From the Cartogrammar Blog:
Granted this map is more interesting if you know the area, but nonetheless it’s fascinating how much something like this can indicate about the patterns of human settlement in a typical American city. It’s not too difficult to see where settlement has followed or been bounded by highways and rivers. Industrial areas are discernible from residential areas, and city from suburb from rural. (By the way, this map only shows a sliver of Greene County—including my hometown of Beavercreek—where a good chunk of additional suburbia is located.) Owing to its simplicity, I believe this map shows urban patterns much more clearly than a satellite image or a road map.
Yes! (via)
A highlighted entry to the latest Core77 1-hour design challenge:
From steveboynton: “Credit is given to the American Indians TEEPEE design for it’s durability, portability, and responsible use of natural resources. In this concept the material (tarp, canvas, gore tex…) would be provided to skin the frame. The units cold be set up alone or combined to form multi-room living spaces.”
Man is no longer the measure of all things. The dimensions of human endeavor have expanded from bodily cubits to incomprehensibly tiny angstroms and incomprehensibly large light years. Architecture, comfortably situated in the middle of this spectrum, and rarely departing from human dimension by more than one or two orders of magnitude, has correspondingly lost authority.
Mammoth says:
A nasty prediction: in somewhere around one thousand billion years, sentience will, unfortunately, still be dealing with climate change. Unfortunately, that climate change will not be global, but universal, in the form of heat death, the entropic decay of energy as it spreads ever more distant from itself and is increasingly-evenly distributed over expanding space-time.
Image by Andy Gilmore
The winners of this summer’s Design It: Shelter Competition—an online competition that asked participants to create and submit designs for virtual 3-D shelters using Google SketchUp and Google Earth—visited the Guggenheim Museum and Google offices in New York. As part of their competition prize, David Eltang, the Juried Prize winner, and David Mares, the People’s Prize winner, first met with Google staff at their New York offices and were given a behind-the-scenes tour of the block-long office building and treated to lunch in Google’s cafeteria.
This is an avatar touring a virtual environment used in the planning of a new school. A project in Birmingham, UK, is trying out the idea of testing school designs using virtual environments that can be explored by students and teachers.
Our Adapting Future: Interactive Architecture →
This is a very cool SEED magazine slideshow by Miles Kemp, who introduces the concept of interactive architecture here:
Watching “The Jetsons” as a kid, I thought that the idea of having helper robots around the house seemed plausible, but the specifics of how this would happen never seemed to make sense. Other than the way she talked, it was hard to see how Rosie the Robot was different from the other characters. But smart interactive robots do not need to look like our mechanical humanoid cousins. Interactive architecture—a burgeoning collaboration across diverse scientific and design communities—has ushered in advancements in manufacturing, behavioral logic, and biologically inspired materials and introduced new ways robotics can enhance our lives. Our spaces and environments—buildings themselves—are becoming the robots, Rosie is becoming the architecture around us, and unprecedented levels of responsiveness and environmental interactivity are becoming a reality.
From Agenda, work by Julien De Smedt Architects.
This is an image from a proposed vertical zoo, by James Biber, who has created an urban take on Charles Darwin’s evolutionary tree of life, “a phylogenic arrangement of species in vertical formation.”
Check out the full post for some nice renderings of how the structure would look in context.
Another project from BLDGBLOG (I wish I could restrain myself from linking to this blog on what seems like a daily basis). These pretty much sum up the idea of trying to “visualize catastrophe” as two projects envision New York City and Tokyo after a catastrophic flood:
Far from stoking fear about a coming catastrophe, both of these projects—Studio Lindfors and Squint Opera—offer a vision in which people, and the cities they live in, have learned to adapt to the overwhelming presence of water. Indeed, Times Square, in Studio Lindfors’s vision, is radiant, markedly improved by the reflective waters that now flow through it. Of course New York should be at least partially flooded, one might be tempted to think; of course the future of urban planning involves designing with water.
Frank Lloyd Wright shows Wright did the actual drawings for the famous Falling Water house in less than three hours!
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