Image courtesy of the American Geographic Institute
Ron Eglash gives an amazing TED talk about fractals found in African villages. He debunks a couple of widely held prejudices. One, that all natives would design with fractals. This isn’t true, because African natives are the only ones that build their villages in the fractal form. The other, that these fractals are based solely on intuition. Many are algorithmic and intentional, such as in cloth designs and even in divination rituals.
Image courtesy of Rajah on TechRepublic, created using Apophysis
These ideas of self-organization are in the brain, in ecological sustainability, the aids virus, capitalism… artists today are using fractals to generate incredible digital pieces. When will an architect design a building using fractals?
David Erdman last week gave a talk about his work and a few of the overarching themes in his current practice David Clovers, and his previous one, Servo. The three most important were: designing with the computer, making complex forms using machinery, and modularity.
It makes me wonder, will we one day print off our houses in 3d printers? Will building a house be as simple as shipping the large printer anywhere around the city, and printing off the custom-designed building?
Already, architects such as Francois Roche from R&Sie(n) have proposed entire museums built using CNC milling machines. This Swiss Ice Museum will be constructed on site, slice-by-slice, with a special 5-axis CNC machine that can work a 5 x 40 meter area.
Swiss Ice Museum, Imagecourtesy of R&Sie(n) studios
It’s only a matter of time before the most bizarre creations that can be dreamed up with the click of a mouse are available for order over the internet!
Great article from Coroflot’s Carl Alviani about why that impulse to relocate to the design mecca of NYC, San Francisco, London, or Barcelona, just may not be the best place to establish your career.
“What finally inspired me to look beyond New York was a pair of realizations that hit in rapid succession. The first was that many freelance clients were remote, or might as well have been. Some were in other time zones, found through digital word of mouth; others were just a few subway stops away, yet we met in person perhaps once or twice in a year, exchanging files electronically and conferencing over the phone. “If it doesn’t matter where I am physically,” went the reasoning, “why am I living in the most expensive city in North America?” The second realization was that all of the Senior Designers I knew in New York–not just most, but every single one of them–had gotten their start somewhere else. Usually somewhere less sexy: Pittsburgh, San Diego, rural Connecticut.
One of my favourite new buildings/architectural interventions is the High Line in New York City. It is a linear strip of parkland built on long-abandoned elevated railway tracks that wind their way through the city.
They provide a radically different view of the city.
Images of the High Line courtesy of Joel Sternfeld, 2002
Montreal’s own version of the High Line, albeit a more car-friendly one, is a portion of Rue Notre Dame E. in Old Montreal, anywhere west of Rue Montcalm.
The old building spewing smoke from its chimney provides power to the campus. It is 75 years old and embarrassingly out of date. The hodgepodge renovations include steam pipes jutting out of the wall and ground every which way, a hastily built chain link barrier fence, all seeming very out of place from the stately stone building they are tacked onto.
The Kowloon Walled City was an anomoly in Hong Kong’s history: a tiny (0.016 sq.mi.) enclave owned by China in the middle of British Hong Kong. I can’t help but notice the uncanny resemblance the city has to the ancient walled structures of the Hakka Chinese.
This video takes you through the market stalls and walks you through the city. At 6:00 you enter the narrow, dark paths that crisscross the walled city.
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
the idea of farms contained within skyscrapers aren’t new - in fact, a number of proposals have been floated in recent years: for new york city, las vegas, even toronto. mvrdv proposed a “pig city”. there’s an underground farm housed in a former bank vault underneath tokyo.
i wonder if the idea of a vertical farm is even economically feasible, given that there would need to be artificial sunlight in the buildings, watering pumped up tens of stories, the expenses for transportation and delivery of the crops, fertilizer, and soil, and the high cost of land in the city.
wouldn’t urban agriculture on existing rooftops, open areas in the city, be a much more feasible method to increase urban agriculture?
