Usman Haque - Open Source Architecture

Our constructed environment, with its direct impact on people every day and its constant transformation through use and reuse, is a collectively designed project. It incorporates vastly different and sometimes conflicting logics. The issues arising from people’s differing perspectives and approaches will have significant consequences on the way architecture in general evolves in the twenty-first century. Computer terminology has borrowed much from the discipline of architecture; here, we borrow back some analogies
from the computer world to suggest ways that architectural evolution could occur.

Traditionally, architecture has been thought of as hardware: the static walls, roofs and floors that enclose us. An alternative approach is to think of architecture as software: the dynamic and ephemeral sounds, smells, temperatures even radio waves that surround us. One might also consider the social infrastructures that underpin our designed spaces. Pushing this analogy even further, we can think of architecture as a whole as an “operating system”, within which people create their own programmes for spatial interaction……..

Interesting paper about the Ideas of Open Source Architecture Read Here

Add comment August 1st, 2005

Sky Ear, Usman Haque

Sky Ear is a collection of hundreds of helium filled balloons with mobile phone technology, electromagnetic sensors and colored lights that are activated by the sensors. by calling the phones attached to the balloons the electromagnetic fields created activate the lights creating interactive performances. The Balloons diffuses the light giving the lights a glowing aesthetic. A new space ‘Hertzian Space’ as Haque calls it becomes percievable.

Sky Ear September 15, 2004 at Greenwich Park.

Usman Haque Sky Ear Project

“As people using phones at ground-level call into the cloud (flying up to 100m above them) they are able to listen to distant natural electromagnetic sounds of the sky (including whistlers and spherics). Their mobile phone calls change the local hertzian topography; these disturbances in the electromagnetic fields inside the cloud alter the glow patterns of that part of the balloon cloud. Feedback within the sensor network creates ripples of light reminiscent of rumbling thunder and flashes of lightning.”

1 comment May 6th, 2005