Find Your Way Underground With AR
We all know Augmented Reality (AR) is the next big thing. Enhanced by the iPhone's 3.0 OS and the iPhone 3GS, AR startups, such as Layar and Tonchidot, pop up like mushrooms these days. British developer Acrossair came up with another great iPhone application that superimposes graphics and information on live camera feeds, called Nearest Tube.
Don't Unplug While Recharging
A picture by our friend, photographer Sipke Visser, just to show that some things turn positive in this time of economic crisis and global pollution. Walking through London last week, I stumbled upon this great fuel station for electric cars. It was the first time for me to see such a thing. Electric cars are […]
Ai! Amsterdam Wants To Break Free!
This blog’s aim is to report about the flexible city. This is not only about moving physical shapes and patterns, but also about the institutional context. On this blog we’ve frequently shared our critical remarks about the current patronising policy in Amsterdam. These days the frustration that we and a lot of people carry with […]
The Inkjet City
Recently we wrote about Contrail. This project even goes beyond that! Some guys have invented an amazing city printer called the Chalkbot. The Chalkbot is a fully automatic robot that is able to print the streets as if it’s a piece of A4 paper slightly slipping through your inkjet printer. Besides the fact that the […]
The Two Creative Classes
Many of mankind’s greatest achievements are products of the urban cauldron. That the density, heterogeneity and social environment of cities leads to more rapid innovation and idea sharing should not surprise many, but it’s worthwhile to examine and understand the mechanics of the relationship between cities and their cultural products. Richard Florida’s Creative Class thesis has […]
Size Matters: Ring Roads Of World Cities
Mick Jagger once said about Amsterdam it’s the smallest metropolis in the world. Living in Amsterdam, I’m stay curious about what Jagger saw what I don’t notice. Amsterdam is with hardly a million inhabitants definitely a small city. But what makes a city a metropolis? Is it about the presence of multiple urban functions, about […]
Mapping The Fruit!
“To my delight I found serviceberry trees in several places, as well as mulberry bushes and trees, two cherry trees I didn’t know about, and even a plum tree!” The people behind the awesome blog La Casa Urbana were surprised to come across such a lot of fruit trees in public space in their neighbourhood. […]
Almost Forgotten: BP's Testing Centre
As a kid watching TV, I always looked forward to some commercials that I particularly liked. One of the commercials that fascinated me the most was a BP one spreading the slogan ‘BP on the move’. The story line is about a pizza boy delivering a pizza at the BP testing centre (a high plate-glass […]
Free Classic: 'How To Build Your Own Living Structures' By Ken Isaacs
Check out this PDF version of the book ‘How To Build Your Own Living Structures’ by Ken Isaacs, published in 1974. This classic is about Isaacs’ Matrix Idea of building sustainable, eco-friendly, modular, flexible, multi-functional living structures which reconfigure the entire volume of a room, being bigger than furniture and smaller than architecture. The book […]
The Moving City By Uniqlo
Japanese fashion company Uniqlo has made this online calendar about the moving city. The time lapse movies show the city as an organism and give a good insight in the relation between moving and static bits of the city. Uniqlo made the calender available for intergration in a blog, a MySpace or a Facebook account, […]
Urban Pixels: Street Lights Of The Future?
Urban Pixels is a project by the MIT Media Lab. This distributed system is built of individual pixels that configure together in a display system. The pixel systems are suited for lighting and display and are therefore blurring the boundaries between digital facade displays and street lighting. Very interesting, because it can be used for […]
Rough Trade London: A Transformable Style Shop
Rough Trade is definitely one of the coolest music stores in London. Besides LPs, EPs and CDs, magazines, books and T-shirts, Rough Trade sells inspiration. It’s a place to be, with a bar inside selling food and drinks and a mobile work spot with a couple of Mac Pros. There’s even a traditional photo booth […]
How Humorous Architects Promote Their Buildings
Many, many architects take themselves too seriously and lack a good sense of humour. The guys of Fantastic Norway, who also created the fantastic cardboard clouds at the Norwegian Centre for Design and Architecture, are quite different. To gain more attention for their creations, they organised the project Walking Berlin, in which they dressed up […]
Gecekondu, Chapter 2: Amsterdam
New chapter of the Gecekondu and Sausalito Almere story! Last week we reported about the Gecekondu summerhouse hotel built by DUS Architects at the beach of Almere, which was part of the Sausalito Almere art village. Unfortunately, top-down interventions made Sausalito disappear. Their seem to be no real societal problems to look after, so the […]
Turning Urban Nightlife Into A Game
The New York Times and Bright report about a new, free, smartphone application by Dennis Crowley called Foursquare. Foursquare seeks to turn the urban nightlife into a game by letting you earn points and unlock badges for discovering new places, doing new things and meeting new people. It’s one of those apps which demonstrate that […]
