have complete without a mention of the influence of Hejduk, Ungers, Terragni, among others. This initial preface will only be published once; however, each set will include a brief description of its pairing.

SET 1

This set contains the most straightforward of projections. Almost all are direct orthographies with little direct reference to the third dimension. This first drawing is a good example of this principle. Here, any illusion of depth is created through offsetting the grid fields at close intervals. This could easily be a 5 meter deep facade or a .02 m deep ceiling grid. Of course, neither is the intention, but rather the goal is to understand the grids, and their tension facilitated in the possible flatness. The remaining drawings follow this trend.

Also of note, image 10 was made alongside the Meditations featured in the Dipteral Temples post, and image 6 bears a not accidental resemblance to Kahn's Library in Exeter. Both drawings move the rules into a flirtation with the liturgical. Both suggestion of a deeper canvas. This allusion is made more conspicuous but the dedicated breaking of symmetry and introduction of Mimetic and Echoing relationships.

- text end -

Iannis Xenakis - Mists

2010-06-25T18:00:00.003-04:00

Aerial Archeology

2010-06-25T16:45:00.028-04:00

On a recent visit to flickr, I stumbled across a stunning set of aerial photographs from the Italian photographer Paolo Nannini. Mr. Nannini works at the Sorprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici della Toscana in Florence, Italy, a cultural commission that is tasked with "protecting, conserving and valorising the architectural and landscape heritage in the territory of competence." Accordingly, many of his images document significant archeological sites that are located in and around Italy's Tuscany region.

Mr. Nannini's work evidences how useful an aerial photograph can be in revealing intricate spatial relationships between a structure and its surrounding landscape. There is a remarkable synthesis here between the manmade and natural, as the earth and sea have quite literally subsumed the bulk of these buildings into their masses, leaving behind only traces of what look to have been magnificent constructions. One's mind easily wanders into an imagined re-construction of these spaces: their scale and proportion on the ground, the way their walls were to touch, the kinds of scents and temperatures that their physical presences enabled...

The following selection of Mr. Nannini's photographs was pulled from the much larger set on his website, where you can find an impressive amount of supplemental information available for each individual exposure. For an even more extensive collection of related photographs, check out Mr. Nannini's group, Aerial Archeology.

Gonfienti Archaeological Site II, November 2009

Location: Calenzano, Tuscany

Vignale Archaeological Excavations, October 2009

Location: Vignale, Tuscany

Vignale Roman Kiln, October 2009

Location: Vignale, Tuscany

Tholos Tomb of Poggio Pelliccia Vetulonia, July 2009

Location: Stazione di Giuncarico, Tuscany

Roman Villa of Puntore-Thermal Baths, April 2009

Location: Follonica, Tuscany

Vetulonia Archaeological Site - Tomba della Pietrera, April 2009

Location: Vetulonia, Tuscany

Rusellae Amphitheatre, February 2009

Location: Il Colombaio, Tuscany

Archaeological Excavations at the Baratti Bay, October 2008

Location: Baratti-Populonia, Tuscany

Albinia Archaeological Site I year 2008, August 2008

Location: Albinia, Tuscany

Etruscan Necropolis Crocefisso del Tufo at Orvieto II, July 2008

Location: Orvieto, Umbria

Roman Ruins of Villa Domizia at Santa Liberata, July 2008

Location: Monte Argentario, Tuscany

Castello di Capriaia Siena II, June 2008

Location: Recenza, Tuscany

Porto Ereole Spanish Fortress 2, November 2007

Location: Monte Argentario, Tuscany

Le Rocchette Castiglione della Rescaia North Coast, December 2006

Location: Castiglione della Pescaia, Tuscany

Paolo Nannini at work, June 2010

Details about the photographic system:

Camera: RICOH GX200

Exposure: Manual + Bracketing if necessary

Drive: Interval Shot (5-10 seconds)

Rig: Picotant one axe

Flying Platform: Kite or Balloon

About Paolo Nannini:

Website: http://www.flickr.com/photos/opaxir

Job: Aerial photographer at Sorprintendenza per i beni archeologici della Toscana

Many thanks to Paolo for allowing download access to these fantastic images!

Animal Collective - Brothersport

2010-06-25T05:39:00.001-04:00

From the Earth Observatory II

2010-06-24T23:09:00.000-04:00

Sea surface temperatures at 2010 hurricane season.

reference

From the Earth Observatory

2010-06-22T03:24:00.002-04:00

The oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. (2010, June 20). Deepwater Horizon Incident, Gulf of Mexico. National Ocean Service, Office of Response and Restoration. Retrieved June 21, 2010.

Control Freaks by Nature

2010-06-21T17:26:00.036-04:00

The following excerpt is from the book Male, Female: The Evolution of Human Sex Differences by David Geary:

THE MOTIVATION TO CONTROL

Human beings, and arguably all other complex organisms, appear to be fundamentally designed to attempt to achieve some level of control over the social, biological, and physical resources that support survival and reproduction. In fact, it can be argued that the desire to control is the fundamental motivation underlying the behavioral and psychological development of human beings [1,2]. From this perspective, the emotional, cognitive, and behavioral systems of human beings and all other complex organisms have been designed by selection pressures to enable the individual to pursue the fundamental motivation to control or to organize the environments within which he or she lives and develops; Heckhausen and Schulz defined control as “bringing the environment into line with one’s wishes” [1,2].

Stated somewhat differently, Darwin’s [3] conceptualization of natural selection as resulting from a “struggle for life” is more precisely defined as a struggle for control of the resources that support life and that allow one to reproduce. In this view, the mind and the body of the organism have been fine-tuned by selection pressures to enable the organism to attempt to gain control of the social, biological, and physical resources in its habitat and to organize these resources in ways that facilitate survival and reproduction. If selection has in fact resulted in a fundamental motivation to control essential resources, then individual differences in skill at achieving control should be related to individual differences in morbidity’ mortality, and reproductive outcomes.

For me, this line of control theory is interesting because it addresses the terms “environment” and “resources” within a human psycho-behavioral context. Many of the current discussions about sustainability tend to refer to such terms in a purely physical sense – in the case of buildings, “The higher R value of this insulation provides a more stable temperature gradient and interior environment” or “The increased efficiency of these solar panels yields a larger reduction in domestic consumption of electricity resources”. While in some cases such a descriptive bias is appropriate (i.e. when quantifying the relative efficacies of various new technologies), physical metrics alone cannot completely account for the human implications of design, development, and decision-making approaches.

This is where the above reasoning is useful, since it discusses distinctly human physical outcomes (“morbidity, mortality, and reproductive”) in terms of a fundamentally psycho-behavioral “struggle for control”. It's an argument that I find especially relevant to architecture, as it suggests that a building could dramatically improve the physical well-being of its occupants by providing them with environments (thermal, acoustic, haptic, olfactory, optical) that they can influence in some directly perceivable way. Theoretically, you could then implement a very low energy framework for the provision of personal control – choice of microclimates, perfumable spaces, sound amplifiers or buffers, temperature adjustment through operable windows and fans, etc. – that would actually leave individual occupants more consistently satisfied than would the one-size-fits-all commercial building control strategies commonly imposed upon them today.

Veterans of the HVAC industry in America like to casually dismiss this notion, bemoaning the suggestion that an individual building occupant should have greater ability to adjust their environment, which they claim (without proof) would be disastrous for energy usage. It’s a frustrating response, but in the end, maybe they are only trying to defend their own sense of control. They are human, after all.

Excerpt from:

Geary, David C.. Male, Female: The Evolution of Human Sex Differences. 2 ed. Washington: American Psychological Association (apa), 2009

[1] Schulz, R., & Heckhausen, J. (1996). A life-span model of successful aging. American Psychologist, 51, 702-714.

[2] Heckhausen, J., & Schulz, R. (1995). A life-span theory of control. Psychological Review, 102, 284-304

[3] Darwin, Charles. On the origin of species by means of natural selection,: Or, The preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life. United Kingdom: Hurst, 1911

Plastiki Well on its Way!

2010-06-16T09:23:00.007-04:00

The Plastiki Expedition, which aims to sail a boat made from 12,500 plastic bottles across the Pacific Ocean from San Francisco to Sydney, has already been out at sea for 89 days, during which time it has covered 5,692 nautical miles! Find real time information on the team's progress here. Help the crew achieve their goal of securing 12,500 pledges to beat waste by the time they reach their destination here.

The right attitude

2010-06-13T05:14:00.003-04:00

Thomas Friedman's weekly column in the New York Times highlights the real cause behind the BP oil leak in the Gulf. If Americans (and the rest of the world) were not completely addicted to oil-derived comforts that permeate our entire way of life, BP would not have been seeking oil in the first place.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/opinion/13friedman.html?hp

"...we have met the enemy and he is us."

Architecture and Agriculture

2010-06-06T10:43:00.012-04:00

...people initially only live in a house because they confess to the conviction that it is rewarding to await an event outside the house. In the agrarian world, the temporal structure of residing in houses must be understood in terms of the compulsion to wait. (Peter Sloterdijk)

The invention of agriculture brought new demands to architecture. Whereas hunter-gathering societies built temporary dwellings to protect themselves and their few possessions against inclemency, the domestication of plants and animals required an architecture of conservation. The ability to keep a surplus and yard animals relied on architectural inventions. Well-known structures developed for these reasons include the dugout, the stable, and the granary. The transition to the sedentary lifestyle thus triggered an architectural revolution, where the essential purpose of building included not only the undergirding of thermoregulation in humans, but the conservation of food and cultural products. By understanding the agricultural revolution as a basis for their disciplines, architects and urbanists can contribute to the revolution that we need today, addressing today's demand of sustainable development, while designing more freely and escaping the confines of economy.

Contemporary architects rarely considers the agricultural origins of buildings, favoring instead the subsequent symbolic, abstract and tangential developments of classical civilizations and eras. Even those who subscribed to the motto "form follows function" in the 19th and 20th centuries skimmed over this fleshly essence of building, aiming their efforts in large part toward an empirical and universal aesthetics. Furthermore, economics have strangled architecture, confining the way we conceive buildings. Surface areas, operating costs, market appeal, and product catalogs confine building design nowadays to the extent that real estate precludes architecture--we are at the mercy of politics.

In terms of architecture, today we strongly favor consumption over conservation and production. In fact, for the most part, our domestic architecture conserves only our preference to consume. Our kitchens have become gargantuan, the TV room has taken center stage and our closets are stuffed with water heaters, air conditioners and plastic junk. We hear the words "perishable goods" only in reference to homeless food drives. It seems that our domestic spaces have consolidated the dugout, the stable and granary and replaced them with the refrigerator, the garage and the closet, all nicely packaged in a mechanically-conditioned interior. Nothing perishes anymore thanks to our interiorized Gardens of Eden. Architecture has lost its capacity to provide any use except for a wealth-bearing, constructively frail, symbolically-charged shelter.

In response, we have seen the constructive development of the "building as power plant." Instead of consuming, architecture could provide the ancillary service of energy production. Architects adopting such an approach have designed automated buildings coated with solar power arrays hooked up to networks of earth tubes. Yet these structures ultimately and ironically meet only a growing demand for power from other buildings.

As we are faced with the fact that the western, civilized style of development is inherently unsustainable, it would help us to look at the origins of production, namely agriculture, and its influence on architecture. In this regard, architecture assumes a role of conservation. As hunter-gatherers settled in one place, housed animals and grew crops, the need for storage arose. Tools, grains, and clothes do not wear well, so buildings were invented to prolong their life. These buildings were not dwellings in all cases, and perhaps the most interesting were not inhabited at all. The oast, a building for drying hops, for example, consisted of a ground-level hearth which heated air that permeated several floors of thin, permeable wood plank floors and escaped through conical roof vents. Therefore, we can propose that an inextricable origin of architecture was the processing and conservation of goods which humans cultivated in the outdoors. The cultural work embodied in the conservation of food, clothing and pleasurable goods became an essential basis for architecture.

The question which then arises is, what happened to conservation? My hypothesis refers to two changes in society. The growth of population in urban centers increased the demand of food and goods, which in turn increased the space needed for production, leading to an industrialization of sorts, which had to be relocated outside the city limits. We no longer lived amongst our conserved goods, but had them processed and transported to us from the outside. Next, having adopted the culture of building, we assumed ultimate residence indoors. Many traditional houses incorporated conserving rooms and crawl spaces, but as the simple housing need grew and preservation technologies (radiators, refrigeration, microwaves) were developed in the 20th century, processing and storage spaces were usurped and converted into dwelling spaces. As a result, the permanent home of humans was relocated, and we arrive at our current situation of domestic architecture and consumption: we are not animals who live outdoors, but people who live indoors.

A DOCK USED FOR DRYING SALT COD IN PROVINCETOWN (SOURCE: http://www.iamprovincetown.com/)

As a part of the solution for today's energy crisis, we must propose a sort of reversal of indoor domestics that necessarily transforms our way of life. Adopting the contemporary land-use principles of urban farming, the ubiquity of wi-fi and an historical garde manger vocation, we could escape the insular quality and high energy demand of interior lifestyles. We must re-exteriorize our culture and redefine the nature of our interior spaces and the built environment in general. By renegotiating our accepted ideas of comfort, relying less on industrial production and recombining urban and rural land, we can invent useful, sensual architecture that also contributes toward sustainable development. It is not a "back-to-the-land" movement, but a "out-from-under-the-rock" action.

jargon, etc. reports from Paris

2010-05-24T18:33:00.003-04:00

Young farmers transformed the Avenue des Champs Elysées in Paris into an agricultural field this past weekend. My comments coming soon.

Daniel Arsham's "Animal Architecture"

2010-05-11T15:18:00.004-04:00

“Animals have a unique relationship with architecture because it is not built for them. When we are confronted with the animal’s ambiguous connection to a world designed for humans, we are better equipped to ask questions about our own relationships to architecture."

These are gouache on mylar works from 2009 - 2010 by Daniel Arsham (born 1980, works in New York and Miami).

Perhaps the surreality of these pictures is not so exaggerated. It's funny how abstract and rigid we humans prefer our environment. The tension illustrated between the animal and the pure, white forms reminds of a recent discussion with a friend. His idea of nature isn't a city park, but a sort of profound and dangerous incomprehensibility, belonging to the sort of "brutal force and panic instincts" that French philosopher Charbonneau used to explain the world before civilization. Without encouraging any kind of return to primeval times, I wonder how a more tangible and less structured environment might appear less contrary to animal environments.

Landscape faces by Levi van Veluw

2010-05-04T18:16:00.003-04:00

Landscape I, 2008

Landscape IV, 2008

See more of Levi van Veluw's work on his website http://www.levivanveluw.nl/

Gardens and Palaces

2010-05-02T15:08:00.004-04:00

WHEN STAIRCASES WERE BIG

A FOREST GROWS ATOP A BUILDING

A COMPOSITION OF TEXTURES, COLORS, SHAPES AND SCENTS

DOUBLE-PANE WINDOWS BEFORE DOUBLE-PANE WINDOWS

I LOOK OUT MY WINDOWS AND SEE BUT LEAVES AND SUNSHINE

THE THINKER

ENJOYING THE DAY

THREE TOWERS COMPETE

Spheres Theory: Talking to Myself about the Poetics of Space by Peter Sloterdijk

2010-05-01T09:42:00.011-04:00

A must-read "interview" with Peter Sloterdijk posted at the AA's "Beyond Entropy" research cluster.

http://beyondentropy.aaschool.ac.uk/?p=689

Excerpts from my favorite parts, along with a few pictures from projects by DOGMA (Pier Vittorio Aureli, tutor at the Berlage Institute, and Martino Tattara):

"What interiors will living beings wish to have if they bear within them the marks of being born? Then the answer must be: They will no doubt opt for interiors that enable them to project a trace of that archaic state of protection onto their later shell constructions. The construction of shells for life creates a series of uterus repetitions in outdoor milieus. Architects must understand that they stand in the middle between biology and philosophy. Biology deals with the environment, philosophy with the world."

"...architects can definitely infer from this that they cannot take geometric ideologies as their starting point. Instead, they need to think in terms of the atmospheric effect of space."

IMAGE: DOGMA'S HELLENIKON PARK PROJECT, 2004

"You must understand that houses are initially machines to kill time. In fact, in a primitive farmhouse people wait for a silent event out in the fields, one they cannot influence but which, thank God, happens regularly—namely the moment when the seeds planted bear fruit. In other words, people initially only live in a house because they confess to the conviction that it is rewarding to await an event outside the house. In the agrarian world, the temporal structure of residing in houses must be understood in terms of the compulsion to wait."

"I expose the essential nerve center of the phenomenon of residence, namely the house’s destiny as a spatialized immune system. Here, I focus specifically on the dimension of designed atmosphere, the air we breathe in a building."

IMAGE: DOGMA'S "STOP CITY" PROJECT, 2009

"Being means someone being together with someone else and with something else in something. This formula describes the minimum complexity you need to construct in order to arrive at an appropriate concept of world. Architects are involved in this consideration, since for them being-in-the-world means dwelling in a building. A house is a threedimensional answer to the question of how someone can be together with someone and something in something. In their own way, architects interpret this most enigmatic of all spatial prepositions, namely the “in.”"

"from my viewpoint the architect is someone who philosophizes in and through material. Someone who builds a dwelling or erects a building for an institution makes a statement on the relationship between the ecstatic and the enstatic, or, if you will, between the world as apartment and the world as agora."

Progress at Ground Zero

2010-04-24T09:12:00.008-04:00

The New York Times has posted some interesting panoramas showing the current state of Ground Zero, including images of One World Trade Center, the World Trade Center Memorial, and the new transportation hub.

Zones

2010-04-22T18:46:00.004-04:00

Window display for a clothing company illustrating a system of zones that chart behavior across the human body.

Digital Scents

2010-04-15T20:32:00.016-04:00

Electronic Noses have been around since the 1980s, but these magical little devices have only recently been recognized for their supra-utilitarian potential (they have most commonly been used for detecting harmful chemicals in the air). Happily, the "pleasure principle" has begun to take hold in eNose research, and is evidenced in a nice article from today's Science Daily. The article discusses the efforts of researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel to prove that one's perception of a smell's "pleasantness" is primarily a function of its molecular structure, and does not vary according to the subjective influences of that person's cultural background.

The scientists initially performed a test of native Israeli subjects in which they asked each subject to rate a smell's "pleasantness" on a scale of 1 to 30. The results of this test were translated into a predictive algorithm that was programmed into the eNose, which is able to characterize different odors based on electronic "fingerprints" that are created by the odor's molecular interaction with the sensor transducer element (see diagram below). The algorithm was then used to successfully predict the qualitative interpretation of each smell by a different group of Israelis and a group of Ethiopians who had recently immigrated to Israel, supporting the scientists' hypothesis that cultural background does not have an effect on one's assessment of an odor's pleasantness.

*image and caption taken from Eggins, Brian. Chemical Sensors and Biosensors. Sussex: Wiley and Sons, Ltd., 2002

These findings in eNose research have huge implications for the possibility of quantitatively characterizing and digitizing the underlying structure of smells, which in turn carries exciting implications for building environments and their occupants. The Smart Second Skin project already evidences an application for the eNose in fashion, using garments to continuously condition the immediate environment surrounding a person based on their monitored mood states. This could easily be extended to an interior building space; imagine that eNose sensors are able to monitor both human and environmental inputs and continuously build pleasant scentscapes, which serve as low-energy psychological foils to thermal conditions that might otherwise be experienced as uncomfortable and require quantities of air heating/cooling to offset. In this way, the low carbon building environments of the future might not be constructed of highly efficient heat pumps and tightly sealed windows, but of the abundant (if artificial) provision of multi-sensory delights.

A Classic Meditation IV: Mueller Villa

2010-04-13T18:07:00.000-04:00

INCREDIBLE PANORAMA LINK

Digital Model and Image copyright: Yammie Ho

From the architect:

"My architecture is not conceived in plans, but in spaces (cubes). I do not design floor plans, facades, sections. I design spaces. For me, there is no ground floor, first floor etc.... For me, there are only contiguous, continual spaces, rooms, anterooms, terraces etc. Storeys merge and spaces relate to each other. Every space requires a different height: the dining room is surely higher than the pantry, thus the ceilings are set at different levels. To join these spaces in such a way that the rise and fall are not only unobservable but also practical, in this I see what is for others the great secret, although it is for me a great matter of course. Coming back to your question, it is just this spatial interaction and spatial austerity that thus far I have best been able to realise in Dr Müller's house."

- Adolf Loos, 1930 conversation

Model and Images copyright: Qiong He

Regarding Current Event of the Week:

2010-04-12T21:00:00.002-04:00

The image should be credited to the following:

Scott Short, Untitled (White), 2008. Oil on canvas, 93 in. x 120 in. (detail). Collection of the artist; courtesy Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica, CA. Photograph by Fredrik Nilsen.

Skins 3: Continuing Deeper

2010-04-12T14:45:00.002-04:00

(1)

Continuing my posts regarding the idea of a skin, I want to move from a series of historiographic examples into a more speculative category.

From an early age, we understand that the human skin is part of an Integumentary System.(2) This compound body is not only comprised of both surface form and tone, but also subsurface volumes and functions. Homeostasis, disease prevention, Vitamin D processing, and nutrient transmission all occupy the realm of this system, with each function using one or multiple cellular substructures.
Unfortunately, architectural skin is still bound to the concept that skin is but a thin component; a surface. This is evident in both the ideas of Daniel Burnham and abuse of the Garden City idea. Burnham, famous for applying decorative fill to a steel structure (see Flatiron), sets an unfortunate precedent. When juxtaposed with the Garden City concept of reconnection with nature to solve problems of interiority, this has led to a nihilistic pursuit of skin thinness. This 20th century problem has only been amplified vis a vis computer production. Easy manipulation of planes and the ability to fit them into this system of thinness has left us with barely a veneer of skin to consider.

This situation should be changed. I suggest that we start by following Vittorio Greggotti. His working process, described in "Inside Architecture," begins each project with the section, horizontal and vertical. This approach leads to careful examination of intersections between inside and outside.(3)

When considered with this method, each inside and outside value can be related by equal stereometrics. Relationships between the two, in terms of climate, perception, and privacy are all moderated only by the thickness of the skin. Moving from a purely simplistic understanding, the formal potentials of this separation activate an architectural integumentary; an ontological change of skin from surface to capable volume.

(4)

1 - Photograph by the NY Times. NY Times International. 28 February 2010, p10.

2 - Etymology - Latin integumentum, from integere to cover; from in- + tegere to cover

3 - Gregotti, Vittorio. Inside Architecture. The MIT Press. Cambridge, MA. 1996.

4 - Cummings, Benjamin. LINK. 2002 Pearson Education Inc.

What's in a Label?

2010-04-07T17:30:00.033-04:00

This is the question that begs to be asked following a recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) report that exposed major flaws in the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) internally-policed Energy Star certification process. As part of a 9 month investigation into the program, the GAO was able to successfully obtain EPA approval for fake products including a gas-powered alarm clock and air cleaner that was actually a space heater with a feather duster and fly strips taped to it. Read the full report here.

In response, the EPA has announced that they are going to expand testing through "third-party, independent laboratories for about 200 of the most common products, such as freezers, refrigerators and room air conditioners, that have already been certified"*.

My sense is that the intent of Energy Star is positive, as I believe to be the case with other prevalent and oft-cited standards such as LEED from the U.S. Green Building Council. But like LEED, which has recently been criticized for it's own deficiencies in certifying buildings that operate sustainably (here and here, amongst other places), the Energy Star program places too much emphasis on product certification and not enough on the tough questions that need to be asked about sustainability and what it means to the design and construction industries: Does super-efficiency actually lead to more careless energy use? Are the energy use practices that we most take for granted to be set in stone? Should we really be incentivizing inherently wasteful behaviors by rewarding products/strategies that support them with less intensive carbon emissions? Using the broad influence that such guidelines can carry, this discussion could be advanced across a broad audience of disciplines. Instead, the standards' current role seems to be limited to rewarding products and buildings that do just enough to jump through a few loopholes and make an extra buck.

To be fair, both the EPA and USGBC seem to be earnestly scrutinizing their own work in the attempt to yield more effective future versions. In response to the second of the LEED criticisms linked above, for example, USGBC President and CEO Rick Fedrizzi remarked "I didn't like the LEED is broken part, but I did like the 'Let's fix it' part"**. The EPA's vows to improve their oversight of the Energy Star program have already been mentioned.

The question remains, however, as to whether these attempts at improvement will mimic the goals of the standards themselves by emphasizing the need for increased efficiency of approaches that already exist, or will instead take a more open stance that engages the transformational approaches coming out of current research and technology developments. In the case of LEED, this could include the explicit consideration of passive conditioning strategies, emphasis on dynamic opportunities for occupant comfort and control over the thermal environment, and improved recognition of landscaping strategies that go beyond water management and aesthetics to include actual food production and sustenance of building occupants.

None of these things are included in the current LEED checklist. Nevertheless, I'm hopeful that both LEED and Energy Star can be significantly improved in the coming years through more involvement of the most innovative researchers and practitioners working in the fields of architecture and engineering, as well as in related fields. We need more of these individuals to bring their ideas into the standards' development and oversight processes, because, like it or not, the market has latched on to the economic promises of such labels, and they have quickly become an integral part of the green buzz in this country.

More to come on LEED in particular in a future post.

*http://www.marketwatch.com/story/energy-star-program-is-under-fire-2010-04-01

** http://www.grist.org/article/leed1/

Skins 2: Dipteral Temples

2010-03-31T10:03:00.003-04:00

plan diagram of Dipteral Temple from unibooking

In a continuing series, I am presenting another reconsideration of the skin. Since the early 20th century it has been thought of as a post-structual device. Applied when necessary and optimized a la any current trend be it terra-cotta, daylight, or solar energy. We need to instead reconsider the free-facade proposed by le Corbusier in a new fashion. One in which the entire facade moderates the building. In which the figural dermis is not entirely dependent on the central occupancy type. Instead the free-facade is a liberator rather than a source of interior libations. It is porous, activated by circulation, sub-occupancies, growths, infestations, and protrusions.

Dipteral Temples show that as this skin depth increases, so does the freedom of the sanctum from previous hierarchies.

plan of the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus

plan of a dipteral temple from the Cesariano edition of Vitruvius (1521)

plan of the temple of Apollo near Miletus, Turkey (310) from Great Buildings

arial image of the dipteral temple of Apolly in Didyma from unibooking

image of SANAA 2009 Serpentine Pavillion from archtracker

Meditations I, II, and III on the Dipteral Temple. Plan and Elevations. Drawing by William Grey

Philippe Rahm lecture at ETH Zurich

2010-03-29T11:52:00.003-04:00

http://www.multimedia.ethz.ch/speakers/d_arch/2009_hs/bauten_01/?doi=10.3930/ETHZ/AV-0593271e-eb1a-4da3-a8b7-84a36c298c84&autostart=false

Watch Philippe Rahm's lecture at the ETH Zurich last November. Rahm discussed his office's projects in the context of the ETH lecture series, "bauten/bauen," in contemporary Swiss architecture. The question and answer session at the end is particularly interesting ("adam and eve," "evilness," "the whole planet is an interior," "rethink the thickness of the wall," "live with the seasons").

The Spatial Mind

2010-03-26T08:43:00.023-04:00

New Scientist published an interesting article this week about the influence of the body's positioning in space on one's thought processes. According to recent research, space and the body are actually much more connected to the mind than has been traditionally accepted. The article cites a study by researchers at the University of Melbourne in Parkville, Australia which found that the eye movements of 12 right handed male subjects could be used to predict the size of each in a series of numbers that the participants were asked to generate; left and downwards meant a smaller number than the previous one, while up and to the right meant a larger number. A separate study at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, asked 24 students to move marbles from a box on a higher shelf to one on a lower shelf while answering a neutral question, such as "tell me what happened yesterday". The resulted showed that the subjects were more likely to talk of positive events when moving marbles upwards, and negative events when moving them downwards. Read more about this here.

The notion that our bodies' direct physical relationship to space can influence thoughts is exciting, and reopens arguments against the ontological distinction between mind and body that is most commonly identified with Descartes, as well as associated questions of physical determinism vs. indeterminism . Going further, I suspect that less overt interactions between the body and its surrounding environment could be also included in this discussion, such as the psychological perceptions of temperature, humidity, and other similarly invisible environmental characteristics. The New Scientist article also references a 2008 study from the Rotman School of Management in Toronto that shows that social exclusion has the effect of making people feel colder. The issue of causality abounds here: if social exclusion or inclusion affects a person's temperature perception, would variant temperatures also be able to yield varying types of associated social behavior? Could we extend this discussion to the somewhat perverse notion that a carefully controlled interior environment is actually a form of mind control? ...

A drawing from René Decartes' Meditations on First Philosophy illustrates his

belief that the immaterial (mind, soul, "animal spirit") and material (body)

interact through the pineal gland in the center of the brain.

Life

2010-03-19T08:59:00.005-04:00

The Discovery Channel series "Life" begins this Sunday, and I couldn't be more excited. Check out a few stunning glimpses of what we're going to be seeing below. Also take a look at the Discovery Channel's site for more videos and behind the scenes looks.

New Onion Flats

2010-03-16T00:06:00.007-04:00

Onion Flats has posted some beautiful new drawings and images of their latest project, TED, which is currently being constructed in Syracuse, NY. Check out a few of them below.

TED, which beat out the likes of Adjaye and Office dA in a competition that was sponsored by the Syracuse University School of Architecture, is another evolution in the firm's ongoing efforts to build flexibly programmed, modular units that can be easily constructed and reconfigured on a myriad of sites. This particular house, which is 1100 square feet and adheres to a strict $150,000 budget, "exudes more energy than it consumes, collects and recycles water, and has the ability to produce food." It also uses solar hot water, radiant floor heating, and mechanical-free natural cooling through convection in the warmer months. These measures will be enough to earn TED a LEED Platinum rating.

Quarantine Photos!

2010-03-15T18:34:00.000-04:00

Sorry this took a bit. BLDGBLOG posted photos from last week's opening at Storefront.

image by Emiliano

Go here for more.

Young architects' skyscraper visions

2010-03-15T17:41:00.006-04:00

eVolo magazine published the results of their skyscraper competition last week. The entries were overall exciting, but I would have like to seen more work besides the contemporary mantras of voronoi, reticular structures and stereotypical notions of sustainability. I found that the great majority of the projects come off as quite harsh, with incomprehensible compositions and renderings depicting what looks like the armageddon. Many of the entrants saw the interesting potential of the skyscraper to produce enough resources to be self-sustaining. Most, however, recited verbatim the textbook solutions of "green" architecture.

My two favorites:

http://www.evolo.us/competition/natwalk-2-0-walking-skyscraper/

Anton Markus Pasing's "Natwalk 2.0" (Germany)

http://www.evolo.us/competition/vertical-street-city-2/

Sergiy Prokofyev's, Arsenii Kuznetsov's, and Oleksandr Garashchenko's "Vertical Street / City" (Ukraine)

The second prize was also a great project, but I'm skeptical of their statement to create a "100 percent sustainable building." I hope to see many more competitions like this, and hopefully the organizers will provide huge cash awards to fund these efforts!

Transformation: Ungers' Galerie der Gegenwart, Hamburg

2010-03-13T09:52:00.000-05:00

Video transformation of the OM Ungers designed Kunsthalle in Hamburg. The project was done in 2009.

jargon, etc. reports from Paris!

2010-03-12T16:06:00.005-05:00

Large spaces, gigantic fields and humongous rooms are some of my favorite things. Lucky for me, France and neighboring areas of full of such gargantuan spaces. Here's a selection of what I've been to recently. I have to say the gardens of Versailles take the cake.

Paintings in the Louvre

The Louvre Museum

Brussels Arcade

Cathedral of Antwerp

Versailles

Paris Fashion Week Fall/Winter 2010-2011

Prêt-à-porter show of Gaspard Yurkievich (see collection here)

School in Chimundo by Bergen School of Architecture

2010-03-12T08:08:00.001-05:00

A very nice project, via dezeen

Landscapes of Quarantine

2010-03-08T21:55:00.005-05:00

If you are in New York today come to this amazing opening. (official Press release follows)

   On Tuesday, March 9, 2010, Landscapes of Quarantine, a group exhibition exploring the spatial implications of quarantine, will open at New York’s landmark Storefront for Art and Architecture. The exhibition consists of new works by a multi-disciplinary group of eighteen artists, designers, and architects, each of whom was inspired by one or more of the physical, biological, ethical, architectural, social, political, temporal, and even astronomical dimensions of quarantine. Curated by Nicola Twilley and Geoff Manaugh of Future Plural, the exhibition will be on view at Storefront until April 17, 2010. Entrance to the exhibition is free; the launch event on March 9 is open to the public and will showcase a one-night-only, inflatable quarantine prosthesis attached to Storefront’s façade, designed by architects Jeffrey Inaba and Joseph Grima, as well as a range of beers generously donated by Brooklyn Brewery.

   At its most basic, quarantine is a strategy of separation and containment—the creation of a hygienic boundary between two or more things, for the purpose of protecting one from exposure to the other. It is a spatial response to suspicion, threat, and uncertainty. From Chernobyl’s Zone of Exclusion and the artificial quarantine islands of the New York archipelago to camp beds set up to house HIV-positive Haitian refugees detained at Guantánamo and the modified Airstream trailer from within which Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and Michael Collins once waved at President Nixon, the landscapes of quarantine are various, mutable, and often unexpected.
   According to Nicola Twilley, the exhibition’s co-curator, “Typically, quarantine is thought of in the context of disease control. It is used to isolate people who have been exposed to a contagious virus or bacteria and, as a result, may (or may not) be carrying the infection themselves. But quarantine does not apply only to people and animals. Its boundaries can be set up for as long as needed, creating spatial separation between clean and dirty, safe and dangerous, healthy and sick, foreign and native— however those labels are defined.”
   “As a result,” adds Geoff Manaugh, co-curator, “the practice of quarantine extends far beyond questions of epidemic control and pest-containment strategies to touch on issues of urban planning, geopolitics, international trade, ethics, immigration, and more. And although the practice dates back at least to the arrival of the Black Death in medieval Venice, if not to Christ’s 40 days in the desert, quarantine has re-emerged as an issue of urgency and importance in today’s era of globalization, antibiotic resistance, emerging diseases, pandemic flu, and bio-terrorism.”
   Landscapes of Quarantine began with an eight-week independent design studio directed by Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley of Future Plural. Each Tuesday evening, from October to December 2009, a multi-disciplinary group of studio participants met to discuss the spatial implications of quarantine and develop their own creative response: the resulting work forms the core of the Landscapes of Quarantine exhibition.
   For most people, the word “quarantine” evokes fear. Artist Daniel Perlin’s installation recreates the discomfort of health screening at international borders as a kind of quarantine theater. Meanwhile, set designer Mimi Lien and graphic designer Amanda Spielman, working in collaboration with her brother, Jordan Spielman, have created works that play on the surreal banality of the quarantine experience, with (respectively) evocative, depopulated dioramas of unexpected quarantine locations, and a tongue in-cheek public health campaign filled with helpful tips on making the most of your time in quarantine.
   Any exploration of quarantine, however, inevitably touches on serious constitutional and ethical issues associated with involuntary medical isolation, as well as questions of governmental authority, regional jurisdiction, and the limits of civic responsibility. Game designer Kevin Slavin and comics artist Joe Alterio have both produced projects that investigate the challenge of shared responsibility and individual decision-making in the face of a deadly disease.
   The extraordinary engineering and logistical challenges of designing for spatial separation inspired artists Jamie Kruse and Elizabeth Ellsworth of Smudge Studio, who focus their attention on what they have termed the “limit-case” of quarantine: plans for the million-year containment of nuclear waste in geological repositories around the world.
   As a project of spatial control, the implications of quarantine ripple outward to affect the layouts of buildings, the shapes of cities, the borders of nations, and sometimes even the clothes we wear. Architects Yen Ha and Michi Yanagishita of Front Studio present an investigation of the implications of inserting quarantine spaces into the fabric of the city, raising thought-provoking questions about quarantine’s economic impact and unacknowledged discrimination. Meanwhile, architect Brian Slocum mounts a physical intervention onto Storefront’s iconic façade, in order to examine the way quarantine spaces shift and blur the border, sometimes moving it into a bubble inside a country or home, and sometimes externalizing it back to the country or place of origin.
   Other works on display include a short story exploring the fictional potential of quarantine by Pushcart Prize-winning author Scott Geiger and an analysis of the infrastructural requirements of quarantine as it applies to both orchids and the President of the United States by architect Thomas Pollman, of the NYC Office of Emergency Management. Photographer Richard Mosse traveled to Malaysia, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo as part of his filmic exploration of vampires, the limits of documentary photography, and the devastation wrought by the Nipah and Ebola viruses. Remaining
within New York City, artist Katie Holten presents field notes from her visit to North Brother Island, the final home of Typhoid Mary. Finally, architect David Garcia offers inspiration to visitors in the form of an illustrated guide to the spatial possibilities of quarantine, complete with his own proposals for a Quarantine Library and a Zoo of Infectious Species.
     Landscapes of Quarantine is free and open to the public from March 10 through April 17, 2010. It is curated by Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley of Future Plural, and designed by Glen Cummings of MTWTF. From March 1st, more information and images will be available online at www.landscapesofquarantine.com

About Future Plural
   Future Plural is an independent research lab, non-academic academy, and umbrella for creative collaboration. Founded in 2009, its activities include the production of seminars, studios, events, publications, installations, and exhibitions that investigate spatial questions and propose intriguing responses. As Future Plural, Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley co-directed the Landscapes of Quarantine studio and co-curated the Landscapes of Quarantine exhibition.
   Geoff Manaugh is the author of The BLDGBLOG Book and the founder and author of BLDGBLOG. He is also a Contributing Editor at Wired UK and former Senior Editor of Dwell magazine. His writing has appeared in Volume, Domus, Abitare, and Space & Culture, among others, and he has lectured internationally.
   Nicola Twilley is a freelance journalist and the founder and author of Edible Geography. Her writing has been published by Volume, Landscape Architecture, Dwell, and GOOD, among others. With Sarah Rich, she is the co-founder and curator of the Foodprint Project.
-bldgblog.blogspot.com
-ediblegeography.com
-foodprintproject.com

About Storefront for Art and Architecture
   Since 1982, Storefront has presented the work of more than a thousand architects and artists who challenge conventional perceptions of space – from aesthetic experiments to explorations of the conceptual, social and political forces that shape the built environment. Storefront creates an open forum to help architects and artists realize work and present it to a diverse audience in a program that includes an exhibition, film, publication, and conversation series. In 1993, Storefront commissioned a collaborative building project by artist Vito Acconci and architect Steven Holl. The project replaced the existing facade with a series of twelve panels that pivot vertically or horizontally to open the entire length of the gallery directly onto the street. The project blurs the boundary between interior and exterior and, by placing the panels in different configurations, creates a multitude of different possible facades. Now regarded as a contemporary architectural landmark, Storefront’s facade is visited by artists, architects and students from around the world.

Skins

2010-03-08T11:47:00.000-05:00

Images clockwise from top left:

Tadao Ando, Langen Foundation (Hector Guerra photograph)

Sou Fujimoto, House N (Architect's model)

SANAA, 21st Century Museum (Architect's plan)

Perkins+Will, Al-Birr Foundation HQ (Architect's rendering)

Images clockwise from top left:

James Polshek, Rose Planetarium (Alfred Gracombe photograph)

Lebbeus Woods, Wall Games (Architect's drawing)

Fort Detriot, c. 1763 (drawing artist unknown)

Alejandro de la Sota, Civil Government Building (photograph author unknown)

The Changing Shape of the Web

2010-03-02T05:00:00.002-05:00

Art by Peter Morance, from the NYT's article Striving to Map the Shape-Shifting Net by John Markoff.

The Nature Dialectic

2010-02-27T11:14:00.000-05:00

Consider the dialectical relationship between man and nature.

( image : "The Nature Dialectic" by William Grey, 2009)

"The first sign of human settlement and rest after the hunt, the battle, and wandering in the desert is today, as when the first men lost paradise, the setting up of the fireplace and the lighting of the reviving, warming, and food-preparation flame. Around the hearth the first groups assembled; around it the first alliances formed; around it the first rude religious concepts were put into the customs of a cult. Throughout all phases of society the hearth formed that sacred focus around which the whole took order and shape.
It is the first and most important, the moral element of architecture. Around it were grouped the three other elements: the roof, the enclosure, and the mound, the protecting negations or defenders of the hearth's flame against the three hostile elements of nature."

- Gottfried Semper. "The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings." Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 102-106

"It's About Seeing the World As It Can Be, Not How It Is."

2010-02-24T08:54:00.003-05:00

There are two issues which I would like to address in this post. The first is the redesigned US Embassy in London, just won by Kieran/Timberlake. Second, I want to talk about where the title of this post came from, which is the unveiling of the Bloom box. These two issues are closely related both in terms of attitude and aptitudes which lie central to current 'green' discussions and architectural developments.

First, I have to congratulate the State Department for picking a good project. Too many times these major government projects have chosen the worst architects with the least inventive options. Here we find a respected firm with a mildly daring, high potential building chosen for an important Embassy. It certainly postures itself to be a good replacement for Eero Saarinen's building.

Top: Winning Entry from Nine Elms Lane (image copyright Kieran/Timberlake)

Middle: Winning Entry Ariel View from East (image copyright Kieran/Timberlake)

Bottom: Notable Entry (image copyright Morphosis Architects)

link : losing entries : Richard Meier or Pei Cobb Freed & Partners

The K/T website lists the project as an 'architectural resolution to what an embassy aspires to be.' Time will certainly tell if this is actually true, but it is worth the effort. I am excited to see what the built solar paneled, ETFE scrims will look like. This is no doubt another step in their research on SmartWrap, but at a larger scale.

My excitement about the K/T project was drawn back because of two things. First, I hope that the design does not get severely compromised as the project gets built. Secondly, building wrapped PV seem like old news given the potential of this Bloom Box.

Watch CBS News Videos Online

What fascinates me most is the sheer optimism of Mr. Sridhar. He really sees his design as not just being suitable for the super rich but also for the super poor. This is one simple difference which I see between his work and that of K/T. While the Phila designers no doubt would like their work to reach a large audience, their client list is a wealthy one.

Any way you spin it, the Bloom will be a fun development to watch, especially as I am a huge fan of localized power sources. (Aside : Mr. Sridhar jokes about American's requiring twice as much power as Europeans and six times as much as the Chinese ...the truth in that is a bit worrisome ...) My thought is that this might entirely eliminate the problem of 'building integrated' power systems. While Kieran/Timberlake's embassy design is groundbreaking now, there is a possibility that in 20 years a single Bloom box could do the same thing as their entire facade. This would render the embassy architecture, whose principle feature is the solar ETFE to a relic. Such a thing has already happed to the large switching stations built for telephone lines. These beautiful ghosts dot major cities and are stalagmites of outdated technologies.

It is another reason why architects need to challenge ourselves not just for popular solutions, but critical ones which have potential well beyond a single application.

The advanced sustainability of Termite Architecture

2010-02-22T08:48:00.011-05:00

Today's New Scientist features a fascinating piece about termite mounds' relevance to sustainable architecture as physical interventions that achieve entirely passive means of conditioning, while also being beautiful and actively providing for the sustenance of their inhabitants. The mounds have been an oft-cited source of bio-inspired building design (see the Eastgate Center), but new knowledge suggests that much more is at work in their passive environmental controls than a simple stack effect, and that in fact their construction acts more like a giant lung for gas exchange. An excerpt from the article:

This is very different to the way ventilation works in modern human buildings. Here, fresh air is blown in through vents to flush stale air out. Turner thinks there is something to be gleaned from the termites' approach. "We could turn the whole idea of the wall on its head," he says. We should not think of walls as barriers to stop the outside getting in, but rather design them as adaptive, porous interfaces that regulate the exchange of heat and air between the inside and outside. "Instead of opening a window to let fresh air in, it would be the wall that does it, but carefully filtered and managed the way termite mounds do it," he says.

Be sure to read more here and to take a look at the links included in the article for more detailed information.

Soar, Rupert and Turner, Scott J. Beyond Biomimicry: What Termites can tell us about realizing the living building.

First International Conference on Industrialized, Intelligent Construction. May 2008.

Science and NSF Announce Winners of Visualization Challenge

2010-02-19T13:25:00.032-05:00

The U.S. National Science Foundation and journal Science have announced the winners of this year's International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge. A synopsis of the Challenge (via NSF):

Some of science's most powerful statements are not made in words. From the diagrams of DaVinci to Rosalind Franklin's x-rays, visualization of research has a long and literally illustrious history. To illustrate is to enlighten.

How many people would have heard of fractal geometry or the double helix or solar flares if they had been described solely in words? In a world where science literacy is dismayingly rare, illustrations provide the most immediate and influential connection between scientists and other citizens, and the best hope for nurturing popular interest. Indeed, they are now a necessity for public understanding of research developments.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) and Science created the International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge to celebrate that grand tradition--and to encourage its continued growth. The spirit of the competition is for communicating science, engineering and technology for education and journalistic purposes.

Images and descriptions from the winners of the "photography", "illustrations", and "non interactive multi-media" categories are displayed below in that order. For a more detailed presentation of all winners and honorable mentions for each category, make sure to check out this slide show that has been posted on Science's website.

Save Our Earth. Let's Go Green
Sung Hoon Kang, Joanna Aizenberg, and Boaz Pokroy, Harvard University

Noodlelike fibers stretch to latch onto a green sphere. Alone each fiber is powerless, but together they grip and support the orb, embodying cooperation at a microscopic scale. This electron microscope photograph catches self-assembling polymers in action, but it could also represent people's cooperative efforts to save Earth, says materials scientist Joanna Aizenberg of Harvard University. "Each hair represents a person or an organization," she says. "It shows our collaborative effort to hold up the planet and keep it running."

Aizenberg and her colleagues design self-assembling polymers in hopes of creating energy-efficient materials. They have snapped many similar photos of micrometer-scale cooperation. This image shows hairlike fibers of epoxy resin assembling around a polystyrene sphere, which is about 2 micrometers in diameter.

Branching Morphogenesis
Peter Lloyd Jones, Andrew Lucia, and Jenny E. Sabin, University of Pennsylvania's Sabin + Jones Lab Studio

Forget about staring at data on a computer screen; try walking through those statistics and touching them. With this illustration of the forces lung cells exert as they form capillaries, scientists and museumgoers can do just that. The 3.5-meter-tall, three-dimensional art installation is one of several projects by biologist Peter Lloyd Jones and architect Jenny E. Sabin of the University of Pennsylvania's Sabin + Jones LabStudio that depict large, complex data sets in new ways. "Sometimes graphing data won't tell you about its intricacies," Jones says. "This makes the whole process exciting and interactive."

The sculpture depicts five snapshots from a computer simulation of lung endothelial cells pushing against and pulling on the protein matrix that surrounds them. Using the simulation data as a template, the team connected 75,000 cable zip ties, each representing a single data point, into five 4.5-meter-wide hanging curtains for each time point. The designers built zip-tie tunnels between the curtains, so viewers could peer through them and watch how the cells' forces changed over time.

Follow the Money: Human Mobility and Effective Communities
Christian Thiemann and Daniel Grady, Northwestern University

Ever wonder where your dollar bills travel after you plop them down for a cup of coffee? The Web site Where's George? allows you to do just that: Record your bill's serial number and then track its journeys as other people spend it across the country. But it's more than just a game. Because every time a dollar is spent in a new place, it means someone moved it there. Christian Thiemann and Daniel Grady of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, have been using the Web site's data to study how people move within the United States.

They produced this video to explain their project and animate the results. Tiny bills stretch out from county to county on a map of the contiguous United States. Some places, such as Los Angeles, California, have many bills passing through it from across the nation, while others, such as Anderson County in Tennessee--Grady's home--have just a few that mainly cycle locally.

*Images and descriptions via NSF: http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/scivis/winners_2009.jsp

SANAA in Lausanne...it's finished!

2010-02-17T17:08:00.002-05:00

The building's new name, the EPFL Rolex Learning Center, lends a certain institutionalized character to everything, but...I suppose you can't build great architecture without great funding?

I have some reservations about the spaces and lighting after watching the video, but will hold my judgment until I visit the building next month. Until then, doumo arigatou gozaimashita!

Proportional Research

2010-02-17T09:33:00.002-05:00

Berlin Family Court Building - OM Ungers

I found this link containing research done by Dr Joachim Langhein. There are some great geometrical analyses both in the images and in the text. My favorites are the ones presented here, especially the work by Ungers. (If you have not read anything by him, I would recommend starting with his book The Dialectical City.)

Also worth noting is the argument he makes that traditional architecture is better because of these proportional qualities. This New Urbanist presumption that beauty is the only prerequisite for quality neglects so many other fantastic changes in the manner in which we live.

Here are some images from the section of vernacular German houses:

Pieter Bruegel the Elder

2010-02-16T17:46:00.000-05:00

A few paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525-1569).

Rooms

2010-02-11T16:24:00.000-05:00

Architectural form today is a collection of rooms. What really is the nature of a room? How did we arrive to such a constrained approach, the room? Is it privacy, procession, or activity?

Images top to bottom: SANAA's Kunstlinie in Almere (ground plan), Fatehpur Sikri (ground plan), Philippe Rahm's Pavilion at Nantes (floor plan), Office KGDVS's Museum in Motion (ground plan), Katsura Detached Palace, Miës van der Rohe's New National Gallery

Much more on the room, the labyrinth, the program and Mies coming soon...!

Super-Super Glue

2010-02-10T09:04:00.000-05:00

During architecture school, studio instructors would often advise students to study small scale models for indications of how a certain structure might perform when actually built. While undoubtedly a useful exercise, there were obvious discrepancies between such models and the intricacies of an assembled construction, especially with respect to the means by which various elements were joined together. Where the student would glue, for example, the contractor would bolt and weld.

Enter the super adhesive. Researchers from Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft have developed a heat-resistant, structurally robust adhesive for use in the Metropol Parasols project in Seville, Spain that blurs the boundaries between scale model and finished product. The adhesive, chosen in this case because mechanical joining techniques posed structural issues, is designed to maintain its stability up to a temperature of 70 degrees - 10 degrees above the highest temperature that simulation models determined the bonds could reach during the hottest of summer days. The performance of the adhesive will be ensured through a tempering process where the material is cured in place and then reheated, causing a post-curing hardening reaction to occur. Read more via Science Daily.

Construction of Metropol Parasol, Jurgen Mayer H., Seville, Spain*

Though this development is certainly exciting, I wonder about the chemistry that underlies these new adhesives. From the literature, it looks as though the Fraunhofer researchers are working on reproducing protein-based materials that are similar to the natural adhesive of a sea mollusk, but this effort is likely only in a nascent stage for such a large scale project. Meanwhile, the health risks of using synthetic urea-formaldehyde resin adhesives in architecture have been well documented, and extending their level of application to this degree could be problematic (though in this case, the exposure to the outdoor air minimizes the risk). If any readers have more information on the composition of the adhesive, we welcome your comments.

*courtesy e-architect.co.uk

Snow

2010-02-09T22:40:00.000-05:00

A man walks across the snow. You know the temperature from the sound of his footsteps. This is a different way of perceiving the environment; one in which the sensorium is undivided; one which recognizes that all information is interconnected.

-R. Murray Schafer, Voices of Tyranny, 1993

Image from the NASA Earth Observatory, February 7, 2010

*top image: Jessica Kourkounis, Associated Press, February 7, 2010 (Philadelphia, PA)

America's Cup Boats

2010-02-09T11:34:00.000-05:00

I saw this article from the front page of today's NYTimes and found it to be exciting. These technological advancements in sailing are astounding, yet the same principles apply to these ships as to the ancient Greeks. Here are images from the article and from the America's Cup site.

Pedro Armestre/Associated Press

Reuters

Guilain Grenier

BMW Oracle

Jose Delgado / Alinghi

While architects like Renzo Piano have designed boats in the past, this is certainly a field which architects could become more involved with. I am not suggesting that architects simply stop making buildings or start making boats (a mistake), nor do I believe that we should make buildings that look or even operate like boats (another mistake). What I am suggesting is that boats have an amazing sense of typology and technology. The America's Cup is an example of an industry challenging itself to create a masterful form. This form is both elegant and high performance yet uses passive means to achieve this extremely delicate balance.

NYT: "The New Age Cavemen and the City"

2010-02-07T12:58:00.000-05:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/fashion/10caveman.html

A fascinating article about reconciling a supposed primitive diet with the reality of contemporary consumption habits in cities.

"New York might seem a challenging environment for the aspiring caveman. Entire professions, oblivious to the rising and setting of the sun, toil in the glare of computer monitors. More to the point, the city has gone so far as to outlaw both hunting and gathering, at least when committed in a city park. Uprooting a plant, snatching a bird egg or trapping a squirrel in a park are misdemeanors punishable by up to 90 days of jail.

“I like New York, but it’s hard to sit in a Midtown office all day,” said Ms. McEwen, a slim brunette, who prefers the term “hunter-gatherer” to describe her lifestyle."

See an earlier post: Hunter-gathering in 2010

The Totality of the Environment

2010-02-06T15:34:00.000-05:00

How do we consider the context of architecture today? How small or large do we define our context? Is it a street, a neighborhood, a city? Is it even geographical? What if we were to consider the contexts of diet, religion or resources? Imagine those romantic landscape paintings of a beautiful European valley, or those medieval maps of an Asian city--we see an entire way of life depicted in them. A river provides water and fish, animals provide meat and hide, a church promotes community, etc. If we were to make such an illustration today, an all-encompassing environmental network, how would it look like? What would it tell us about how we live and how to imagine new ways of living?

Consider 4x3

2010-02-01T00:42:00.000-05:00

This is a set of things which have been on my mind of late. Without saying why each is entirely fascinating, I think we could all use more reading on these items. If anyone wants to know more about my views, I will respond in comments.

Some images to consider:

clockwise from top left:

Abu Simbal (architect unknown), Casa del Fascio (Giuseppe Terragni), Steiner House (Adolf Loos), The Primitive Hut (Gottfried Semper)

Some Text to Consider:

The free designing of the ground-plan. The support system carries the intermediate ceilings and rises up to the roof. The interior walls may be placed wherever required, each floor being entirely independent of the rest. There are no longer any supporting walls but only membranes of any thickness required. The result of this is absolute freedom in designing the ground plan; that is to say, free utilization of the available means, which makes it easy to offset the rather high cost of reinforced concrete construction.

- - -

A Klee painting named 'Angelus Novus' shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one picturs the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that he angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

- - -

The full or double Matthew Walker Knot. Lever in 1808 speaks of "Matthew Walker's Knot" and describes the knot which Alston in 1860 calls the "Double Matthew Walker Knot." A refinement of the original knot had in the meantime taken over the original name , which is now generally modified to "a Matthew Walker." Lever's familiar expression, "Matthew Walker's Know," suggests that he may have known the inventor, who was possibly a master rigger in one of the British naval dockyards. Many myths have grown up around Matthew Walker, "the only man ever to have a knot named for him." Dr. Frederic Lucas, of the American Museum of Natural History, once told me the following story of the Origin of the knot, which he had heard off the Chincha Islands while loading guano in 1869. A sailor, having been sentenced to death by a judge who in earlier life had been a sailor himself, was reprieved by the judge because of their common fellowship of the sea. The judge offered the sailor a full pardon if he could show him a knot that he, the judge, could neither tie nor untie. The sailor called for ten fathoms of rope and, having retired to the privacy of his cell, unlaid the rope halfway, put in a Matthew Walker Knot, and then laid up the rope again to the end. So Matthew Walker secured his pardon, and the world gained an excellent knot.

Sources from top:

1 - Le Corbusier/Pierre Jeanneret. "Five points towards a new archirecture." Almanach de l'Architecture moderne, Paris 1926.

2 - Walter Benjamin, "Thesis on the Philosophy of History." 1940

3 - Wikipedia contributors. "Matthew Walker's knot." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 16 Jul. 2009. Web. 1 Feb. 2010.

Review Part 1: An Architecture of Humors

2010-01-23T11:39:00.000-05:00

The Paris architecture office R&Sie(n) is currently exhibiting it's latest urban experiment project, "an architecture of humeurs" at Le Laboratoire. Here are a few snapshots from the opening night. It was crowded and my French skills are not the best, so I will give a detailed review after I am able to visit a second time.

Nevertheless, the project is truly stunning. The new robotic construction system has great potential. The team designed a four-legged robot which extrudes a quick setting stream of woven concrete.

Here are a few more photos, but I will leave the explanation and my critiques for next week.

Preview: An Architecture of Humors

2010-01-13T15:50:00.001-05:00

We've got a few sneak peeks of R&Sie(n)'s next computational, robotically maintained urbanism concept. With this first impression, it looks quite similar to their first urbanism proposal, "I've heard about...", but it's too early to tell for sure. I'll post a review of the exhibition in a couple weeks.

"Animist, vitalist and machinist, “mood-driven architecture” rearticulates the need to confront the unknown, an uncertain and unpredictable nature, in a contradictory manner by means of computational and mathematical assessments."

More information: http://new-territories.com/une%20architectures%20des%20humeurs.htm

Present Day Chandigarh

2010-01-11T12:33:00.000-05:00

Six decades removed from Le Corbusier's original vision for the new Punjab capital of Chandigarh, Vinayek Barne reflects on recent travels to the Indian city, where socio-political realities have challenged the masterplan's conceptual purity and rendered its infamous administrative center largely inaccessible to the public. Via Planetizen.

Image Credit: Vinayek Barne

Scenes in American Deserta

2010-01-08T17:49:00.000-05:00

There's been much talk lately about EnviroMission's plans to build two massive solar updraft towers in the desert of Arizona, at an estimated cost of $750 million per tower for 200 megawatts of production. The monumental scale of the towers (2400 feet tall) and massive expanse of their ground level greenhouses (4 square miles) have raised some questions about the project's economic viability, especially when compared to traditional power plants. Still, the Superstudio-esque images are fascinating, and I'm impressed by the thermodynamic simplicity of the idea.

The project gets even more interesting when one considers what could happen inside the greenhouses. Enviro Mission cites the goal of growing plants, but could the program be extended? What if humans could actually live in certain parts of these vast interior spaces, turning the city-scale enclosures into climatically variable utopian desert communities? For starters, I'd love to see a plan developed that better describes the micro-environments surrounding each tower. Mr. Rahm, are you available?

*Images courtesy the NYTimes and EnviroMission

How We Lived, Volume I

2010-01-07T23:38:00.000-05:00

Mission San José and San Miguel de Aguayo, near San Antonio, Texas, established 1720

The things we make represent us and describe the way we live. Just as anthropologists today study the tools, bones and garbage of previous societies, in the future inferences about us will be made from our websites, mobile device software, cars and architecture. Buildings, and specifically their internal organization, tell the story of their inhabitants day-to-day activities. In order to bring into question the cause for architecture and to provide a background to contemporary visions, we will regularly feature bygone ways of living, and their corresponding buildings. Our starting points: "Distinct Living Areas Early in Stone Age" and "An architecture of humors."

One of the four entrances into the mission.

The mission consists of a large, inhabited outer wall, an outdoor middle space, a granary, and a small religious complex consisting of a church and clergyman quarters.

The "courtyard" is the most fascinating, although it was never explicitly planned. Native american families originally lived in huts organized along streets in what became this open space. After facing increasing threats from neighboring groups, the mission built an outer wall made of stone for protection. For some unknown reason, the indians abandoned their huts and moved into two-room houses built into the wall. Perhaps the clergymen wanted to impose a more monastic lifestyle? In any case, this field soon became an important space for work, worship and recreation. The field is fascinating--shade, wind, noise and fragrance gradually change depending on one's proximity to the wall. Standing in the very middle, one hears only the crunchy grass beneath his/her feet.

The field reminds me of many OFFICE projects.

Each "house" had a front door and a few windows.

Large clay and stone ovens were built along the wall to serve the cooking needs of the adjacent families. The clergymen distributed a peck of corn, a slab of meat and some tobacco to each family every week.

One of the most elegant spaces is the granary. It is a large, long room with just a few clerestory windows. Nevertheless, on a sunny day, the space is very bright and textured. The doors are a beautiful solid wood and the thresholds in general are very prominent.

From outside, the mission is surprisingly gentle, given the massive fortress-like wall. Perhaps the courtyard trees popping up over the wall give this impression.

Reference
Handbook of Texas Online

Mauritania Mining Towns

2010-01-07T11:15:00.000-05:00

These six pictures from Google Maps depict the towns of F'Derik and Zouerate in Mauritania. These towns are situated on either side of one of the worlds largest iron mines. Each year, the towns support the mining and transport of around 17 billion raw tons of iron to the ocean via a massive train line that stretches 437 miles from Zoureate to the ocean. The towns contain incredible poverty, but have formal influences from both Magrab and French town planning. There will be more on this later.

Embassies Closed in Yemen

2010-01-04T07:51:00.000-05:00

The NY Times and other agencies have reported this morning that the US and British embassies in Yemen have been closed for an indefinite amount of time. This is yet another example of the tenuous relationship with politics that places architecture in the middle of the conflict. Destruction of an installation is a more potent gesture than the destruction of an individual and more effectively challenges the political infrastructure used to create the installation.

This is the reason that our standard embassy design for looks something of a colonial fort. It is not a symbol of openness and engagement but one of protectionism. I think that in the end, the buildings are subject to much the same conditions of the guard in Foucault's Panopticon. If so, this would explain their paranoia of form.

Chrono-Architecture

2009-12-28T09:25:00.000-05:00

In the conversations about architecture's relevance to sustainability, we often fail to recognize a crisis of the human body, forgetting that when buildings are out of sync with Nature, it is the body that suffers the most. This is especially true for the American city, where, because of Daylight Savings Time and an adherence to longer working hours, the odds are already stacked squarely against the natural circadian rhythm that has become an increasingly well understood source of the body's health and well being. Unfortunately, the prevailing environments of our urban architectures only support this imbalance, deepening its severity as a firmly entrenched cultural conceit.

The Human Circadian Rhythm typical of one who is early to rise, early to bed.*

For evidence of the body's malaise in the urban built environment, one must simply turn to the standard glass office buildings that illuminate the downtown skylines at night. The best of these structures achieve a visual transparency that belies their primary function as mechanisms of control and predictability. Their unchanging interior environments, supported through artificial injections of air conditioning and fluorescent lighting, fly in the face of nature's dynamic diurnal and seasonal shifts in temperature and light, disrupting the cyclical rhythms of day and night, hot and cold, humid and dry that our bodies are designed to rely on. Recent research has quantified the negative effects that such circadian monotony can have on a person's general well being and productivity; a widely cited 2003 study performed by the Heschong Mahone Group for the California Energy Commission, for example, finds a 21% increase in student learning rates in classrooms with ample daylighting compared to those without any daylighting source [1]. Meanwhile, our own direct experiences with artificially stagnant spaces over the course of a day, week, month, or year continue to provide the most substantial proof that these environments are unable to sustain human health and corporeal stimulation - in this matter, the immediacy of one's bodily perceptions make them the most valuable and advanced research tool available.

Andreas Gursky, May Day V, 2006*

An architecture of sustainability cannot afford to ignore the complexities of the human circadian rhythm and its relation to the interior spaces of buildings. Indeed, the failure of architects to recognize these problems of body and environment has hitherto yielded only a cursory understanding of the sustainability issue across the profession, and represents a missed opportunity to produce critical work and theory that could have enormous impacts on both the field of architecture and society in general.

In effect what we need is an anthropocentric chrono-architectecture, which offers critical alternatives to the existing status quo in "green" building and its failure to prioritize human sustenance through a wealth of dynamic environments. This architecture is not founded on the macro scales of forms, typologies, and program, but on the micro scales of human biology, physiology, endogeny, and the associated bodily processes that evolve in an environment over the course of a day and season. The human body and its circadian stimulation are rightfully placed at the fore of the architect's concerns, and fundamentally shape the way that buildings are designed to moderate a natural environment. Since the body has been shown to benefit from more exposure to Nature than less, such an approach would lead to buildings that embrace their surrounding environments through innovative passive and microclimatic conditioning strategies, thus transforming the current standard of the human interior climate.

Interestingly, it should be noted that in our most densely populated urban centers, the question of what constitutes the "natural" has been obscured by over a century of artificial modifications to the urban air by industrial pollution. This has even extended to larger weather patterns, which have been increasingly altered by the carelessness of human energy use and greenhouse gas emissions.

In the city, therefore, we are presented with a unique challenge to the aforementioned approach to sustainable design - an argument that we can no longer engage the "natural" environment with our buildings because that environment, and particularly the air of that environment, has become too tainted with pollutants to be suitable for human health. Certain designers have responded to this claim by cleverly choosing to operate within its underlying modern paradigm of control in ways that criticize the paradigm's rigidly pragmatic base. Philippe Rahm, for example, whose work has been much discussed on this blog, presents us with a kind of hyper-controlled interior space in his De-Territorialised Milieus project, which recreates the exact environmental conditions of one day in pre-industrial Paris. Similarly, in Change of Heart, Marina Nicollier utilizes specifically controlled schemes of temperature, light, and sound to elicit varying physiological and sensorial responses among medical patients, which she postulates can play a role in the healing process.

Marina Nicollier, Change of Heart: Rethinking the Prescriptive Medical Environment,

Rice University, 2008*

These projects don't offer a strict solution to the problem of designing a LEED-platinum, zero emissions, super-efficient "green" building, but perhaps that shouldn't be the end-all goal in our attempt to theorize and execute a sustainable architecture. What the projects do evidence is a keen awareness of the body as a source of our problems with sustainability and a subject of focus in advancing the issue forward. It seems that the existence of static, artificially conditioned interior environments is all but a given in the urban architecture that we inhabit daily, and it will remain so until we, as architects and as humans, bring ample attention to its inadequacies as an unsustainable affront to the human body and the natural environment.

So as we embark on a new decade, this author is hoping that we see more of chrono-architecture- an architecture, that is, of circadian rhythms, of a symbiosis between interior and exterior spaces, and of a more interesting, engaging, and healthful interior human climate.

[1] Heschong Mahone Group. "Windows and Classrooms: A Student of Student Performance and the Indoor Environment (Technical Report)," for the California Energy Commission, 2003.

* Diagram courtesy Yassine Mrabret: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/Biological_clock_human.PNG

* Image courtesy NYMag: http://nymag.com/arts/art/reviews/31785/

* Sectional diagrams courtesy Geoff Manaugh, BLDGBLOG: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bldgblog/3215462433/in/set-72157612836079402/

Extrinsic and Intrinsic Facades

2009-12-27T11:53:00.000-05:00

There are two current facade trends in architecture. I will put them into two categories, intrinsic and extrinsic.

Intrinsic facades have the quality of the modulating the architecture through formal adjustments. Double curtain walls that adjust pressure and ventilation for the spaces within because of their operable glass is a prime example of the intrinsic facade. Another example is the aperture laden walls of Jean Nouvel's Arab Institute in Paris.

The second category, extrinsic facades, is both a reinterpretation of Le Corbusier's call for a 'free facade' and a harkening to classical (and Loosian) notions of the public and the observed. These architectures separate the facade structure in ways that are not simply gravitational, but perceptual. An example of this in practice is Kazuyo Sejima's Carina Shop in Japan. She has pulled the wire mesh even farther from the structural plane of the facade than she did at the New Musuem. At that project she was limited both by the weight of the mesh but also the cost of anything more than traditional bracketing. Freed from those constrainsts by a much small project, Sejima opted for the same expanded mesh, but at a much small diameter. By reducing the weight of the facade she could hang here perceptual barrier as a disconnected object which floats beyond the store glass.

Reiser+Umemoto do the same act in their O14 tower for Dubai. Theirs is an inversion of the relationship suggested by Sejima, however the perceptual separation is the same. Rather than shield the inside condition with external scrims, they have shielded the interior condition with the structural form of the tower.

What both extrinsic projects do is create the separation of experience which an effect with the facadism of the late 19th century. During that time, projects could be built where the majority of the expense was put into crafting a balanced appearance. The downside of this was both egregious formal abuse at the street level and lower quality interior conditions and craftsmanship. Adolf Loos was radical in the proposing of inverting this relationship. By maintaining the separation of facade (public) and interior (private), Loos in his Vienna house was certainly the father of extrinsic facades.

Where intrinsic facades fail, if we consider them in Loos' terms, is there is no perceptual difference from inside to outside. The banality of corporations and the heinousness of opulence have embattled the public realm through intrinsic glass facades for the last half century. Loos and Corbusier align their theories when we realize that both valued the facade for its ability to moderate between the aesthetic traditions of the public sphere and the whims of the individual.

Intrinsic facades, reject this moderation and with their ability to be operated by the user, suggest a much more positivist world.

EXTRINSIC FACADES - 1 - 2 - 3 - 4

INTRINSIC FACADES - 1 - 2 - 3 - 4