Posts filed under 'Architecture'
Shaun Murray’s projects are harbingers for a meaningful ecological (both machinic and natural) audit of specific sites and the development of a series of tactics and protocols that can deliver to architects a full understanding of their sites and of the agents, provocateurs, cybernetic systems and disparate observers and drifters that influence and use them in some way.
Modern architecture has currently failed to provide architects with these now very necessary tools for them to create architectures that are fully in tune with the wide gamut of artificial and natural ecological conditions. For those of us interested in the architecture for the new cyberised, biomachined inhabitants of the twenty-first century Murray’s research and propositions are a beacon in a still dark landscape of the future.
Murray has not only helped to develop this interesting and original approach to architecture and ecology (the subject of a Phd) but he has also developed various methods of representing architecture. Like any architect which deals explicitly with the ravages of time; the choreography of sudden and not so sudden shifts in geography and geometry have to be charted. Murray has needed to generate a draughting style that facilitates and explains his ideas.
January 23rd, 2008
Stuart Munro
A New Website has been launched at Bartlett School of Architecture presenting selected members of AVATAR (the Advanced Virtual and Technological Architecture Research Laboratory). AVATAR is conceived as a cross unit research group and agenda that explores all manner of digital and visceral terrain, its augmentation and symbiosis. Over recent years AVATAR has grown into an international research collaborative centre with members including Neil Spiller, Bob Sheil, Shaun Murray, Nic Clear, Marjan Colletti & Marcos Cruz.
Spyridon Kaprinis
January 21st, 2008
Michael Wihart explored how ecologies of small machines made of nanotechnological and biotechnological elements might be able to swarm together to create architectural space and developed notions of how these spaces might reconfigure over time. Here’s some images of his work and some thoughts of his on the issues he raises.
“The decadence and redundancy of the integrity of architectural thinking needs to be constantly questioned in order to reveal if architecture can be a source for the sentimental titillation. The embarrassing meanders of architecture into the challenge of the feasibility must be extended into the poetry of spatial mediation. the process of designing can no longer be solely functional and operational. The creation of an architecture which is embedded in the mythical knowledge of the future enables us to extend the sentiment of in-habitation into the realm of co-existence.”
“Certainly this vision can be engaged to fulfil the concupiscence of a few heroic models but the question if this architecture can establish a casing of affirmative cultural emergence which is the source and site for the engagement of individuals with the fate of their co-habitants, is a different one. Architecture therefore stands for the manifestation of the ambivalence of the transience and the after-effect of the notion of co-existence. But when architects by themselves abandon and forget to realise fantasies which have always already been lost in the dawn of the socialisation, where then will we find the sites for the staging of our sentiments?”
January 18th, 2008
Without question, my favorite blog. Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG is talking at the Bartlett this coming wednesday. It is open and free to the public. Arrive early to avoid disappointment.
6.30pm Wednesday 23 January 2008
Darwin Lecture Theatre, UCL
Gower Street
London WC1
Map
January 17th, 2008
Marcos Cruz is a practising architect who lives and works in London. He is a co-founder of marcosandmarjan, as well as a Lecturer at the Bartlett UCL (Unit 20). His individual research is dedicated to a future vision of the body in architecture, questioning the contemporary relationship between the human flesh and the architectural flesh. In a time when a pervasive discourse about the impact of digital technologies risks turning the architectural ‘skin’ ever more disembodied, his aim is to put forward the notion of a Thick Embodied Flesh by exploring architectural interfaces that are truly inhabitable.
Conceptually his work delves into the arena of disgust on which the notion of an aesthetic flesh is standing, and it explores new types of ‘neoplasmatic’ conditions in which the future possibility of a neo-biological flesh lies. He proposes Synthetic Neoplasms as new semi-living entities that are identified as partly designed object and partly living material, in which the line between the natural and the artificial is progressively blurred. Hybrid technologies and interdisciplinary work methodologies are required, leading to a revision of our current architectural practice. In his research Marcos Cruz proposes Flesh as a concept that extends the meaning of skin as one of architecture’s most contemporary metaphors.
He recently was awarded his doctorate at the Bartlett for a series of investigations into flesh. Here’s a synopsis of the projects
and here’s an interesting conversation i found between Marcos and his Partner Marjan Colletti on Inhabitation of the Body and Toys
January 17th, 2008
Architects ‘The Living‘ did a great presentation on their design approach to rapid low cost prototyping of interactive environments and construction techniques last year at the ‘Interactive Architecture & Media’ symposium I organised at Eyebeam last February. They’re currently having an exhibition at the Van Alen Institute gallery in New York running till January 18th, so if your in the area I recommend having a look. Below is a synopsis on their research. Using three parallel tracks of research they are exploring three definitions of the Living City.
Video Introduction to Living City
1. The living city - a platform for the future when buildings talk to one another
“
“In the future, buildings will talk to one another. In the era of ubiquitous computing—as sensors disappear into the woodwork and all kinds of data is transferred instantly and wirelessly—buildings will communicate information about their local conditions to a network of other buildings. Architecture will come to life. Living City is an ecology of facades where individual buildings collect data, share it with others in their social network, and respond to the collective body of knowledge.”
2. An exploration of the vitality of the city through new forms of public space—air and facade
“In the future, public space in the city will be everywhere. Air will be public space. Building facades will be public space. Both will belong equally to everyone in the city, no less valuable than the traditional fixed public space of parks and streets. At the intersection of air and facade, public space will be distributed and dynamic. Architecture will come to life. Living City is a definition of air as public space and building facades as public space.”
3. A prototype facade that breathes in response to air quality
In the future, walls will breathe. Construction materials and systems that have been inert for thousands of years will respond in real time to the dynamic conditions of their surroundings and to a larger network of data. Buildings will host public interfaces to air quality and make visible the invisible conditions of the environment. Architecture will come to life. Living City is a full-scale building skin designed to open and close its gills in response to air quality.”
January 14th, 2008
Next Posts
Previous Posts
