Frank Lloyd Wright shows Wright did the actual drawings for the famous Falling Water house in less than three hours!
(via)
Amazing! This is an image of Adolph Sutro’s Cliff House, which was located outside San Francisco. It stood for eleven years, from 1896-1907, before being destroyed by fire. BLDGBLOG writes:
This gallery of images is extraordinary; the house is so badly situated on its site that it appears simply to be hovering over the rocks on an artificial ground plane. It’s like a continental afterthought, the dream of western architecture pushed beyond its ability to retain anchorage. But it’s a cinematic sight, to say the least.
Spider web or hand-cut street map?
If you think the outside of this church carved into volcanic rock in Turkey is incredible, wait until you see the inside…
from a Lebbeus Woods post on a New Babylon project:
Some time ago, I was speaking with Peter Cook, the founder of Archigram, about the Situationists and, in particular, Constant Nieuwenhuys—the artist and visionary architect—and he told me a story. “In 1959 or ’60, Mike Webb (a founding member of Archigram) and I attended a lecture given by Constant on his “New Babylon” project. We were just graduating from architecture school, but Mike leaned over to me during the lecture and whispered “we can do it better!” And so, a couple of years later, they did it at least differently, setting off a revolution in architecture that reverberates to the present day. What both Constant and Archigram did was imagine architecture as a leading instrument of social change, through the making of ideal or utopian architectural projects. The difference between them is that the projects and the ideals they expressed stand on opposite sides of a cultural divide.
(via But Does it Float)
GOOD profiles project proposals to revitalize the Greenwich South area of New York City:
The ideas range from the totally do-able to the just plain zany… Morphosis (image above) re-envisioned the entire southern tip of Manhattan (above) as a sustainable “Battery North.” WORKac’s “plug-in” tower, a mixed-use, cantilevered structure, would have rows of brownstones six stories in the air… A few firms specifically wanted to tackle the six-acre hole of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, a gaping scar across Greenwich South. Architecture Research Office wants a public market, park, and recycling center over the tunnel approach. Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis and Transolar Climate Engineering (above) want to build a vertical park over the tunnel’s entrance that cleans and filters the air emitted from the cars entering it. And for reasons that aren’t quite clear, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer wants to use the space to project images of a sun onto a 30-meter meteorological balloon (to remind us that global warming is closer than we think?).
Cool post from BLDBLOG profiling the work of Margaret Bursa…
Very nice new work from Pentagram.
From h+:
In the bright and shiny future, we all live in green, gleaming communities, monorailed shuttles at the ready, climate-controlled at all times — a sort of Logan’s Run, but without the forced euthanasia. It almost happened in, of all places, an old mill town in northern Vermont…
One night in 1979 a group of its creative young city planners went to dinner and Mark Tigan, then the city’s 32-year-old director of community development and planning, decided that not enough attention was being paid to energy conservation. Then, in the way that only a few glasses of wine can facilitate brainstorming, someone said, half tongue-in-cheek, they should put a dome over the city…
The New York Times hated the idea; of course Buckminster Fuller loved it!
From PopSci:
Using nearly half a million Flickr photos of Rome, Venice, and the Croatian coastal city of Dubrovnik, a team of computer scientists at the University of Washington’s Graphics and Imaging Laboratory assembled digital models of the three cities in 3-D… Each video includes clusters of small diamond shapes, which represent each photographer and his or her vantage point. The team built a new algorithm that proceeds in two steps — first, by matching the photos by what they had in common, puzzle-style, and then by determining the scene and each photographer’s pose.
Wow, this is really an incredible project. BLDGBLOG has the details:
For his student thesis project at the Bartlett School of Architecture, Thomas Hillier produced an immersive narrative world, complete with origami-filled hand-cut book pages and an elaborate model of the story’s architectural landscape. Hillier’s project was called The Emperor’s Castle and it was inspired by the work of Japanese printmaker Hiroshige.
From the Pentagram blog:
Monica Pidgeon, who with Pentagram co-founder and architect Theo Crosby edited and transformed the journal Architectural Design (AD), died on September 17 at age 95.
This is a wonderful piece (the unabridged version of what was recently published in WIRED’s UK edition of its Digital City issue) by Adam Greenfield on how cities are currently taking (and will continue to take) shape around technology. Here’s how he gets right to the point and frames the discussion:
It is by now clear that over the last decade a great number of people on Earth, in the developed and the developing world both – certainly the overwhelming majority of those reading these words – have embraced the digital mediation of everyday life, to such a ferocious extent that it can already be difficult to remember how we ever got through our days without the networked things around us.
Without necessarily considering the matter with any particular care, as individuals or societies, we have installed devices in our clothing, our buildings, our vehicles and our tools which register, collect and transmit extraordinary volumes of data, and which share this data with the global network in real time. If some of us once – and recently! – thought of this as the domain of “ubiquitous computing,” the words are already starting to sound obsolescent, as clunky as “horseless carriage.” This is simply the way we do things now.
And barring the usual panoply of potential catastrophes, it is only likely to be more so as time goes by, for an ever larger proportion of us. Under such circumstances, it’s only natural to expect that a great many of these systems will wind up speaking directly to the challenges cities were designed to resolve, as well as those with which they cannot help but confront us…
You’ve probably heard the point before, if not repeatedly: that the advance of technology has happened at such a pace as to “lap” our own ability to perceive it, such that we are tending towards the consideration of it in retrospect (e.g. “Oh yeah, I can send email, listen to music, take pictures, and make telephone calls all with the same portable device!”). What Greenfield is doing here is pointing out that when technology has such a shaping power over society, then the ways in which we are able to envision the future shaping of urban planning and architecture- in other words, how we will live- are challenged by our own myopia. His thoughts here are fascinating, and I encourage you to read the entire article.
Here’s one last pertinent quote:
it’s surpassingly hard to be appropriately critical and to make sound choices in a world where we don’t understand the objects around us. Understanding networked urbanism on its own terms, however wise it might be, requires an investment of time and effort beyond the reach of most…
In the networked city, therefore, the truly pressing need is for translators: people capable of opening these occult systems up, demystifying them, explaining their implications to the people whose neighborhoods and choices and very lives are increasingly conditioned by them.
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