It is fascinating how a simple act on mundane objects can create something amazing. These landscapes carved out of books have a strange intimacy while remaining mysterious. This duality makes all the difference.
Originally via materialicious.
http://www.materialicious.com/2011/12/book-carving-landscapes-by-guy-laramee.html
!POST, Art
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.
You can check out more at:
http://insidethefactory.typepad.com/my_weblog/2011/12/revit-spaghetti.html
And download it at:
https://github.com/ikeough/dynamo
!POST, Revit, Revit_App
A really excellent presentation from AU2011 by Jason Grant and David Light on how to leverage Revit for producing great graphics. Much of their advice is straightforward and many people will know pieces of it, but I doubt very many have been as systematic about it as what is shown in the presentation. Like most software for producing architectural graphics, much of the advice revolves around developing a consistent process that can be integrated with the day to day workflow and the curation of Revit families for all those little elements of presentation, like people, analysis lines
+ arrows and site elements. Anything to give life and depth without cluttering the graphic is useful.
Revit, !POST
The vacuum of space isn’t empty. It is filled with a constant hum of virtual particles being created and destroyed. It turns out that a couple of scientists have succeeded in making virtual photons real by bouncing the virtual photons off a mirror moving near the speed of light. In this case the mirror is a an electric field.
There is a lesson in this for Architecture; space is never truly empty. It is always filled with the capacity to create and affect. At its heart, this is what Minimalism is about; it is trying to create mirrors to reflect the virtual into actuality. On the flip side, the abstract expressionism of much of the Architecture of the past decade was trying to express the virtual through the actual. It has always been there, but the change in perspective is interesting.
Science, Physics, Quantum_Mechanics, !POST
While not the easiest read for those not familiar with the techniques described to study the micro-structural avalanches, it is still an interesting article concerning the nature of material change.
For a number of years I have intrigued by the idea that Architecture can be thought of as purely a material state with all that implies concerning phase changes, fluctuations in bulk intensive qualitative like temperature and the importance of singularities and flaws. This article with its discussion of sudden shifts in the crystalline structure cascading heterogeneously through portions of the material seems like an interesting idea for architectural research.
Material_Science, Science, !POST
Fluid dynamics is a tough subject but incredibly interesting and full of fruitful architectural ideas like boundary interfaces, turbulent flows, mixing and phase transitions to name a few. This gallery of images and videos showing various experiments and simulations in fluid dynamic research are show all sorts of interesting phenomenon. Some of my favorites are the Direct Numerical Simulation of Stratified Turbulence, the Bursting Water Balloons, and the Optimal Chaotic Mixing by Two-Dimensional Stokes Flows.
The chaotic mixing seems especially promising as a method of developing a new architecture. For example an architecture developed by casting programmatic volumes into a fluid mixing field and letting them distort and mix, forming overlapping boundaries.
Also check out:
APS Physics | DFD | Image Gallery
APS Physics | DFD | Video Gallery
Direct Numerical Simulation of Stratified Turbulence – APS Division of Fluid Dynamics 2011 Image Gallery
Bursting water balloons
Optimal chaotic mixing by two-dimensional Stokes flows
!POST, Fluid_Dynamics, Science, Architectural_Theory
Like the Lytro camera, this camera looks really interesting as it allows one to see the movement of light. There are some physical limitations on the type of scene, but it is amazing the detail that can be shot.
!POST, Technology, Photography
Storing quantum information permanently – While rocking my son to sleep, I have been catching up on some reading and finely read this interesting article on quantum memory. The basic premise is that scientists have come up with a way to store information geometrically, in this case using a torus. Sound familiar to anyone… sounds like Architecture to me.
Case in point, my finally grad studio was on formalizing knowledge geometrically to create a library. The instructor encouraged us to us topological knots, such as torus's. Though my pursuit ended up exploring cellular automata instead, this article is fascinating as it points a way in which topological knots might actually be used to store knowledge.
Parallax is a dizzying monochrome nightmare created by two people – Parallax is a new maze game where one travels through two overlapping dimensions with different geometry to find the exit to the maze. It is difficult to explain without watching the video, but the general concept is that one can see and travel through portals between the two dimensions on your way to finding the exit.
To conceptualize multiple dimensions is a difficult task and one that Architects should consider. We already balance try to balance the multiple, overlapping and sometime contradictory uses, programs, perceptions and ideas that make up a space, but to formalize it is a whole other challenge, Parallax shows one possible way.
The implications for Architectural Visualization are immense. In its basic form, it would allow one to take a photo, import it into modeling software that would generate a 3D model with mappings. From there it would be easy to insert new rendered objects.
I really look forward to seeing where this technology goes.