Ready Made Art - Plastic Bags 1

"In the early morning Thursday 5 March, 80 plastic shopping bags were reused by Luzinterruptus to lit ended floating in the wind in The Prado Museum.

The intervention was called ´A Cloud of Bags visit The Prado´and it was a success thanks to the wind that blew through the city on this particular day.

The installation was rather ephemeral we thought that before dawn it would have been dismantled by the Cleaning Service who are always ready to leave everything spik and span and enable everybody to enjoy such a magnificent building. We hope that as we always mention the components of the intervention were recycle.

Despite its short duration we kept our memories have been im mortalized by Gustavo Sanabria's photos.

Time of installation : 1 hour 20 minutes.
Damages: none
Exhibition time: 4 hours."

via luzinterruptus

The Geometry of Geology

A recent post midnight and champagne conversation on the post modern nature of Melbourne's design culture had me thinking about design motifs. Geology was my least favourite subject at school, but I found this image really interesting as a possible way into a design process. Can the geology of the site be reflected in the designed landscape in three dimensional form? i.e. not just inform how deep the footings need to be and what type of plants will survive.

via bldgblog

One Day Poem Pavilion

I have been having an "interesting" time recently with the concept of canopies and shade structures on a project in the Middle East. We suggested 'em > the client wanted 'em > we designed 'em > the client doesn't want 'em anymore > somebody found the shadow studies and realised that we don't actually need 'em > but now the boss wants 'em... just great... anyway, the One Day Poem Pavilion by Jiyeon Sung is an amazing project that tracks the sunlight with a moving poem. These is a time lapse video too. I wonder if this can be made to work on a very large scale.

For the love of statistics....

... and for my friends who need pictures and diagrams to be able to understand numbers - you know who you are...

Dematerializing Samples

A granite paving sample fell on my friend and co-worker Jooyeon's foot yesterday and bruised her. I don't think it she was using it for the purposes that the sample was issued, in fact I think she was using it to stabilize a book that she was photographing because she couldn't be bothered scanning, so maybe its the sample's way protesting its abuse. (I have been reading the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy). But the incident got me wondering if there was a better way to manage the millions of paving samples that we receive constantly - I request new ones for every project because its simply too hard to find the ones I want in the existing sample collection. And voila ~ the interior designers have already come up with a way of doing this...

"In 2002 the Chattanooga-based sustainable-design-services company Tricycle launched an alternative sampling option for the interiors industry; manufacturers outsource the process to the company, which produces and delivers extremely realistic paper samples—called SIMs—to specifiers instead of actual carpet slabs. The idea quickly took off and has become widely implemented (and widely imitated) in the industry. Tricycle estimates that in four years its service has saved about 26,000 gallons of oil and kept more than 155,000 pounds of waste out of landfills.

At this year’s NeoCon World’s Trade Fair, Tricycle launched a significant expansion of the program, called Tryk. Previously the company could only cre­ate samples of tufted carpet, but Tryk works with woven carpet as well as wall-coverings and fabrics. It also allows for different scales and larger sizes—and the image quality is improved. “We continue to move toward a more photorealistic image,” says Michael Hendrix, Tricycle’s creative director and chief brand officer. “If you could see an image from three years ago, the tufts looked flatter. We’ve been able to improve the perception of volume in the overall look.”

The company is also launching a new Web platform, which will be fully functional by January. “It’s more robust,” Hendrix says. “It’s giving more features to the user, and it’s actually better integrated with the business practices of manufac­turers.” The end result is an even more efficient, easy-to-use, and realistic tool for designers to sample materials—without wasting them."

Via Metropolis Mag

StarSight : Useful Street Lighting

Not that normal street lights AREN'T useful, but this one is even more so as its a solar-powered street light and WiFi in one.

A StreetLight System consists of a kit that contains several components.

This kit is intended to be mounted on "one" pylon. Typically 11 "Lights" network with one central control.

The kit contains :

• Lamp - StarSight Lamp Model 1021 is the "Light" of the Street Light.
• Battery Subsystem - StarSight Battery Subsystem provides power when the sun has not been available for an extended period of time.
• Solar Array Subsystem - This is the main power source.
• StarSight Controller - This unit integrates charge controller, radio, cpu, and anti-theft into one unit.

Things not included:

• pylon due to its weight is supplied in country. The system supports a varity of pylon designs.

Developed by Kolam Partnership, Ltd and currently used in the Ivory Coast, Cameroon and the Congo.

via PingMag

Infrastructure as ART

Not that long ago I told an architect that I was working with we were never going to be able to "integrate" the 2ML water tank the engineers were proposing into the landscape and that perhaps we can convince the client to let the The Graffiti Project people turn in into an artwork instead. Today... while flickering for interesting water features, I came across the Valence Water Towers in France designed by Philolaos Tloupas in 1969 and I was ashamed as a designer that I have failed to see the possibility in the form of water towers and tanks. Australian designers can be so quick to label the French conservative and yet we are so far behind them...

Luna-resonant streetlights

i LOVE this idea by the Civil Twilight Design Collective that street lights can be ephemeral and respond to the the moonlight! this would be perfect for a water front project to highlight the connections to tidal movements and the moon etc... and it saves energy, bonus!

The idea won this year's Metropolis Next Generation ideas competition.

via The Underwire

the POOP house

In the Architect's (Andrew Maynard Architecture) words...

"No matter which way you look at it, building a house is never green. It takes vast quantities of materials with high levels of embodied energy and water and it creates a lot of waste. Even houses constructed from recycled materials often have an incredibly high embodied energy to implement. So we at Andrew Maynard Architects asked ourselves "what's the greenest building" and we concluded that the answer was "no building at all". But rather than be nihilistic about it we decided that a house should build itself through a lengthy period of assembling house hold waste. Through adopting similar structural logic employed at Stanford University the Poop house is a water structure that, over time, takes all household bio-waste, including human excrement and food, and slowly constructs the walls and roof. "...more here

Sounds fantastic in principle... but the ‘yuk factor’ is hard to overcome ... a bit like drinking recycled sewage - no scientific or health reason for it not being ok, just yuk.

Vision of Excess

Incredible photos from the Industrial Scars series by J. Henry Fair for Harper's Magazine

via the underwire

what is normal?

An interesting diagram from the National Climatic Data Centre.

via Beyond the Beyond

Mixed Greens

An international survey of state-of-the-art sustainable skyscraper design. MIXED GREENS marks the first collaboration between The Skyscraper Museum and The New York Academy of Sciences.
See also Uber-Eco-Towers: The Top Ten Green Skyscrapers
via The Underwire

House Swarming

Designed by Jenna Didier, Oliver Hess and Marcos Lutyens
In the Artist's words

"Commissioned for the Art Center presentation of “Open House,” this site-specific installation operates both as a complex light pattern that greets visitors and as an environment-sensing device.

During the day, the “swarm” of green ambiguous forms, both biomorphic and geometric, accentuates the South Campus’s main entry. At twilight, the swarm comes to life, telling visitors and passersby about the current air quality around the building. Electronic sensors perceive air contaminants – such as tobacco, benzene, carbon monoxide, even perfume – and separately inform the outside and inside swarms, which sets off signals. These signals are interpreted as changes to the natural rhythm that the network has established based on the number and distribution of nodes connected to the cable net. Flashing cells on the exterior faÁade indicate air quality inside the building. Conversely, pulsating effects in the interior entry inform visitors about the outside air quality. The flashing lights become indicators of the environment like dramatic clouds at sunset that forewarnings of storms at night.

HouseSwarming is an example of how architects and designers are using technology that mimics biological systems. These patterns look like those structures found in nature, such as the patterns made by schools of fish, flocks of birds, and swarms of locusts. Used in the home, this type of sensor-node technology could enable us to extend our nervous system into the environment and alter our sense of boundaries."

check out the video here
via The Underwire