My thinking about complexity and the dangers it poses for us has been evolving fast lately and I am convinced that this is some of the most important work I've ever done. The message is simple, but the implications are profound. To say "hope you enjoy" would not accurately describe my feelings. Let's try "hope you are moved to action, dialogue, or further reflection" instead. — Kazys Varnelis
A video in three parts presenting three speculative design proposals, each probing a pathological aspect of the built environment. — johnszot.com
The best way to harness a city's potential for creativity and innovation is to jack people into the network and get out of the way — scientificamerican.com
... according to a person familiar with the plans who is bound by a nondisclosure agreement, Apple has already begun work on such a store in Santa Monica. Like the Peter Bohlin-designed Apple Store on New York's Upper West Side, it will have a tall, striking glass storefront... — cnn.com
The Santa Monica store episode also illustrates Apple's unusually covert way of doing business. Interviews with almost two dozen people familiar with Apple Store negotiations say the Cupertino, California, company sometimes employs uncommon legal tactics, refuses to name itself in public... View full entry
As we approach the end of 2011, more and more attention will be applied towards answering the profound question: why is this year different than any other year (or why was it the same)? To facilitate this scrutiny, I've called upon Architecture Research Office (ARO) and Gustafson Guthrie Nichol (GGN), the recently announced Architecture Design and Landscape Architecture winners, respectively, of Cooper Hewitt's National Design Awards. — huffingtonpost.com
The source of the disconnect between San Francisco's transit-first heart and its car-centric hand is an arcane engineering measure called "level of service," or LOS. In brief, LOS suggests that whenever the city wants to change some element of a street — say by adding a bike lane or even just painting a crosswalk — it should calculate the effect that change will have on car traffic. — Eric Jaffe
Changing a city from being car-centric isn't just a matter of building better bike lanes and drawing up better bus routes. Sometimes, developers have to go up against restrictions which won't let them build at all if it interrupts too much car traffic. View full entry
Nona Yehia and Jefferson Ellinger established the architectural firm, Ellinger/Yehia Design LLC in 2003 to investigate links between architecture, landscape and technology. In 2004, the firm opened an office in Jackson Hole, Wyoming to further explore these inter-relationships. Architects... View full entry
Technologies, such as building information modeling and integrated-product delivery, have enabled architecture firms to design better buildings and deliver them more quickly and more efficiently. Yet in today's fiercely competitive global marketplace, efficiency and speed alone are not enough to guarantee market viability. The real differentiator is design—as an engine of innovation and a productive force for creating economic value. — Michael Speaks, archrecord.construction.com
Architect, engineer, and director of the SENSEable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Carlo Ratti will focus on (you guessed it) the Senseable City—merging the digital and the physical realms by understanding how we sense and act on our built environment, and how the latter then responds to us. — blog.bmwguggenheimlab.org
Finally, toasteroven has recently "got word from a couple local arch programs that enrollment has dropped this past year" and asks if anyone else has heard the same? To which jordans99 replies "Based on what I've heard, I expect that applications will be stagnant if not decrease.
In the latest installment of Archinect’s Contours feature EDD DE 1101 I, Guy Horton cops a David Wallace and his writing takes a biographically satiric turn from recent Contours. "Hello! Author here. Just interjecting at the onset of this article to make it clear that, yes, I am... View full entry
Semi-autonomous flying robots programmed by Swiss architects Gramazio & Kohler "will lift, transport and assemble 1500 polystyrene foam bricks" next month—starting 2 December 2011—at the FRAC Center in France. The result, they hope, will be a "3.5 meter wide structure." — bldgblog.blogspot.com
Yaohua Wang, of Los Angeles firm Yaohua Wang Architecture, has sent us visualizations of proposed Nanjing Lab, a vegetation laboratory in Nanjing, China. The project was comissioned by the Nanjing Xiaguan district goverment and is currently within the schematic design phase. — bustler.net
USC Professors Behrokh Khoshnevis (Engineering), Anders Carlson (Architecture), Neil Leach (Architecture) and Madhu Thangavelu (Astronautics) have completed their first visualization for their NASA research grant into the potential use of Contour Crafting robotic fabrication technology to build structures on the Moon. [...] Contour Crafting was recently voted one of the top 15 innovations most likely to change the World. The question now being addressed is how it will change the Moon. — parasite.usc.edu
For more information on Contour Crafting, visit contourcrafting.org. View full entry
Dynamic Performance of Nature is a permanent architectural media installation in the Leonardo Museum of Art, Science and Technology, located in Salt Lake City, Utah. DPoN engenders environmental perception in the museum’s visitors by communicating global environmental information through a dynamic and interactive interface embedded in the material of the wall. — bustler.net
Researchers at the University of California Irvine have developed a material that is as strong as metal but 100 times lighter than Styrofoam. The material is constructed from a micro-lattice of nickel phosphorous tubes that is 99.9% air. — Inhabitat.com
