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From Pasta&Vinegar (nice!), thanks to R-echo

Incomplete buildings are something that fascinate me. The raw backbone of the buildings looks as if it had been never finished or strip naked after a momentarily stopped renovation. To me, the city of the near future definitely looks like this sort of architecture. And this fascination is not just poetic, it’s a very recurring encounter in lots of cities due to economic and cultural issues in construction.

For example, the picture above has been taken in Cusco, Peru. It nicely reveals how the floors reached different levels of completeness. The one above is a restaurant where I had lunch in august, whereas the two other stories below have a totally different affordance. Sometimes, it’s even more fascinating when you have incomplete skyscrapers, falling into despair. Some are totally abandoned, some only partly… with pockets of emptiness. These structures often lead to interesting new forms of socialization that would surely need some time to be uncovered.

If like me you’re into this sort of things, you may be intrigued by a french architecture firm called coloco which works on this concept. Régine pointed me to their Skeleton Observatory. It’s actually a summary of their exploration, about why the think this architectural typology is important and may play a role in the near future. It eventually lead them to describe projects about “inhabiting the skeletons”, i.e. the re-appropriation of abandoned and incomplete architectures. The skeleton becomes and “invitation à l’usage” (i.e. “an invitation to be used”). They even have their own France-based abandoned building to test their hypotheses.

Why do I blog this? cataloguing curious signals about new forms of architecture on a pure exploratory angle.

From TED

Graham Hawkes has created a new generation of high-tech undersea vessels that truly augment the way terrestrials experience the immense, otherworldly habitats of the oceans. His Deep Flight submersibles look like airplanes and behave like ocean creatures, using their wings and unique propulsion to gracefully soar and somersault into the deep — giving their pilot an unprecedented 3D perspective. According to his website, Hawkes’ designs account for a “significant percentage of manned and unmanned vehicles used by science and industry.”

Hawkes leads Hawkes Ocean Technologies, whose submersibles were featured in James Cameron’s 3D IMAX film, Aliens of the Deep. His company also produced the WASP and Mantis Atmospheric Diving Suits, built to facilitate undersea pipelaying. Hawkes currently holds the world record for the deepest solo dive — 3,000 feet — using one of his own inventions, the Deep Rover submersible.

“We’re throwing billions of dollars into the void and ignoring a rich frontier much closer to home: Earth’s oceans. They’re awash with unknown life, unclaimed territory, and immense natural resources. Perhaps the future of mankind isn’t out in space but in our sea.”

Graham Hawkes, WIRED

http://www.deepflight.com/
http://www.covari.com/PPL/

download the video 74mb

Working from principles of differential geometry, physicist Garrett Lisi is developing a new unified theory that purports to explain all the elementary particles, and gravity, in one elegant model. His theory is based on a mathematical shape called E8. With 248 symmetries, E8 is large, complex and beautiful — and Lisi believes the relationships of its symmetries correspond to known particles and forces, including gravity.

His work, explained in his paper “An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything,” and in an ongoing discussion on FQXi, is still on science’s speculative fringe. But some physicists believe he could be pointing the way toward a truly unified theory.

“This is an ‘all or nothing’ kind of theory — meaning it’s going to end up agreeing with and predicting damn near everything, or it’s wrong. At this stage of development, it could go either way.”

Garrett Lisi on physicsforums.com

“sad hat l happy hat” is one of design interventions in the “benchspace walk workshop”, part of London architecture festival.

We like London, this city-world full of differences, ethnic variety, colors, textures, sounds; within a block distance the environment can change totally. We are perpetually commuting and when we think about architecture, we think of vertical constructions, enclosing horizontal space.

Sad Hat | Happy Hat from cesar harada on Vimeo.

Naturally we have a tendency to look up when we are happy and down when we are sad. We want to bring emphasis on the ground and the sky, amplifying one’s mood. The “sad hat | happy hat” can be worn in two different ways, happy (looking up) or sad (looking down). The reflective surface inside multiplies the perception of either the sky or the ground.

But what happens when you either look only up or down? You bump into stuff! Maybe you need someone to complement your perception: if you are sad you may need someone happy, if you are happy someone sad, to walk together safely.

The object can be experienced in 2 main ways, outside-in and inside-out. The outside-in aspects: the appearance of the hats indicates obviously what mood you are in. This experience critiques our excess of self-awareness in public, how much we care about how others are looking at us. The inside-out aspect provides a thrilling sensorial experience, something different and playful, we might not care how people will look at us, in our own visual and acoustic distorted world.

The “sad hat | happy hat” is a simple playful perception limb that directs and amplifies ones perception and mood, allowing to re-consider how one feels about the city while creating an extreme social relation between the mask user and the others, encouraging the necessary complementary pair relation

With Dot Nitipak Samsen. Voice Nasser moustakim.

http://www.dotmancando.net/projects/between/
http://cesarharada.com/2008/sad-hat_happy-hat/

URBAN SPACE STATION Sofia, Madrid 2008 from cesar harada on Vimeo. All documentation on http://urbanspacestation.org.

I went to see this exhibition of Sinta Tantra, beautiful blend of installation and poetry.
You can also see the high quality video here. 

Scattered House, Usman Haque & Adam Somlai Fischer from cesar harada on Vimeo.

“[source] Scattered House is an architectural experiment founded on a truly contemporary notion of space, where issues of ubiquitous connectivity, family diasporas, design-by-occupant, and public control technology come together in an installation assembled from inexpensive electronic toys and gadgets. 
We are inviting members of the public to visit the Hungarian Cultural Centre and contribute to elements of the “house” —  they can either bring toys and gadgets that will become part of the amalgamated whole or we will also have a selection of items that they can try hacking themselves. Architects and interaction designers Adam Somlai-Fischer and Usman Haque, authors of the online manual “Low Tech Sensors and Actuators” [download 1MB], will be on hand to advise and assist in this process, as well as Bengt Sjölén, artist from Stockholm.
The three day event will be suitable for families and accompanied children, as well as design (or non-design) students who would like to be part of the event. The public will help design and build fragments of the interactive “Scattered House” which will be exhibited internationally later in the year. People will be able to open up toys and gadgets (that they have either brought along or which are provided for them), gain a simple understanding of how they work, and learn how to connect them directly into the installation themselves.  
No experience is necessary, though enthusiasm for hacking open toys is welcome!”

It was a brilliant experience, I just regret I don’t have so much footage of the installation at the Hungarian Embassy, but a lot of interview instead, so here is a quite similar experiment the same people did, if you want to see more in detail the hacked electronic components: 

Reconfigurable House 2 at Place@Space at Z33.be from Adam Somlai-Fischer on Vimeo.

[source : technology review]

This week, IBM announced plans to build the world’s largest “noise free” nanoelectronic fabrication facilities in Switzerland. By shielding equipment from external electromagnetic, thermal, and seismic noise, the new facilities should help advance research in a wide range of fields, such as spintronics, carbon-based devices, and nanophotonics, says IBM.

“Once you move into atomic-scale research, you are dealing with very low energy levels, and so you need very sensitive instruments,” says Kaiserswerth. And the more sensitive the instrument, the more responsive it is to disturbances in the environment. “Every time we bought a new piece of equipment,” says Paul Seidler, IBM Zurich’s science and technology manager, “we would find ourselves having to think hard about which lab was most suitable.” {by Duncan Graham-Rowe for Technology Review, Friday, June 27, 2008}

[source of the image]

I find this very interesting that IBM needs this kind of facility for new technologies : seeking an absolute model of precision to cope with Moore’s law as if it was a production imperative… I think I am going in the precise opposite direction of IBM, by letting entropy increase, extremely noisy architecture. Giving space to nature and openess in the experiment we might obtain non-mesurable yet invaluable results.

Still I think a clever compromise between chaos and order must be found, the Urban Space Station Sofia (june 2008) in Madrid is one, but I can’t stop thinking of alternatives, or derivated, that may be more in the “jungle” direction, even more open, cheaper, progressive, informal… The way is open in front of us.

The station construction is completed… Now it all looks so simple!

An astronaut ready for launching.

Here is the space station!

How it looks inside, it is a small crowed space, looks better in video, soon.

That’s a lazy astronaut!

Unfortunately it was not allowed to take pictures of our own work during the launching, we will do a proper filming session soon + video.

]

Tonight was the VIP launch, I think it was very successful, people
were surprised, interested, and honnestly that was a lot of people for a night the Spanish football team plays a quarter-final of Euro, 3-0 against Russia, Madrid was just mad tonight, most people were as naked and nervous as me in the streets! heheheh!

The construction was very intense today… tired! Everything has to be done tomorow, big time! I’m quite impressed how disorganised the construction was, but somehow it seems that we are going to make it happen… put it together with some spanish magic perhaps.

Here are the people of our team who made this possible! Without these guys to hold the tubes, without thes many clever hands, wouldn’t have been possible … OOAAAAHHH OYASUMI!!!