What If New York City 3 by Studio Lindfors

This is pretty awesome, but it would make it much harder to use the political & economic disruption of a precipitous rise in sea levels to stage a world revolution.

[vis BLDGBLOG, so so long ago]

My neighborhood in Los Angeles is too near Griffith Park for any of the outdoor options to be feasible (we regularly see coyotes ambling down our street and the stray cat [...]]]> Cat Ladders has a pretty great collection of vernacular pet architecture that has got me daydreamig about the spatial possibilties for a client that weighs <20lbs.

My neighborhood in Los Angeles is too near Griffith Park for any of the outdoor options to be feasible (we regularly see coyotes ambling down our street and the stray cat population is zero), but an indoor arrangement would be doable and let me break out my atrophied wood shop skills.

azwickyplanung-catladder4 photo by Andreas Zwicky

Hilarious, since IRC is still clearly the better choice for classroom projection. It’s hella confusing to watch stray tweets come in [...]]]>

This was in 1999 and it was cutting edge to give a presentation with my partner contributing her half through IRC projected on a screen. (It’s the future now, so people project Twitter #hashtags.)

Hilarious, since IRC is still clearly the better choice for classroom projection. It’s hella confusing to watch stray tweets come in long after the presentation has moved on. But Twitter is what all the hip kids are doing nowadays…

Incidentally, the Cyborgs & Architects series at Quiet Babylon, from whence comes the above twitter aside, is quite interesting.  That architects would feel anxious about the end of their profession is understandable; the architect’s position in society has been eroding for a long time due to the same industrial processes of specialization and standardization that have transformed the rest of the economy.  Where once there were master-builders now there are general contractors, steel fabricators, curtain wall designers, every manner of consultants from LEED to acoustics, civil/mep/structural engineers, interior designers, landscape architects, etc.

The architect nominally holds the reigns as coordinators , but that actual contribution of any individual to the design process is small and it’s not difficult to imagine a future where the architect is just another consultant, hired by the owner’s rep to provide some advice on massing and help fashion the building’s skin into some pleasing fractal shapes. With the rising popularity of Design-Build projects that place the contractor at the top of building pyramid, one might even say it’s likely.

Against that backdrop comes the spector of human mechanization, either by upgrading our bodies or uploading our minds. Architecture replaced by body hacking or Second Life. Anxiety is felt. A bright line is drawn between altering the environment and altering people.  Only one is ok.

All very understandable,but as these things often go, the bright line is bunk.  Architecture mediates how people experience the environment — it lets in this much  light, this much air, at these locations, and those elevations. It’s basically a filter whose foundation is in earth, but it’s hardly our only filter.  There’s also clothing, vehicles, consumer electronics, hearing aids — sometimes also designed by architects — which drastically alter our experience of the environment, and do it by being attached to us and altering us.

If anything our coming cyborg future would see those non-architectural filters replaced, but structures remain.  Clothing gives way to Carbon Fiber EpiDerm Pro.  Cars to the Usain Bolt Locomatron GOLD.  But, barring a total revolution in human desires, people will still want privacy, still want facilitated socializing, and still want expresions of hierarchy, so houses, bars, and skyscrapers should be with long after grocery stores become unneccessary due to the Pollan Omni-Replicator: Now With Meatier Algorithms!

National Technical Library Prague photo by vtr do

While I agree with Archidose that this video is a wonderful way of presenting the design concept and understand that this house is just a study in the use of wood structural panels and not intended for construction, the engineer in me groaned at the way in which the [...]]]> Click here to view the embedded video.

While I agree with Archidose that this video is a wonderful way of presenting the design concept and understand that this house is just a study in the use of wood structural panels and not intended for construction, the engineer in me groaned at the way in which the walls were completely discontinuous across the 2nd floor.  Modular prefab construction in wood and concrete is often unfairly maligned as cheap or ugly and there’s certainly ample ability to attain architecturally compelling forms with prefab materials.

But know your material.  You’re going to have a hard time using one replicable panel design if every panel is loaded differently by the floor above.  If you’re using an off-the-shelf panel, it almost certainly will not have been engineered to recieve the large point loads caused by upper walls framing orthogonally past lower walls.  Or to cantilever.  Or to be a floor system subject to a highly irregular load patterm.

All this means multiple custom panels are required, which is very doable, but as each piece becomes specialized you’re getting less and less value out of the prefab system you’ve adopted.  Of course you can treat the panels as mere partitions and provide a separate system of columns and beams, but at that point the prefab panels are an aesthetic gimmick rather than a structural system, and you’ve abandoned the study’s premise of building out of one sustainable material as well as the authors fealty to Miesish “honest express of materials.”

Typically I’m completely for untethering conceptual models from practical constraints in order to move the creative process forward, but simply using materials in ways they weren’t intended and in ways they work poorly is not a creative achievement; you also must arrive at elegant ways to make the novel applications work.

La Live by Gensler

It’s not often you see a building get larger as it goes up. [...]]]> Light posting of late, as I’m working on a different online project that I’m quite excited about. When it’s of at least beta quality you’ll hear me chattering about it endlessly, but until then…your moment of zen phallacy:

La Live by Gensler

It’s not often you see a building get larger as it goes up. Something to do with physics…

I’ve had my share of vitriol for Thom Mayne in the past over the hostility and anxiety that his buildings exude, so I was excited to see that he had taken my criticism to heart for [...]]]> Reminiscent of a Norman Foster building broken and twisted by a kinetic event and then frozen in place, Phare Tower:

I’ve had my share of vitriol for Thom Mayne in the past over the hostility and anxiety that his buildings exude, so I was excited to see that he had taken my criticism to heart for this Parisian office block.

I think it’s beautiful, but let’s look at the structure: steel emerges from the ground as bundled roots or muscle fibers (definitely organic, but I wonder what the intended metaphor is?), then distributes itself, forming a structural skin that envelops the building in a kind of distended exoskeleton, providing an impressively redundant lateral system.

Unfortunately, that system appears to have many members that are weakened by kinks and inefficient placement or are just completely extraneous. Those negatives, combined with the modeling nightmare that is the tower’s shape, may mean that the designers choose to treat the triangulated exterior structure as cladding; mere dead load along the building perimeter.

Note that the interior structure of the tower quickly becomes linear, which also suggests that Phare Tower’s radical engineering is really only skin deep. Compare this building to Foster’s Gherkin, which relies almost entirely on the exterior skin for structural support, and the Mayne building becomes less impressive — the equivalent in honesty and utility of throwing a brick face on a 2×4 house.

But that’s par for the course in this kind of pomo architecture, where paying homage to the base structure is paid without regard to the actual physics of materials — symbolically only (which is to say, not at all). Thankfully (sadly? my inner masochist asks.), I’m not the one that has to deal with this system — which is either extremely complicated, or extremely dishonest — and can just enjoy the aesthetics. which are wonderful!

But somewhere out there is a young engineer building a Revit model and cursing the name of Thom Mayne long into the night.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Airspace Tokyo

I like looking at architecture models, but check out the designers’ website above for the as-built version. This skin was developed for a new building, but what’s most exciting is its potential uses on existing structures. In LA, we love us some low-rise stucco box apartments, [...]]]> The impressive facade stylings of Thom Faulders:

Airspace Tokyo

I like looking at architecture models, but check out the designers’ website above for the as-built version. This skin was developed for a new building, but what’s most exciting is its potential uses on existing structures. In LA, we love us some low-rise stucco box apartments, and while economical, they’re no one’s idea of high design (well, few people’s). The easiest way to mod this blight is to attach lightweight structures to the exterior –no demolition, no retrofit, no loss of resident access.  Moreover, these typical apartments tend to have bad insulation, too little privacy, and only token transitions between indoors and out — all problems that a perforated facade can address, by acting as a sun and privacy screen.

See Loud Paper for the conceptual basis for the Airspace Tokyo design, which utilized computer algorithms — giving me hope that I’ll one day be able to put my killer programming skills in long-defunct programming languages (fortran) to use on something more exciting than my moment of inertia calculator.