I am sure many of you have already seen this, but I wanted to talk about it anyway. Dynamo provides a graphical way for linking and driving parametric models in Revit. While there are similar tools such a Grasshopper for Rhino, Dynamo’s real promise is bringing a graphical programming environment to a production powerhouse like Revit. I look forward to seeing how it develops.
An amazing new camera that captures “light fields” instead of 2D pictures. A light field includes depth of field and exposure information so it can be dynamically altered. In theory, one should be able to recreate the 3D objects projected through the field from the photo.
The implications for Architectural Visualization are immense. I really look forward to seeing where this technology goes.
La Coruña Center For The Arts by aceboXalonso studio can be unbearably stark at times, it is also an exquisite and beautiful space. The filmy light through double curtain wall into the crisp concrete interiors creates an airy but moody and layered space that is overpowering in its emptiness. It is a building that I find hard to love, but I suspect it will haunt my dreams for years to come with its potential. Sometimes, the best buildings are like that.
Architecture, Institutional, Project, !POST
As always, articles on the practice of web design are so applicable to those in the architecture industry. Though some of the advice is the norm in architectural practice, there is still much to learn from this article.
!POST, Business
Lebbeus Woods comments on Sarah Williams Goldhagen’s article in the New York Times about the idea that there is a current trend in Architecture that is trying to embody nature. Her main example regards tree metaphors.
While Goldhagen’s article seems to be largely concerned with a neo-phenomenology of embodied nature, Lebbeus’ commentary brings up an excellent point about how this trend is hardly new, though it tends to come and go. His examples are from the turn of the 20th century movements of Expressionism and its attempt to evoke nature, though as Lebbeus points out their concerns mostly focused on geological ideas.
It seems to me that many of that much of contemporary architectural thought is largely re-hatching the architectural equivalent of abstract expressionism. Much like the the painters of the mid 20th century did in response to expressionism of the early part of the century, many contemporary architects are trying to dissolve the figure of the building in favor of an abstract ideal of affectation, which acts as a substitute for evoking nature directly.
While Goldhagen may have a point that some may easily be interpreted as direct metaphors of natural phenomena, much of the architectural discourse is around such ideas as qualitative performance, biomimetics and parametric variation, which are all ways of abstracting away the direct metaphorical content of natural phenomenon and dealing with the ideas behind them. Though with the contemporary tools at our disposal, such abstraction is perhaps more potent that true imitation, it is unlikely that one can claim that any building can live up to Goldhagen’s need for a phenomenological connection to nature and it is worth remembering Lebbeus’s admonishment that architectural form is limited in ability to address such need in its entirety.
!POST, Architectural_Theory
An interesting video showing how glass manufacturer, Corning Glass, envisions how glass will be used in technology in the near future. The gist involves a lot of ubiquitous glass display and touch control surfaces.
Science_Fiction_Made_Real, Technology, !POST
Great read on the importance of API’s for better leveraging information to meet ones business goals.
Beyond that, API’s hold a lot of interesting concepts and lessons for Architectural practice. An API is a way of abstracting the interface between different programs. It speaks to a modular and distinct information architechure that none the less behaves as if it is continuous. Too often in Architectural thought, buildings are conceived of as either totally discrete objects or as a singular vision to be propagated across all Architecture in a continuous field. It can be difficult to think of buildings as discrete fields of program that none the less need to interface with the larger context around it in a seamless way while retaining their own identities.
Programming, !POST
Like a huge net, this neutrino detector will be built on the floor of the sea and will cover an area of several cubic kilometers. The structure will consist of long cables anchored to the sea floor with large glass spheres brimming with sensors attached to them. While consisting mostly of empty space, the really interesting thing is that because the structure lives on the bottom of the sea floor, it will be totally inaccessible to humans. Architects rarely think of what an architecture might be without humans and the few that do tend to think in a purely formal or virtual sense, creating buildings with very little in the way of program or function. Yet clearly there are programs that lack any human interaction and exists in a very actual sense, rather than virtually.
Physics, Infrastructure, Architectural_Theory
The apparent incongruity of our 3 dimensional space and the theoretically predicted 9 dimensional space of super-string theory has fascinated me for years.
The proposed idea is that the other 6 dimensions are still wrapped up and very small, so only the 3 we currently live in are experienced. In many ways, this parallels our built environment where we only perceive the usual 3 dimensions, however every space is filled with all sorts of other dimensional data, from the mundane aspects like program, circulation, and temperature to the more ephemeral aspects like the space of a conversation.
The real trick is visualizing all these additional dimensions in a way that is not purely reductive. I have no answers, but it is a problem I will be trying to tackle for years to come. Suggestions are certainly welcome.
You can also read more at:
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-12-theory-simulate-big-bang-supercomputer.html
Physics, Super_String_Theory
While a very cool idea, don’t let this make you think that your clothes will replace your smartphone one day. Do you really want to wear the same shirt every day or deal with the complexities of transferring your data securely to each day’s clothes?
The real use of this type of technology will be adding another level of perception and connectivity to your day to day lives. As the article points out, adding sensors that detect radiation or monitor your vital signs are a possibility. But what about a tee-shirt that understands your movements and gestures and can use them as input into other devices. Or perhaps it could dynamically display information when viewed through a reality overlay system, be they glasses, contact lenses, or just your smartphone screen. By embedding information and computation directly into our clothes they become even more an extension of ourselves.
Also check out Mashable’s take:
http://mashable.com/2011/12/29/cotton-computer-clothing/
Technology, Material_Science, Science_Fiction_Made_Real