From Archinect

by Emily Kemper

“The simple act of registering for May’s GRAVITY FREE conference in Chicago was a thrill: “Register early,” we were told, “and you’ll get access to everything the conference offers PLUS e-books from the speakers!” GRAVITY FREE bills itself as a multidisciplinary design innovation conference that breaks the mold of traditional design conferences, and with a list of presenters that included Karim Rashid, Theo Jansen, Stefan Sagmeister, Massimo Vignelli, and Michelle Kaufman, it was easy to get excited. After all, GRAVITY FREE, with its capital letters and rock-star theme - “The Year of Dangerous Minds” - promised inspiration, and if it didn’t deliver, you could ask for your money back.

I attended the conference on May 12 armed with a press pass from Archinect.com and sponsorship from the USC Stevens Institute for Innovation, both a source of inspiration in my own life. I entered the halls of the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago as the perennial observer; eyes open, mouth shut, with few expectations but great anticipation. GRAVITY FREE promised a shared experience; everyone would attend the same presentations, participate in the same Q&A sessions, and have the same chances for round-table discussions at the end of the day. I emerged three days later with a head full of ideas, a great sense of potential - and a blog full of anecdotes and observations. More than anything else, however, I gained from GRAVITY FREE a greater understanding of how innovation is propelling design into the future by turning towards technology, as well as returning to basics.

Take Arturo Vittori, for example. He’s shooting for the moon, literally. MoonBaseTwo, designed with his partner Andreas Vogler through their company Architecture and Vision, is a habitat meant for lunar living that looks suspiciously like an igloo. In fact, both structures are based upon the idea that a spherically-shaped outer shell provides the maximum exposure to the sun, and therefore provides the most warmth. Bob Gruen, a legendary rock n’ roll photographer, might be described in the context of the conference as a “designer of visual culture” since his medium of film so expressively described the historical context in which rock culture emerged. Ryan Genz and Francesca Rosella are taking the most cutting edge technology and placing it in the most obvious and most tactile place - our clothing. Deborah Adler simplified a prescription labeling system for her master’s thesis in graphic design - and in doing so, she revolutionized the entire industry.

The round-table sessions at the end of each day provided a unique opportunity to interact with the speakers we had just seen. Unfortunately, I have not yet developed the ability to appear in 13 places at once, but for my first session, I was lucky enough to find space at Janne Kyttänen’s table. Even designers familiar with advanced techniques in 3D printing would be amazed by the objects that Kyttänen and his firm, Freedom of Creation, produces. These objects include a 3D model of a “shoe city” inspired by Tokyo, and a satchel made of chain mail (below), both products of a still-tedious process of 3D printing that “prints” special powder with a laser at the rate of about a 1/2 inch per hour.

Freedom of Creation: “Electric Light Shoe” for Onitsuka Tiger
image courtesy of hypebeast.com
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Freedom of Creation: “V-bag” shoulder bag
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Most of us at Kyttänen’s table were interested in the way he goes about designing these objects, which, he told us, account for 60 percent of his firm’s profit. Remarkably, he explained that he doesn’t do hand sketching anymore either; the computer is his medium, and he uses it with the ease of a pencil and sketchpad. Intrigued about his manufacturing partners, I asked if he would ever be interested in maintaining his own manufacturing facility, a practice that Michelle Kaufman had embraced for her pre-fab housing and described the day before. “I highly doubt I would ever get into that business,” Kyttänen said. “If you have a company doing your productions, they can make a mistake, and if you hire some guy to do production in-house at your company, he can make a mistake … so it’s just a matter of contracts, how you’re going to put it on paper. How do you define the quality of a product … I think the point is they are doing our manufacturing much better than I would…..and to be honest, what we’re doing is really on the borderline. The profits are still very very small, you have a lot of products, very expensive, so it’s quite a risky business.” He said that rather than get into the manufacturing business, “I would just want to go into the creation of big libraries of 3D models” so that people with their own 3D models could print out whatever they wanted. This approach to planning for the future of his design practice shows that Kyttänen is adept at using technology to innovate.

While Janne Kyttänen uses high-tech 3D printer powder to produce his fantastic creations, Bryan Berg’s building blocks are famous for their simplicity: he uses playing cards, and lots of them. He is most famous for building large card houses and holds the Guinness World Record for World’s Largest House of Cards. However, as I found out at Berg’s own round-table session the next day, his interests lie in buildings much more practical than card houses. He is an architect by training, having received his Master’s Degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and currently he works as a consultant on projects in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His work with playing cards has led him to develop a structurally rational approach to his architectural designs. “I’m really big into things looking the way they are built,” he said. “That’s probably what I like about cards, is that it’s very real in terms of what you see is really what’s happening … there’s not a way to clad card buildings.”

Bryan Berg at work
image courtesy of wikimedia.org
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Berg discovered just how rigid playing cards can be when he took them into a structural testing lab. After setting up a load distribution cone with plywood and placing the cards in a waffle configuration, his load tests revealed that this construction could withstand over 600 pounds of pressure. With this in mind, “you could create larger dwellings very easily,” says Berg. In fact, he directed the framing of two buildings in a day using a scaled translation of this waffle construction in modules, and he offered that “you could build an entire town of houses out of this method in weeks.” You could even build vertically, he proposed: “With a large amount of plywood, you could actually build buildings incredibly tall … I’d have to do some thinking about what the direct translation would be, but I think it would be very doable.” With these concepts, Berg proves that innovation doesn’t have to be high-tech to be effective.

Looking back on GRAVITY FREE, I’m impressed with the breadth of designers who presented at the conference. All of the attendees were truly exposed to a broad spectrum of ideas, and, as promised, the access to the speakers was unparalleled. But I wonder if the myriad of designers at the conference realize the significance of the ideas we witnessed there; I wonder if these “dangerous minds”, who are using simple ideas to advance new technology, grasp that their innovations are laying the groundwork for a new generation of designers to propel the world into the design future that we’ve always imagined. GRAVITY FREE may not set out to raise these questions, but for the time being, it’s a great place to find people to have a conversation about them.” Archinect

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From New York Times

The architect Renzo Piano said on Thursday that he supported plans by officials of The New York Times to alter the facade of the newspaper’s year-old tower, which he designed, to prevent people from scaling the veil of ceramic rods that sheathe the tower, as three men have done in the past five weeks.
Mr. Piano, who designed the 52-story tower in Midtown Manhattan, said he was “totally in agreement” about the need for the adjustments, which include removing the rods closest to the base of the building and installing permanent glass panels to hinder people from climbing onto the glass canopies around the building and then onto the rods.

The final scope of the alterations has not yet been determined, Mr. Piano said in a telephone interview from Sicily, where he was on vacation, but the changes will probably occur over the next few weeks.

On Wednesday morning, a Connecticut man, David Malone, 29, climbed about 11 stories and hung a banner from the Eighth Avenue side of the building, which faces the Port Authority Bus Terminal. He used the rods like a ladder, as two earlier climbers — a French stuntman, Alain Robert, and a Brooklyn man, Renaldo Clarke — did on June 5.
Hours after Mr. Malone’s climb, workers began to remove a few rods, but officials at The Times have declined to comment on that or on any other changes to the building.

“I’m frankly quite worried about this new fashion of going up on buildings,” Mr. Piano said in the interview. “This is what I call an inappropriate use of the building.”

Mr. Piano said of the tower: “It was built to be responsive to design after 9/11. The big challenge was to make a building that is not like a fortress, but that is transparent, and open to the city.” He added, “This problem of climbers is honestly something we didn’t think about.”

Mr. Piano said that his architectural firm, Renzo Piano Building Workshop, began meeting with Times officials immediately after the building was scaled on June 5.

In a separate phone interview, Bernard Plattner, a partner at the firm, which is based in Paris, said he had taken part in several conference calls with Michael Golden, vice chairman of The New York Times Company, and David A. Thurm, a senior vice president of The Times.

“We have to give a very strong sign to the police that there is something effectively happening to prevent fanatics from climbing the building,” Mr. Plattner said.
The main idea under discussion — shortening the veil of rods by what Mr. Piano called “six or seven feet” from where they begin — would deter most would-be climbers and “fundamentally doesn’t alter this building,” he said.

On the northern and southern sides of the building, he added, little glass panels would be put in place — similar to plywood barriers temporarily installed after the previous stunts — to prevent people from climbing onto the canopies.

Mr. Piano said that he was looking forward to other, more important changes in the building: the completion of retail spaces on the tower’s ground floor (where Muji, a Japanese clothing and housewares store, has opened a shop) and the opening of a roof garden.” New York Times

Popularity: 5% [?]

Lost and Found
from BLDGBLOG

Is a cave in Jordan the world’s oldest Christian church? “The cave is beneath the ancient church of St Georgeous, itself one of the oldest known places of worship in the world,” the BBC reports. “According to Dr. Abdul Qader Al-Hassan, the director of the Rihab Centre for Archaeological Studies, the cave site shows clear evidence of early Christian rituals that predate the church.” This subterranean place of worship has been tentatively dated at 70 A.D. [...] Read

Popularity: 2% [?]

Harvard Design Magazine

Recombinant Urbanism: Conceptual Modeling in Architecture, Urban Design and City Theory by David Graham Shane, who teaches urban design at Columbia University, is a book of wide-ranging erudition. Anyone who was delinquent in not reading the proliferating literature about “architecture culture” can, with this book, catch up on that portion focused on the history and theory of city design. There is a particularly strong analysis of Kevin Lynch (more than 100 index entries), showing his many moral and political commitments and the multifaceted character of his work — ranging from something approaching a spiritual vision of cities and nature to close empirical studies, particularly those on which his classic book, (1960), was based. Too often, however, we get litanies of urban facts or thumbnail presentations of theories that clutter pages without illuminating the issue or driving the argument. Those moments when Shane speaks in his own voice are marked by compelling explication that, unfortunately, is not evident throughout. Read the full story

Popularity: 9% [?]

This article was written a very while go, specifically in July 2004 by BLDGBLOG editor Geoff Manaugh, but i would like to share it with you again on Architecture Lab. (some photos are from Archibase.net)

[Image: Gunkanjima Island (via)].

“Off the westernmost coast of Japan, is an island called ‘Gunkanjima’ that is hardly known even to the Japanese. Long ago, the island was nothing more than a small reef. Then in 1810, [with] the chance discovery of coal … people came to live here, and through coal mining the reef started to expand continuously. Befor [sic] long, the reef had grown into an artificial island of one kilometer (three quarters of a mile) in perimeter, with a population of 5300. Looming above the ocean, it appeared a concrete labyrinth of many-storied apartment houses and mining structures built closely together.

Seen from the ocean, the silhouette of the island closely resembled a battleship – so, the island came to be called Gunkanjima, or Battleship Island.”

[Image: Gunkanjima Island (via)].

The idea of an entirely manmade island seems to lie somewhere between James Bond and Greek mythology. I’ve always wanted to write a short story about a mineral-rich island where a man similar to Conrad’s Kurtz sets up a mining operation; in mining the mineral wealth of his new little island, the architecture and structural engineering – the gantries, vaults, platforms, roads, etc. – come to be built from the island itself. Eventually the island entirely disappears beneath the waterline, mined down to nothing – and yet a small stilt-city of mining platforms, engineering decks, control rooms, and cantilevered walkways still exists there, built from the island it all now replaces.
In The Scar by China Miéville, there’s a floating city made from tightly lashed-together hulls of ships, built so densely that, for those deep within it, it appears simply to be a particularly over-built – albeit floating – island. The rudders and keels of old boats cut through the water at angles contrary to the direction that the ship-island floats in, and thousands of anchors secure the city in place when it needs to find harbor.
What seems to be missing, at least to my experience, from architectural history & design courses are things like – drum roll – offshore mining derricks. Once again, it seems the wrong people are teaching our design labs: instead of more M.Arch grads who’ve read too much – or not enough – Deleuze, we need to bring in junior executives from BP or Halliburton, geologists and NASA engineers, and put them into dialogue with Situationism – and, why not, with China Miéville. Science fiction writers. Get ideas out of the one side, practical engineering science out of the other, and shebang…
What could that produce…? is a legitimate question. A terrible example, but still marginally interesting I think, would be something like the Burning Man festival, thrown not in the desert but in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. A joint-venture between BP, Halliburton, and Peter Cook of Archigram. And the Mars Homestead Project. Seaborne utopias. Platform cities. Perhaps Atlantis was built by a battalion of rogue Roman engineers lost to history.

It’s not Damien Hirst, Daniel Libeskind, Matthew Barney, or Norman Foster we should be watching, neither artistically nor architecturally, I mean; it’s the Chief Operating Officers of offshore oil-services firms. The architectural patrons of today are not avant-garde, middle class Connecticut home-owners but logistical managers in the US Department of Energy. New building types are not being discovered or invented in the design labs of American architectural offices, but in the flowcharts and budgetary projection worksheets of multinational petrochemical firms.
Fuck Spiral Jetty – we need a platform city built above the mid-Atlantic rift, an uninhabited, reinforced concrete archipelago ideal for untrained astronomical observation. The Reef Foundation – you win their residency grant and get to spend six months alone staring at the sun on a perfectly calibrated Quikrete lily pad.
We need the wastrel sons of hedge fund billionaires out there patronizing manmade archipelagos in the South China Sea. We need more Gunkanjima Islands.” BLDGBLOG

Popularity: 8% [?]

Wired

Death Chamber: Angola, Louisiana State Penitentiary (largest prison in the United States), 2005
A new book by photographer Richard Ross: Architecture of Authority, examines the way institutional buildings exert power over people. Ross managed to gain impressive access to all kinds of secretive or high-security buildings, from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, to the supermax high-security Pelican Bay prison in California. Ross credits his unprecedented access to a combination of persistence and sincere curiosity. “Many of these people want to show you these places once they know that you’re interested in their world,” he says.

To question the pervasiveness of intimidating, “disgusting” architecture, the images in Ross’ book are both striking and inviting. Ross intentionally makes the photos of oppressive structures look seductive. “You can convince people a lot easier by whispering in their ear rather than hitting them over the head,” says Ross.
Read the full story

Popularity: 15% [?]

- Via WIRED

Photo Seth Anderson
Illustration: Rob Beschizza

“With the space age entering its crassly commercial phase and science fiction dominated by gritty dystopian visions, you could be forgiven for giving up on the future. But not everyone has. With Dubai’s 800-meter-tall Burj Dubai skyscraper almost complete, starry-eyed visions of tomorrow’s cities are more popular than they’ve been in 50 years.

Here’s a collection of promised skylines we never got to see — and a few that may yet come to be — as seen from the imagined eyes of those who live there. Read the full story

Popularity: 16% [?]

- Via BLDGBLOG

[Image: The self-weaving complexity of I-95 and I-695, north of Baltimore].

” For a variety of reasons, it seems worthwhile to do a kind of combined recap of my recent talks for the AIA in Baltimore and at the University of Pennsylvania. If you were present at either one of those events, then this should hopefully serve as a nice trip down memory lane; if you weren’t there, this should give at least some idea of the topics covered, themes discussed, images seen, and so on. Of course, if this sounds even remotely interesting, I’d be more than happy to give a similar talk at a venue near you… I’ve been having a blast doing these things.
In any case, I was in Baltimore two weeks ago on a joint invitation from the AIA and Preservation Maryland, to discuss architectural preservation, broadly conceived, with at least some relation to Baltimore proper.
So I began my lecture with a story from the science journals back in fall 2005. It turns out, we learned, that a specific highway junction north of Baltimore – where I-95 and I-695 meet – is topologically unique, exhibiting something called “non-trivial braiding.” However, because of that structure’s inefficiency as a traffic conveyor, the merging on- and off-ramps were going to be rebuilt, reconnected, and otherwise altered beyond mathematical recognition.
Its topology, in other words, would be ruined. …” Read the rest of the article on BLDGBLOG

Popularity: 2% [?]

- Via BLDGBLOG

” A few years ago I audited a course about Archigram at the University of Pennsylvania, just something to do on a Wednesday morning before I went to work – but one of the things that indirectly came out of that experience was BLDGBLOG. It’s interesting to note, then, that one of the other people in that class now writes Brand Avenue; another’s work was featured here on BLDGBLOG last year; and, this morning, another course attendee emailed to point out a proposal that he’s helped assemble and conceptualize, about hydrogen-powered urban design in Iceland. …” Read the rest of the article

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- Via Metropolis

Dubai’s insane rate of development is easy to misinterpret—even caricature—but the cliché obscures the city’s more serious ambitions.

” Fifty years from now, New York will be considered the economic and cultural capital of the previous century, fille­d with quaint artifacts of another time and places to visit for the sake of nostalgia, but not the center of world culture—­somewhat like how we think of Paris today compared to 100 years ago. Federal immigration restrictions, the religious police, and the protection of large corporations from foreign competition will have cut off our biggest sources of wealth—invention and innovation—and historic preservation will have saved the unique character of neigh­borhoods and conserved innumerable buildings but killed the spirit that made the city the greatest of its time.

Read the full story

Popularity: 4% [?]