By Joop de Boer | Published: Wednesday August 11, 2010
Richard Hardy, a recent graduate from the Bartlett School of Architecture in London, has produced a couple of very interesting movies exploring the future of our cities. This one, featured on BLDGBLOG, is called the Transcendent City, and speculates on the question whether the conception of artificial intelligence has been a necessity in human evolution and if we therefore should embrace emergent technologies to engage with problems of sustainability and the city. The video shows a dreamy world, a forest with artificial flowers dancing in the digital wind and amazing constructions that somehow remind us of a mix between Archigram’s Walking City and the fantasy world of 3D movie Avatar.
“The Transcendent City is an autonomous artificial machine that extends across the earth adapting to the natural eco-systems it encounters while deriving its energy from the renewable resources available at each particular site. The systems desire is to maintain homeostasis within itself whilst maintaining homeostasis within the greater system, Gaia. Its processes are engineered on the molecular scale by nano technologies controlled by molecular computers that monitor and analyse the environment.”
By Joop de Boer | Published: Tuesday August 10, 2010
In contrast to what’s mostly argued about light signs in public space, I truly believe in their attribution to the urban lay-out. Light signs give valuable information when navigating through the city. They simply tell us where it’s nice, busy, and where to drink beer. In fact this is is how we all use them when standing on a crossing in an city you’re unfamiliar with. We unconsciously tend to walk in the direction where light informs us about the activities behind the facades. Light signs mostly promise drinks, music, people and entertainment.
In France and Italy this promise is rather misleading. Lights signs are not the exclusive visual expression of entertaining bars, shops and gambling halls, but are most glaringly used by pharmacies — a function which we can generally consider rather boring. One of the most remarkable element characterizing French and Italian cities is the pervasive presence of the animated green crosses telling us there’s a pharmacy. In fact these signs visually dominate the French and Italian streetscapes. They’re heavy and there are exorbitantly many of them. But they make the street look interesting!
Why should pharmacies make so much visual noise to attract clients? Is it because there are so many of them (one after every 200 meters), which causes a rather heavy competition, or is the visibility of these health services collectively considered important?
A possible answer might come from an Italian professor in urban planning who studied the relation between medicine use and environmental problems at cemeteries. He once told me about Italian grave yards. As medicine use in Italy is among the highest in the world, cemeteries suffer immense pollution problems. All medicines consumed in the last years before passing away go with the body and leave a chemical residue. Even more remarkable are the spatial problems caused by the collective medicine addiction. Bodies are over-conserved and don’t rot because of excessive use of medication. This causes spatial problems on the cemeteries where graves are usually planned to be re-used after a certain period.
What the ancient Egyptians did with their mummies and the Russians did with Lenin, is what modern South Europeans do with themselves, with a little help from the local pharmacy.
By Joop de Boer | Published: Monday August 9, 2010
We just want to share some great stop-motion videos with you. The animations are the result of a graduation project by students of the München Design School. The video’s, which we discovered via Urbanshit, represent the urban life in two streets in München. Both are very pretty and deal on an interesting way with different subcultures like the graffiti and the party scene. Below is the video Reichenbachstraße, click here for Tumblingerstraße.
By Joop de Boer | Published: Sunday August 8, 2010
The video The Eco-Commune by Richard Hardy is a short film exploring a dystopian vision of London in the near future. The economic meltdown of 2009 has left the financial district abandoned, allowing space for nature to reclaim its iconic structures, and a new community of scavengers to settle within its midst.
By Joop de Boer | Published: Saturday August 7, 2010
Did you ever sleep in a hotel with an architecture bookstore on your floor? In Marseille that’s possible. We stayed at Hotel Le Corbusier, to be found in Le Corbusier’s famous building Unité d’Habitation. The hotel on the third floor of the building is combined with apartments on the other floors. It’s a great design hotel which I can advise anyone who’s visiting Marseille.
Most interesting in fact is to personally experience the obsolescence of modern architecture. The first observation is the fragrance in the building — strange, but familiar. It reminds me of the elderly apartment complex my grandmother lives in. It combines two main elements: the typical aroma of common spaces in concrete apartment blocks, and the odor of predominantly older people. It doesn’t smell, but it’s far from fresh and doesn’t represent the clearness as showed on the pictures in the architecture books. Would Le Corbusier have ever imagined that his modern architecture would smell old-fashioned? It’s not strange though. The modernistic buildings has become mature, and the people that want to live in this predefined modernity did so too. The concrete is of the oldest type and the dark brown wooden workmanship inside the building is well preserved, but in contemporary perception typically traditional. In fact the whole building breathes as an old-timer when it comes to the lifestyle of its inhabitants, its fragrance and the building materials.
On the third floor, where the hotel is located, a traditional restaurant, a traditional bar and pastry bakery, an art gallery and an architecture book store can be found. It’s interesting to see how an architecture book store can survive on the third floor of an apartment complex, situated pretty far from the city centre of Marseille. But that’s only because most hotel guests are architects themselves.
In fact these services on a third floor only work in the modern society as perceived by Le Corbusier and some of his disciples (a world in which people were considered a main production element in an industrialized working economy) but the world has changed in another direction. So did the average body length. Okay, I’m 1.95 m. (which is quite tall), but that immediately makes everything in Unite d’Habitation pretty narrow. This becomes clear when measuring myself with an original Modulor, Le Corbusier’s own proportion system, which is rather famous among architects. One thing we should compliment the architect with are the concrete desktop tables constructed as an integral part of the balconies, which are definitely timeless. They’re most certainly still the best place for laptop workers in the warm climate of Southern France.
In their battle for salary increase, the garbage men of the city of Amsterdam decided to strike in May. Their actions led to an entire city full of stinky trash. We were lucky that it wasn’t that warm, otherwise we should have hired some pied piper. In order to make the city a bit more beautiful during these hard times, artist and party organizer Jesse Limmen decided to buy eightteen spray cans and color up the hills of gray plastic. Make art, not trash. Click here for a full series of pictures.
Under the name of Invisible Cities, New York-based designers Christian Marc Schmidt and Liangjie Xia started a fascinating information mapping project that reveals the ever-expanding invisible layer of digital activity that is everywhere around us in the urban environment. The application, which was built using Processing, enables real-time mapping of activities on online social networks such as Twitter and Flickr by generating individual nodes that appear whenever a message or image is posted. Data is displayed by location and hills and valleys are displayed representing areas with high and low densities of data. According to the makers, Invisible Cities describes a new kind of city — a city of the mind. The application is expected to become available for download in the future.
“Invisible Cities maps information from one realm—online social networks—to another: an immersive, three dimensional space. In doing so, the piece creates a parallel experience to the physical urban environment. The interplay between the aggregate and the real-time recreates the kind of dynamics present within the physical world, where the city is both a vessel for and a product of human activity. It is ultimately a parallel city of intersections, discovery, and memory, and a medium for experiencing the physical environment anew.”
By Joop de Boer | Published: Saturday July 31, 2010
Over the last years we’ve encountered a continuous stream of pop-up architecture constructed out of daily objects. Almost every single household product has been used to create a shelter, pavilion, pop-up construction, temporary house, bar or hotel. For me it’s still unclear whether this is a consequence of the bad economic situation for architects (they simply have no real houses to build) or a direct implementation of the sustainability debate. Anyway, they provide us with funny and inspiring examples of unusual constructions. I discovered this project on Recyclart. It’s called ‘Carapace’ and it was originally made by Canadian artist Brian Jungen at the Frac des Pays de la Loire in France. The structure entirely consists of plastic garbage bins.
‘Hello, world!’ is a real installation for the virtual globe of Google Earth, made by German media designer Bernd Hopfengärtner. In May 2006 he created a huge semacode measuring of 160 by 160 meters and consisting of 324 bright and dark squares in a wheat field near the town of Ilmenau, Germany. The code produces the classic phrase ‘Hello, world!’ when it is decoded. “The ambition was to have an aereal view of the code integrated in Google Earths’ regular database”, Hopfengärtner explains.
“The semacode is a visual code that codes character strings (just like the QR code, J.B.). It was planned to graphically code weblinks. The thus extracted pixel graphics can, for example, be retranslated from camera mobiles into URLs. With ‘Hello, world!’ the code serves as a kind of branding of a digital culture whose omnipresence is obvious, yet whose modes of action are unknown in wide parts of society.”
On the website of this great landscaping project, Hopfengärtner provides a KMZ file to see an areal view overlayed in Google Earth. Click here for a photo set on Flickr about the realization of ‘Hello, world!’.
VR/Urban is a Berlin/Glasgow-based collective of ‘public media interventionists’ that works together to create real-time installations. The aim of all their projects is to reclaim urban screens for the public, and so they did with the SMSlingshot project. This neat installation consists of a mobile text gun for spreading information on public screens and media facades. It enables people to launch digital paint bombs at buildings and walls, containing text messages they’ve typed on the phone-sized wooden keypad which is integrated in the wooden slingshot device. After shooting, the messages appear as colored splashes with the message written within, and they will also be real-time twittered.
“Because of the increased commercial interest of paving public space with digital advertising screens the need for accessible intervention devices seemed obvious and necessary. The wish and habit to comment (tag) the surrounding world is also an ancient and still vivant phenomena we try to preserve. (…) People shall not only remain as a passive audience, they must obtain the privilege and beside that the right tools to create their own multimedia content in the streets. The more and more mushrooming media facades, LED supplied walls and huge projections are interesting and worthy technical innovations for the people, but in contrast to the old-fashioned posters in the streets, it is nearly impossible to create own content for these facades or even hang up your digital video.”
The SMSlingshot consists of a projector-equipped minibus and of course the device itself, which is equipped with an ultra-high frequency radio, a hacked Arduino board, a laser, and batteries. Visit the project website to learn more about ‘the making of’.
By Joop de Boer | Published: Wednesday July 28, 2010
In the past we’ve been writing about designing the air, for example here and there. This is a small contribution to this subject in the form of a moonlight rainbow fountain in the South Korean capital of Seoul. This exciting 1,140 meters long fountain is the world’s longest bridge fountain. It’s an aerial design on top of the Banpo bridge over the Han River, which connects the Seocho and Yongsan districts. The moonlight rainbow fountain contains nearly 10,000 LEDs and it sprays 190 tons of water per minute. Installed in September 2009 on the Banpo Bridge, Seoul mayor Oh Se-Hoon praised the structure to further beautify the city and showcase Seoul’s eco-friendliness, as the water is continuously recycled. Click here to watch a video with the fountain in action. (Sorry for the terrible music.)
The Banpo Bridge itself forms a double deck bridge as it is on top of the Jamsu Bridge. When the water level rises too much, the Jamsu Bridge covers with water and gets closed. The lower deck contains pedestrian and bicycle paths that provide easy access to the Banpo Hangang Park on the North side of the river. The Banpo Bridge is a girder bridge and was completed in 1982.
We like vending machines and we like seed bombs, so we were very delighted when we heard about this clever idea from the designers of Commonstudio. Under the name of Greenaid, the agency has launched these nifty vending machines that stimulate a bit of guerrilla gardening by appropriating the existing distribution system of the quarter operated candy machine. Insert a coin, take a seed bomb and create yourself a small green paradise.
Made from a mixture of clay, compost, and seeds, seed bombs are becoming an increasingly popular means combating the many forgotten grey spaces we encounter everyday, from sidewalk cracks to vacant lots and parking medians. The machine helps people to temporarily reclaim derelict urban sites and transform them into green, peaceful spots.
“Whether you’re a business owner, educator, or just a concerned citizen we’d like to work with you to get Greenaid in your community. You can purchase or rent a machine (or two, or ten…) directly from us and we will develop a seed mix as well as a strategic neighborhood intervention plan in response to the unique ecologies of your area. You then simply place the machine at your local bar, business, school, park, or anywhere that you think it can have the most impact. We will then supply you with all the seedbombs you need to support the continued success of the initiative.”
The project website features a short video which explains more about the initiative. As you can see on this map, the Greenaid seed bomb vending machines can already be found at a number of locations throughout the United States. Click here to become a fan on Facebook.
In the past we’ve written about some examples of mobile services that aim to enhance opportunities for location-based communication. For instance BlockChalk, an application that enables us to correspond with strangers that are close-by. Another appealing initiative is Anttenna, a new, free mobile application that facilitates real-time, location-based, person-to-person exchanges. By turning traditional classified listings into geo-tagged Twitter-sized microlistings, Anttenna lets you quickly connect with people nearby.
The idea is pretty simple. Anttenna allows its users to post to supply or demand chains. Listings can be sorted by filters like keyword, category, location, and proximity. Mapping in Anttenna makes it easy to connect with people that are physically close to you. Communication between users goes through Twitter, and the developers have a fancy word for that: ‘Anttweeting’. In this article on Springwise, CEO and co-founder Marcus Wandell explains:
“With the exception of posting ads online and making them searchable, classified ads really haven’t evolved all that much since they were introduced 300 years ago. Anttenna fully leverages the smartphone platforms and new communications standards to give people a whole new way to use classified advertising. Anttenna delivers a constant stream of hyperlocal, real-time listings, always relevant given the moment and location in which they are seen.”
The service is currently available in most metropolitan areas in the United States and Canada, but it is expected to arrive at the other side of the Atlantic in the near future. The video below explains more about the initiative.
By Joop de Boer | Published: Saturday July 24, 2010
Swedish artist Michael Johansson (who in general makes the most brilliant series of heavily packed regular objects) created this handy packed city. The so-called ‘Umedalen Skulptur’ is an installation that can be visited in the Galleri Andersson/Sandström in Umeå, Sweden. It reminds Recyclart of good old Tetris, but then played with urban objects. The installation consists of containers, a caravan, a tractor, a Volvo car, pallets and refrigerators, among others.
Last week the exhibition Fashion & Architecture kicked off with a good party at the Amsterdam Architecture Center (ARCAM). Along with ARCAM and office for architecture and urbanism V2A, our friends of Amsterdam-based fashion label OntFront has challenged four creative duos to enter into a design process. Each duo comprises a fashion designer and an architect who have teamed up specially for this occasion. The results are interesting and impressive.
Cross-over projects are common in the world of fashion as well as in the world of architecture. However, intensive collaborations between fashion designers and architects are pretty new, while there are lots of similarities between the two professions. Both deal with creation of volumes and take constructive principles in mind. At the same time, more and more fashion designers aim to make timeless products that fight high turnover rates, and architects attempt to create buildings and structures that are increasingly flexible, fluid and responsive to the environment. Mutually inspired, the designers cut through the dogmas of their own discipline and allow the visitor an insight into the creative process. The exhibition shows which new design statements have derived from an intense and extraordinary collaboration between professions that have not much in common at first sight. That makes this exploration very appealing and definitely worth visiting.
With this exhibition, ARCAM, V2A and OntFront hope to provide insight in the growing opportunities for collaboration between architects and fashion designers. Please watch the video above to learn more about the project. The exhibition runs until September 11, and entrance is free. By the way, if you’d like to get updated about what’s going on in the vibrant fashion scene of Amsterdam, check out the OntFront blog!
The Pop-Up City is an online magazine by Amsterdam-based design agency Golfstromen which explores new ideas, trends, strategies and methods for a dynamic and flexible interpretation of contemporary urban life.
Last week the exhibition 
