artcodex reblog

“What happened to the science-fiction future?” by Katherine Mangu-Ward is a very good piece from Reason. The article is about sci-fi futures that never happened, technological innovation and user’s pragmatism. Some excerpt I liked:

“Fanciful futurist visions can obscure all the neat stuff we’ve accumulated, once-wild innovations that are far cooler and more functional than jetpacks. (Microwave ovens, anyone?) They also make it easy to forget that the ultimate responsibility for choosing which technologies fill our lives lies with us, the ordinary consumers, more than any rocket scientists.
(…)
Small boys everywhere will always doodle Ferraris with wings when they’re bored in class, but the actual lived “future” is not something that leaps off an engineer’s drawing board or from a novelist’s visions. It emerges from complex, unpredictable interactions between visionary inspiration, technological limits, and consumers’ insistent pragmatism.
(…)
In another recent book, The Shock of the Old (Oxford University Press), the British historian David Edgerton posits that technological innovations don’t matter as much as we think they do. We tend to consider scientific and engineering breakthroughs themselves as the important thing, he says, when what really matters is how we fit them into our lives. Edgerton disparages our high hopes for each new innovation as “futurism,” a disease that led us to believe in a new world birthed by engineers, where electricity would be “too cheap to meter,”“

Why do I blog this I definitely like this topic, and working as a UX researcher in a tech school makes really buying the things that are described here. The article gives intriguing examples (skyscrapers, jetpacks, roads-that-must-roll and underwater dwellings) about techno-push futures that have troubles finding their way to users acceptance… and it’s not because there is a tech breakthrough that a product is there, acceptable, usable and successful. The last bit about the role of science-fiction is also interesting considering the recent books/short stories by Bruce Sterling or William Gibson:

“we—shouldn’t read science fiction to get a sneak peak at as-yet-unseen innovative technologies. Rather than as a blueprint for what should happen, we should read it to imagine the ways humanity will figure out how to use whatever shows up, or to tweak the impressive tech that’s already lying around.“

Originally posted by Nicolas Nova from Pasta&Vinegar, ReBlogged by lucidstraw on Sep 27, 2007 at 05:30 AM

Originally by Nicolas Nova from Eyebeam reBlog on September 27, 2007, 3:30am

Originally from Mute magazine - Culture and politics after the net - CULTURE AND POLITICS AFTER THE NET on September 26, 2007, 6:27pm

[Image: Via Archinect, the LA Times says that “The U.S. Navy has decided to spend as much as $600,000 for landscaping and architectural modifications to obscure the fact that one its building complexes looks like a swastika from the air.” The Naval Amphibious Base Coronado. Photo: Google Earth.]

Originally by Bryan Finoki from Subtopia

[Image: The Ring Dome by Minsuk Cho, at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, NYC. Photo by Alan R. Tansey].

If there were such a thing as a kind of psychic milit_urb then I think this ‘ring dome’ in SoHo (in Petrosino Park to be precise) by architect Minsuk Cho would be it, or at least looks like it would be. Seriously, (from my photo-dependent vantage) this structure is both simultaneously beautiful and alarming for me to see at the same time (not alarming in any real sense of the word, just visually) – it’s there, glowing with this electric forcefield of wound coils - like a little Tesla barrier weave, or the architectural equivalent of a police taser gun or something. Who knows, it could be a little love nest conjured out of thin air by a spatial magician, or maybe it’s an electrified detention facility dropped instantaneously down on a helpless family of urban migrants from the Pentagon’s twisted sorcerer arm. Actually, it looks more like something out of a video game, a temporary forcefield. I wish I could be there to actually check it out. It almost appears like it’s a shield for some hyperactive brain – a thought guard – as if it has caught something invisible. What’s at the center, what’s in there? … I don’t know, we all know I’m crazy.

[Image: The Ring Dome by Minsuk Cho, at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, NYC. Photo by Alan R. Tansey].

Anyway, if you are in NYC you need to go take a peak, walk around it, see if you can’t walk through it, stand underneath it and tell me what’s the effect? It’s all part of the Storefront for Art and Architecture’s 25th anniversary celebration titled Performance Z-A which is going on all month and into October. Joseph Grima, the gallery’s director, says it isn’t quite a Postopolis! 2 but definitely something next of kin. There are a bunch of great participants lined up from Eyal Weizman, Pedro Reyes, Stefano Boeri, Gianluigi Ricuperati, and Tomas Saraceno, taking turns holding events in different places, indoors, outdoors, between doors like only the Storefront can allow – for example, today/tonight Teddy Cruz will be hosting ‘Food for Thought: The Tijuana-NY Kitchen.’ For one evening, Ring Dome becomes an open-air kitchen, serving authentic Tijuana tacos in an exchange of food for thought.

[Image: The Ring Dome by Minsuk Cho, at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, NYC. Photo by Alan R. Tansey].

There is even a new funky ‘micro-bookshop’ that is being cultivated out of the gallery itself, uniquely curated by the participants themselves. I tell ya, the Storefront just keeps on rocking. It’s incredible actually. So don’t miss it. Go now, get some tacos with Joseph, Teddy and the gang tonight! (damn…I just realized, really realized, I am missing this).

Originally by Bryan Finoki from Subtopia

GIF artist unknown

Originally by tom moody from tom moody on September 19, 2007, 1:05pm

Holy shit. For the Love of God is in an edition of three.

Originally by Kriston from Grammar.police on September 11, 2007, 1:58pm

After participating in a roundtable discussion with architect Lorcan O’Herlihy yesterday at Dwell on Design, I decided to look into his work a bit more – and it’s been a great way to spend time. Lorcan has both a great sense of modernist architectural volume and a brilliant eye for color; the lime green he used on a multi-unit residence in West Hollywood, for instance, is extraordinary. I’ll see if I can dig up some photos of the finished building.
The following images, meanwhile, are just a random look at three or four of O’Herlihy’s most interesting projects. To start with, here is a recent building in Los Angeles, called Gardner 1050.

[Images: Gardner 1050, by Lorcan O’Herlihy].

I’m a particular fan of the outdoor footbridges, as they criss-cross a shared entry courtyard in the all-pervading sunlight of LA.
O’Herlihy, you see, has a small thing for residential bridges: these next images feature the Fineman residence – a house with its own “enclosed glass-walled bridge.”

[Images: The Fineman house, by Lorcan O’Herlihy].

This next image gives us a bird’s-eye rendering of O’Herlihy’s proposal for a new dormitory and “Educational Facility” at CalArts – more information about which is available on O’Herlihy’s website.

[Image: Proposal for CalArts, by Lorcan O’Herlihy].

In a nutshell, though, the circulation-friendly building complex uses a “shifted” east-west axis “to take full advantage of the complete spectrum of the optimal solar angle.” This not only “supports the passive ventilation system,” it means that “the need to artificially and mechanically condition an internal corridor year round can be eliminated resulting in a significant reduction in the net energy demand over the life of the building.”
Below, then, you see the architectural logic behind O’Herlihy’s Norton Avenue Lofts, going from a bare-bones diagram of abstract spatial volumes –

[Image: The Norton Avenue Lofts, by Lorcan O’Herlihy].

– to the final renderings of the project’s exterior.

[Images: The Norton Avenue Lofts, by Lorcan O’Herlihy].

In any case, I know I’m not exactly going into much detail with these projects – in fact, I’m just sort of whipping out a bunch of cool, unrelated images without offering any real or substantive analysis – but I still want to point out one more: O’Herlihy’s 12 Houses, an almost Bach-like study in formal variation.

[Image: 12 Houses by architect Lorcan O’Herlihy].

The original idea behind 12 Houses, we read, was “to create individualized identities and experiences for each house using shared elements of design and construction.”
As a result, O’Herlihy generated “four prototypes”:

Starting from a simple main floor plan consisting of two adjoined rectangular bars, a second floor is created by pulling up or pushing down one bar – either in complement or contrast to the topography of each site. From these two formal gestures, four variations emerge: up, down, long, short. Further variation is produced by siting (for privacy and views), adjustment of each prototype in response to stringent building envelope limits, and a carefully-developed palette of exterior/interior materials.

I absolutely love the puzzle piece-like results.

[Image: 12 Houses by architect Lorcan O’Herlihy].

But let me pre-empt some criticism right away: yes, this is simply another kind of suburban sprawl, destined to grace tasteless cul-de-sacs, surrounded by well-watered lawns and reachable only by private automobile – yet the houses are also beautifully devised and formally stimulating.
I also have an active soft spot for systems like this, and so I’m easily seduced by basic variations upon simple architectural plans – the same animating principal behind Palladianism, for instance. The mathematics of the ideal villa, indeed.

[Image: 12 Houses by architect Lorcan O’Herlihy].

O’Herlihy’s 12 Houses are apparently slated for construction, too: they should be ready for inhabitation by Spring 2008.
For more projects by Lorcan O’Herlihy, book a visit to his firm’s website.

Originally by Geoff Manaugh from BLDGBLOG

I’m currently in Germany working on a book. Next door to Steid’s press he has several apartments (aka The Halftone Hotel) for visiting artists.

Today in my room I read an essay by C.K. Williams called ‘A Letter to a Workshop‘. Williams says that poets should grant themselves “the right to vacillate, to wobble, to shillyshally, be indecisive in one’s labors, and still not suffer from a sense of being irresponsible, indolent, or weak.”

“Another, related, right,” he says, “is to be wrong, about anything and everything, and to know that even when your line of reflection or imagining might be viewed as absurdly illogical, you should be able to go on to its however provisional conclusion.”

Staying in the adjoining room is Jock Sturges (info, images). Only two weeks ago I had a lengthy discussion with a friend about my problems with Sturges’ work. After a couple days sharing meals (and a bathroom) with Jock, I’m not sure what to think anymore. But I paid close attention when Williams discussed another right:

We should be able to regard our inner existence, the part anyway that’s raw material for poetry, as a laboratory, in which mental and emotional phenomena are valued according to their potential usefulness, and considered harmless unless they demand to be concretized in malignant actions. (It should probably be kept in mind that the ultimate purpose of this sort of reflection isn’t action, but self-knowledge. Action—creation—comes later.)

From this follows the right of the mind to be able to remark in itself and not repress, or at least not too quickly, anything that comes to it, even such ostensibly inadmissible emotions as, to mention just a few, lust, greed, envy, anger, even rancor, even genres of otherwise unutterable prejudice. We should be able to entertain anything the mind casts up as potentially useful for a poem, while at the same time forgiving ourselves for such after all private matters, and this should be a forgiveness that arrives in a short enough time so that any shame or guilt arising from such scary glimpses within will be productive rather than debilitating for the germination of poems. We have, for poetry, to have as accurate an awareness as we can of the quality of our ethical consciousness, but we also need a firm sense of the difference between sins of the heart and sins of the hand: the mind has a life of its own which cares little for the parameters culture and society propose for it, and it is often this inner awareness which is most potentially interesting as aspects of a poem.

Should photographers be as free as poets? Or is photography itself a “sin of the hand.” I’m not sure. But I’m pretty sure Jock would appreciate this poem:

On the Metro
by C. K. Williams

On the metro, I have to ask a young woman to move the packages beside her to make room for me;
she’s reading, her foot propped on the seat in front of her, and barely looks up as she pulls them to her.
I sit, take out my own book—Cioran, The Temptation to Exist—and notice her glancing up from hers
to take in the title of mine, and then, as Gombrowicz puts it, she “affirms herself physically,” that is,
becomes present in a way she hadn’t been before: though she hasn’t moved, she’s allowed herself
to come more sharply into focus, be more accessible to my sensual perception, so I can’t help but remark
her strong figure and very tan skin—(how literally golden young women can look at the end of summer.)
She leans back now, and as the train rocks and her arm brushes mine she doesn’t pull it away;
she seems to be allowing our surfaces to unite: the fine hairs on both our forearms, sensitive, alive,
achingly alive, bring news of someone touched, someone sensed, and thus acknowledged, known.

I understand that in no way is she offering more than this, and in truth I have no desire for more,
but it’s still enough for me to be taken by a surge, first of warmth then of something like its opposite:
a memory—a girl I’d mooned for from afar, across the table from me in the library in school now,
our feet I thought touching, touching even again, and then, with all I craved that touch to mean,
my having to realize it wasn’t her flesh my flesh for that gleaming time had pressed, but a table leg.
The young woman today removes her arm now, stands, swaying against the lurch of the slowing train,
and crossing before me brushes my knee and does that thing again, asserts her bodily being again,
(Gombrowicz again), then quickly moves to the door of the car and descends, not once looking back,
(to my relief not looking back), and I allow myself the thought that though I must be to her again
as senseless as that table of my youth, as wooden, as unfeeling, perhaps there was a moment I was not.

Originally by Alec Soth from alec soth - blog on September 13, 2007, 11:31pm

Building Design takes a look at the “joy of car parks” – including this beautifully faux-classical quasi-Piranesian garage, the Parc des Célestins, built in 1994 in Lyon.
Unable to resist the obvious, however, when I hear someone say “the joy of car parks” I have to quote J.G. Ballard: “Take a structure like a multi-storey car park, one of the most mysterious buildings ever built. Is it a model for some strange psychological state, some kind of vision glimpsed within its bizarre geometry? What effect does using these buildings have on us? Are the real myths of this century being written in terms of these huge unnoticed structures?”

Originally by Geoff Manaugh from BLDGBLOG

Wind power is one of the most promising sources of renewable energy, yet most often its presence is felt only on the industrial scale, in large wind farms connected to the power grid. How great would it be for individuals to be able to power their devices through their own personal, portable windmill? Thats the concept behind the ‘Wing’ Personal Windmill. The name alone has an air of freedom and mobility, and that’s exactly what this lightweight personal windmill creates. Portable, easily folded and carried by a single individual, Wing produces enough electricity to satisfy the primary needs of the mobile individual; powering cell phones, laptops, and lamps.

(more…)

Originally by Ali from Inhabitat on September 10, 2007, 8:10pm