Archive for July, 2009
A project that caught my eye a while ago is ‘Living Light’ by The Living, architects in New York. It is a permanent public pavilion in Seoul that visualises air quality data from the city. Although according to their website it hasn’t been completed yet, images are starting to appear.
The lines represent neighborhoods so, broadly speaking, you can spot which areas of the city currently have pollution issues. You are also able to communicate with the structure via text message to receive more in depth information about the air quality. More lights illuminate when it communicates in this way, as a visual gauge of public interest.
As Ruairi noted early last year, The Living always have a few research projects on the go, what they call ‘flash research’. With a budget of less than $1k, a project duration of less than three months, and the idea of finishing up with a full scale prototype, its a simple recipe for producing interesting projects.
As a newbie to the world of architecture I find it amazing that a short timeframe and a small budget can allow such developments in that realm. We often find it hard enough in digital media to accomplish these things to any major degree of success without needing to consider architecture’s expensive and challenging areas like construction materials.
The following images are of River Glow, another R&D project of theirs. They will be exhibiting a similar project in New York starting September 2009.
“Two networks of floating interactive tubes will house a range of sensors below water that will monitor the presence of fish, water quality, and hydrodynamic forces. This data will then be displayed above water using an array of LED lights, along with wireless sensor communication and a text-messaging interface so that citizens can communicate with it from the shoreline.” See Situated Technologies: Toward the Sentient City.
Article on The Living. Images from The Living.
July 13th, 2009
“How do you make things?
You could lay out the process as a line. You start at one end with a bundle of goals and plans. As you work hard—designing, writing, rehearsing, or doing whatever else is required—you progress along the line. At some point, you get to the end, with a product, a novel, a performance. You’re finished!
You could lay out the process that way. But you’d be doing it wrong.”
These words are taken from a chapter entitled ‘Iteration’, from New Liberal Arts. If you want to read the rest, you can download a free digital copy of the book here. I’d recommend you do. I have only read a small part of the book myself (so far), but it’s free, it’s thought provoking, and it’s concise (three qualities I love in a book).
In fact, one of the proposed courses is on brevity.
If you want to own a hardcopy, too bad. There were only 200 and they sold out in 8 hours.
July 9th, 2009
Declan Shaw’s of Interactive Installation, Bird Soundscapes incorporate a dynamic three dimensional acoustic environment of birdsong which perform accelerated diurnal cycles. Individual ‘birds’ occupy positions in space, which move about in birdlike patterns and also reacting to the movement of the inhabitants. This is accompanied by a coloured light cycle which denotes the times of day.
In this manner the listener may hear an accumulating dawn chorus of bird personalities while her environment is filled with an intensifying morning blue light. She may go on the hear crows and blackbirds interacting in a red evening dusk. Shaws work was developed within the Bartlett School of Architectures Anechoic Chamber hence the menacing image of the spikey walls but the intention is that the constructed environment would be placed within an existing negative waiting space, such as a hospital ward or waiting room, with a view to encouraging positive waiting behaviour in its occupants.
As well as the installation Declan produced a series of college images depicting this changing acoustic environments intended effects in the hospital patients experience of these spaces.
Declan describes how “the context of this project is the construction of a space for waiting and for exploiting the possibilities of waiting. While drawing distinctions between waiting situations as pleasure/play and waiting as punishment/pain, I fixed on the notion of reverie as a crucial condition for the encouragement of the positive possibilities of waiting, which include: rest, renewal, inspired creativity and a sense of satisfaction and wellbeing.” Declans doesn’t have a website but his work and work of many other students from Unit 14 at the Bartlett can be found here
July 3rd, 2009
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