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Better than SimCity: how architects benefit from games, ft. special guest Quilian Riano on Archinect Sessions #79

2016-09-01T18:35:00-04:00

Closing out August's special theme of Games, we're joined this week by Quilian Riano to talk through all the ways games can help architects reimagine not only their designs and design processes, but also their own role in the system and structures of city building. We discuss Quilian's recent piece for Archinect on his own work with games in pedagogy, practice and protest, and share our other experiences at the intersection of games and architecture.

Listen to episode 79 of Archinect Sessions, "Better than SimCity":

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Shownotes:

Gaming the System: role-playing spatial and political change, Quilian's piece on his work with games

Game designer Jane McGonigal's T...

Now that the Olympics have ended, what's in store for Rio's stadiums?

2016-08-23T18:05:00-04:00

Future Arena, the handball venue, will be taken apart and the pieces used to build four schools around the city, each serving 500 students. [...] the city will turn the aquatics stadium into two community swimming centers; the media center will become a high school dorm; and the 300 acres of land on which Barra Olympic Park currently sits will go be turned over for public parks and private development.

What architects (and not just parametricists) can learn from 'No Man's Sky' – an astronomical, procedurally generating video game

2016-08-19T16:45:00-04:00

Hello Games has created its own periodic table of elements for the universe of No Man’s Sky ... This allows them to generate 1.8 quintillion planets that are all different from one another and built governing the inherent logic set forth. [...] “It is no longer about designing a final object or a product, but about designing or configuring the system or the process of their formation—the underlying code, algorithm, or procedure that can generate not just one but multiple outcomes.”

Art of Intervention: One-to-One #34 with architect Abraham Burickson, founder of the immersive theater company, Odyssey Works

2016-08-16T17:06:00-04:00

In the spring of 2015, we ran a Working Out of the Box feature with Abraham Burickson, the practicing architect who founded Odyssey Works—a theater company that produces performances for an audience of one, often lasting days. Participants are extensively researched and the performances are rigorously planned, so that the whole thing unfolds before them spontaneously, as they move about the world.

To Burickson, theater and architecture are one and the same—their objective is to immerse the audience, and make them feel something. And in preparation for this month’s theme of Games, it's impossible not to see Odyssey Works' performances in the same genre of experience: game-like interventions that change the way we experience the built environment.

The following interview is our conversation from February of 2015, edited for time and clarity.

Listen to One-to-One #34 with Abraham Burickson:

iTunes: Click here to listen and subscribe to the new "Archinect Sessions One-to-One" podcast
SoundCl...

A tour of experiential magical realism games from the Triennale Game Collection

2016-08-16T13:11:00-04:00

Among the discoveries in the magical realist-flavored experiential series of smartphone games from the Triennale Game Collection is just how compelling this format is for exploring the nuances of architecture, even if that architecture pushes the limits of physics (and is often heavily layered with surreal color and effects).

"The Worm Room" by Katie Rose Pipkin. Image: Triennale Game Collection.

With visual allusions to everything from Pixar to Darren Aronofsky's "The Fountain," the games emphasize the experience (hence, "experiential") over a plot-driven, goal-oriented construct. Nonetheless, each game has its own internal logic and rules, and rewards players with different visual effects and paths the longer they explore each world.

"Neighbor" by by Jake Elliott, Tamas Kemenczy and Ben Babbitt. Image: Triennale Game Collection.

Check out this video, which takes you through a quick tour of the five iOS/Android compatible games:

Climate change will make finding a host city for the 2088 Olympics incredibly difficult

2016-08-15T17:53:00-04:00

As our planet grows warmer over our lifetimes, the number of cities that will be cool enough to reasonably host the summer games is going to rapidly dwindle. And that doesn’t just mean Atlanta or L.A. According to an analysis published in The Lancet last week...only three plausible host cities in the entire continent of North America may still be low risk by 2085 (or the summer games of 2088): San Francisco, Calgary, and Vancouver.

There may be zero in Africa or Latin America, and only two in Asia (Bishkek, in Kyrgyzstan, and Ulaanbaatar, in Mongolia).

As the article notes, the really disturbing implication of this research is less about athletics and more about day-to-day work. Half the world's population works outside, and temperatures that are too high for a marathon will be too high for laboring.

For more on the Olympics, check out these links:

Pokémon Go is forcing us to grapple with 'virtual usage' zoning

2016-08-11T13:22:00-04:00

“if augmented reality really catches on, and an internet environment overlaid on our real world surroundings becomes common, what will be the rules around using that augmented space?" [...] Could you sell, lease, or subdivide the digital rights to your own home, yard, or lobby? Could you extract a toll, tax, or commission from virtual usage?

Referencing multiple, international cases of private property disputes over the mega-popular Pokémon Go game, Geoff Manaugh floats the idea of zoning regulations for virtual and augmented reality instances.

As players wander through public and private spaces alike to catch 'em all, they inevitably trespass on certain stakeholders ideas' of what's allowed in that space—especially if the 'Trainers' are profiting financially in any way from occupying, say, a suburban front yard.

As these disputes proliferate (whether from Pokémon Go, or the next AR/VR game to takes its place in popularity), Manaugh's piece poses the following: What rights do virtual entities have to be in those spaces? What rights to property owners have to keep Snorlax from napping in their hammock?

More AR/VR on Archinect:

Come on in, the water's fine: Rio sailors say worries about water quality overblown

2016-08-09T19:04:00-04:00

Despite reports of dangerous levels of pollution in Rio's Guanabara Bay and concerns that floating garbage could damage or slow competitors' boats, sailors at the 2016 Olympics are showing little or no fear of getting into the water [...] Many said the dangers of sailing in Rio have been overblown and worried that the water concerns are overshadowing some of the most exciting and challenging sailing of their lives.

So far, the Rio Olympics seem to be going pretty well. But before they opened, a series of issues plagued the preparations. For some background, check out these links:

Hit or miss?: Oliver Wainwright reviews the designs of the Rio Olympics

2016-08-09T13:13:00-04:00

he collapsed sailing ramp has been hauled out of the water, a Russian diplomat has heroically killed a carjacker (or maybe not), and 450,000 condoms await action in the leaky athletes village. Beset by construction problems and delays and with preparations decreed the “worst ever” by the International Olympic Committee, how is the architecture and design of the XXXI Olympiad shaping up so far?

The Olympics are in full swing. Here's how to watch them. Interest in more Olympics architecture? Check out 10 notable projects from past Olympic Games here.

This month, Archinect's coverage includes a special focus on all things related to games. Check out some related articles here.

Donald Trump, usher of America's postindustrial urban blight

2016-08-05T18:10:00-04:00

Casinos like the Taj Mahal have destroyed Atlantic City’s public space. Gambling’s arrival replaced the outward-looking hotels, shops, and promenades of the mid-century boardwalk with clusters of dark, labyrinthine resorts, set back from the street and enclosed behind monitored security gates. [...] Atlantic City’s model of a plush, self-contained casino abutting a ruined neighborhood has become a synecdoche for the last forty years of American urban development.

To dissect the urban effects of Trump's Atlantic City casino, Sam Wetherall traces the city's history as a booming resort town through the early 20th century, and into its current economic crisis:

In 2014 alone, casino closures cost Atlantic City more than ten thousand jobs, a staggering figure for a city with a population under forty thousand. Atlantic City’s unemployment rate sits at almost 14 percent, and it suffers from the highest home foreclosure rates in the country.

Donald Trump may herald a radical new force in American politics, but his background illuminates trends that have been unfolding in American cities for more than fifty years. As deindustrialization hollowed out cities’ economies, many have responded by wrapping their public spaces in glittering property developments and legalizing gambling to survive.

Atlantic City provides a potent, and foreboding, example of the kind of urbanity that Trump's business agenda has wrought:

While the media has dissected the failures of...

Kids play with virtual skyscrapers in new app

2016-08-04T19:08:00-04:00

"Spark a blackout, fix a pipe, or clog the toilets. Test your building’s engineering when dinosaurs invade, lightning strikes, or the earth quakes. Find out what keeps skyscrapers standing tall and people happy in them all." So says the description of the newly launched Skyscrapers by Tinybop, a game app for kids that allows users to essentially play in and around skyscrapers, like an urban-planning minded King Kong. Players can construct their own towers and then wreck havoc (or try to maintain order) with their creations. Here are a few screenshots of the game in action:

For more on games (it's Archinect's editorial theme this month):

And here's a video:

Rio's streets clog with traffic as visitors arrive for the Olympics

2016-08-02T13:43:00-04:00

Special traffic regulations giving priority to athletes and VIP visitors to the Rio 2016 games have caused 20km (12.5 mile) traffic jams in the streets of Rio de Janeiro, days ahead of the opening ceremony. Since the new dedicated Olympic lanes opened on Monday, traffic during the morning rush hour has been reduced to a crawl with average speeds of less than 15 km per hour, according to O Globo.

Opening on Friday, the Rio Olympic Games aren't exactly going smoothly. Athletes are refusing to move into the apparently-incomplete Olympic Village. The city's favelas are "rapidly gentrifying", —displacing families, in the meantime. Workers are dying. Construction contracts for stadiums have been cancelled. And the government is in shambles.

But here at Archinect we're still going to focus on all things game-related for our special August theme, Games. Check out more relevant articles here. And submit to our open call for new versions of that classic real estate game, Monopoly, by Sunday, August 21.

Gaming the neighborhood: One-to-One #32 with Jose Sanchez, co-creator of Block'hood computer game

2016-08-01T15:35:00-04:00

Architect Jose Sanchez is the co-creator of Block'hood, a city-building computer game that runs on real city data. Under his practice, plethora-project (covering architecture and indie game development), he focuses on how play can initiate design practice.

In Block’hood, players build cities out of 80 preset block types, and are rewarded for thinking “ecologically” and creating diverse cities (check out some screen shots in the gallery below). Sanchez wanted the game to be accessible to everyone, not just urban planners or architects, and to ultimately be both a learning tool and fun in its own right. Sanchez's interview is part of our special August focus on Games.

Listen to One-to-One #32 with Jose Sanchez:

iTunes: Click here to listen and subscribe to the new "Archinect Sessions One-to-One" podcast
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Download: this episode

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Open Call for Submissions: "Games"

2016-07-28T12:25:00-04:00

Monopoly is an undeniable classic. Originating over a century ago in the U.S., in the era of Rockafellers and Carnegies, it was first known as “The Landlord’s Game”—a didactic tool protesting the power of, well, monopolies. Its current form of winner-takes-all buyouts has dominated since the 1930s, providing a place for family and friends the world over to fight tooth and nail for every last dollar and property on the board.

Monopoly’s structure is simple enough, and its sheer ubiquitousness places its ideas of property and ownership firmly within our globalized collective unconsciousness—that it is also almost entirely a game of chance is one significant vestige of its original anti-monopolist didacticism.

To architecture, Monopoly can be thought of as a frame of mind—a perspective through which to model the economic mechanisms (for good or evil) behind growth, and decline, of urban development, eventually leading to the infancy of a city. Games and simulations offer architects ferti...