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

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.

However as several of the comments bring up, the idea of putting spec information directly on drawings or in schedules tends to break down when addressing public works who require multiple bids and true performance specifications with alternates for all products. Large complex projects have similar obstacles.

That said, in my own work, I find a hybrid approach best. For those products and specifications that require only performance information, a traditional specification is best, however for proprietary products or materials that are integral to the design I like to use a schedule(s) that list out the information in a concise way.

It seems to me, that this is fertile ground for an architectural concept. The very idea of treating architectural space as a material continuum rather than the more typical outlook of form that frames space. This is not an argument for the sleek forms of parametric thinking, though it doesn’t exclude them. Rather, I argue that a material thinking is more about exploring contextual relationships, both continuous and discrete, in a way that favors the field rather than any individual piece.

AD Classics: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library / Skidmore, Owings, & Merrill | ArchDaily – The rare book library at Yale is an excellent example of modernism done right. While the building is largely self contained and self referential like most classic modernism, the library's carefully crafted spaces and exquisite materiality of the translucent marble facade, give it a sense of progression and reverence for the functionality of the library.

While the seriousness and sincerity that the library takes for its function seems out of date compared to the irony filled and clever architectural programs that spill out architecture schools and magazines, it is also its greatest asset. While so much modern architecture has lost its ability to affect and instead comes across empty or naive, this library still carries with it a sense self and purpose that is rare.

CHEAP — THE BI BLOG – As always, Bi Blog provides two different takes on their current post concerning the concept of CHEAP. While Jacob's half is poignant in how it describes the consequences of building cheaply even when it was with good intentions. Thom's thoughts on CHEAP, however, are more aspirational and thought provoking. Thom questions why contemporary Architecture seems fraught with expensive formal devices over the careful balancing material excess with other resources equally as important, such as space. It is a good question, but one that must be asked carefully, while heading the implicit warning in Jacob's post.