Archinect - News

A giant robotic spider climbed around a cathedral in Ottawa, and local Catholics called it "demonic"

2017-08-07T14:59:00-04:00

But as Canadian Catholic News reported, some individuals were far from impressed with the 65-foot-long spider, which rises 18 feet when at rest and over 42 feet when in motion. Critics expressed their outrage on the archbishop Terrence Prendergast’s Facebook wall, with one woman reportedly describing Kumo as “disturbing, disappointing, and even shameful.” Others apparently referred to it as “demonic” and “sacrilegious.”

Canada celebrated its 150th anniversary over the weekend of July 27th. Part of the celebration featured giant robots put on by La Machine, a street theatre company that constructs unusual objects for performances in public spaces. The company built two robots, a mechanical dragon-horse hybrid and a giant mechanical spider, that spent the celebratory weekend walking around Ottawa and engaging in dramatic battles.

Found via La Machine's facebook.

As part of the performance, La Machine installed the spider on the top of Notre-Dame Cathedral Basilica. The Cathedral, led by archbishop Terrence Prendergast, had agreed to feature Kumo, the mechanical spider, when approached by the theatre company, seeing it as a way to cooperate with the city and be a part of the celebration. The Cathedral also sits opposite the National Art Gallery and the famous Louise Bourgeois bronze arachnid, "Maman," making it the perfect location to feature La Machine's very own arachnid.

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Princely pests: new study reveals wealthier homes tend to host more insect species

2016-08-04T13:58:00-04:00

When it comes to cleanliness, common sense suggest wealthier homes are at an advantage. Live-in maids and cleaning services should, ostensibly, help create antiseptic, exclusively human enclosures. Yet new research shows there’s a correlation between socioeconomics and the presence of bugs in the home: more affluent neighborhoods host a greater number of species than lower-income areas.

If you think about it, it makes a lot of sense: more green space means more plants that harbor insects. In fact, socioeconomics impacts diversity across the board, with higher affluence associated with more birds, bats, reptiles, etc.

Humans don’t live aside “nature”, but are an integral and influential force in ecology. Despite all our pesticides and cleaning products, our homes are entangled in a mesh of bacteria, fungi, plants, insects, and animals. According to the study, the average home hosts about 100 species of arthropods, ie. insects and spiders

"Our houses are really permeable and dynamic,” s...

Cutting across the Chicago Architecture Biennial: Tomás Saraceno's spiders

2015-10-07T13:10:00-04:00

For the first few seconds you’re blind in the darkness. Then a reflex forces your pupils wider and your photoreceptor rod cells become more sensitive, sending a neural signal that alerts you to four glowing cubes that seem to be floating in mid-air in front of your body. It takes another few seconds for the glow to connect to its source, illuminate the supports of the plexiglass boxes, and finally render their content legible: a series of startlingly-complex and impossibly-delicate spiderwebs.

Here drawing back the curtain doesn’t destroy the magic. Quite to the contrary, Tomás Saraceno’s collaboration with various arachnids for the first Chicago Architecture Biennial has a power that extends beyond some mere trick of the light and runs deeper than a one-liner about non-human construction. It's a reprise of a project he's exhibited before, notably at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, but within an architectural context it conjures a particular significance.

The Argentine-born, Berlin-based Sara...