Comments on Invisibility cloak could hide buildings from quakes – New Scientist
Invisibility cloak could hide buildings from quakes – New Scientist – The physics behind optical invisibility cloaks that have been gaining so much attention have other possibilities. Scientists at the Fresnel Institute have worked out a potential technology for cloaking buildings from surface waves caused by Earthquakes and Tsunami. The technology uses tuned rings that might end up being installed in the foundations of a building to propagate a wave around the
Comments on JAPAN – MY TRIP TO BATTLESHIP ISLAND | Vice Magazine
JAPAN – MY TRIP TO BATTLESHIP ISLAND | Vice Magazine – The story of two friends exploring an old coal mining facility on Hashima Island, which is close to the port of Nagaski. The facility was abandoned in the 1970’s and the crumbling buildings are an incredible site. Unlike many other modern ruins, Battleship Island wasn’t devastated by war but only by neglect. The island was once the most densely populated
The Manhattan Archive and Library
The idea of building a new library in these days of the internet seems almost quaint. Something of a throwback to times when information wasn’t as accessible, yet overwhelming. Certainly the very idea of what is a library and what it can offer society has changed. When speaking of this change of idea, most young architect’s would try to challenge our preconceptions of what a Library is or offer us some theory of information diffusion cast in a formal strategy that expresses to the world, through Architecture the grand and revolutionary changes in the world of information today. Yet does every new building, let alone every library need to be a statement on society, or an expression of the world of information as a whole? Certainly such definitions of the problem are valid and important to the discussion of Architecture, but this is to the detriment of other problems.
Tribeca Telecommunications Switching Station
Constructs.
Architecture is inevitably an act of construction. Even such “paper” architects as Boulle or Lebbeus Woods engage in acts of construction or perhaps they might instead be said to engage more in acts of construing. Yet such a distinction does not only apply to those who theorize and do not build. For even the most practical and physically oriented architectural practice requires both an act of construing and an act of constructing. Implicit in the construing – constructing relationship is a production or becoming of a body. This body is not a whole but a population of pieces arranged in such a way to create capacities to affect other bodies or be affected by other bodies. Due to the fact that the joint or relationship between the pieces is what determines the becoming of the construct in the world, the joint is of great interest in any construing – construction process. Yet the body that emerges from the event of the joint constitutes the lived reality of our world and the embodied nature of things and ourselves in that world. In the end the problem of architecture is to address this lived reality including the way human beings and their bodies are embodied by this reality.