Ah, the New York City skyline.
A mile-high dome shades Midtown Manhattan, an airport floats off Battery Park, Harlem is enveloped in a hulking megastructure literally lifting residents out of poverty, and the tallest building in the world, continuously under construction, sprouts from ground zero, growing without end.
“It’s the city that never was but could have been,” said Irene Cheng, an architectural historian. “Sort of an alternate future.”
Popularity: 20% [?]
logorama is a short film by the french collective H5, which visualizes and explores the way that logos are increasingly embedded in our existence. after winning the kodak prix at the cannes film festival this year logorama is being screened at various international locations in the coming months.
Popularity: 47% [?]
So these cities of the future are still made of concrete, but also of transient slivers of silicon and amorphous clouds of wireless activity. Atoms and bits. The great promise of informatics – or whatever we end up calling it – is that the fabric of the city is once again malleable, responsive and can adapt through learning from layered patterns of behaviour. Perhaps we don’t call it informatics, but architecture and engineering, just a new form of both crafts. Yet these developments pose radical changes, from the point of view of skills, processes, business models and purpose, and Ratti and his crew of collaborators are indicating one possible future for our work. He concludes by tentatively suggesting, “It’s almost redefining, I believe, what being an architect is.”
Popularity: 45% [?]
Eric Gordon, a professor of new media at Emerson College, and Gene Koo, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, just won a MacArthur Foundation grant for their innovative new take on community planning using Second Life, a three-dimensional virtual world which users explore as avatars.
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Every tree is a living archive, its rings a record of rainfall, temperature, atmosphere, fire, volcanic eruption, and even solar activity. These arboreal archives together reach back in time over centuries, sometimes millennia. We can even map human history through them—and onto them—tracing famines, plagues, and the passing of our own lives.
Popularity: 20% [?]
When real-world and computer graphics objects are blended into real footage in real time, you have reached augmented reality (AR). Combining live video imagery with computer-generated graphics, motion-tracking and other data, Layar promises a mobile web where users can walk down a city street and receive real time demographic information, histories of buildings, and block-by-block news. and More…
Popularity: 39% [?]
Visualizing power is a way of interpreting and understanding it. And this understanding can become a basis for challenging it. Design can be used to describe and locate power, to pressure those who hold power, and ultimately to facilitate and generate power by bringing people together. So why do so few designers take advantage of this persuasive power?
Popularity: 9% [?]
From a representational point-of-view, it is interesting to see some of the ways in which representation plays a vital role in communication. I’ll inevitably revisit this some more, as it’s a topic worth exploring, but these examples span the photographic to the planimetric, while encapsulating a wide range of messages. To begin, it’s always interesting to see the popularity of documenting the urban conditions ala Alex Maclean – through semi-oblique aerial photography. His work stands on it’s own, as well as illustrating some great books like ‘Drosscape’ and ‘Reclaiming the American West’ and the idea of this form shows up often as a method for exploration of the territory between eye level and satellite aerial.
Popularity: 8% [?]
This summer, residents in Chicago and the surrounding region will be asked to plan for their own future, thanks to a collaboration between the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning and a real-life version of SimCity, known as MetroQuest.
Popularity: 10% [?]
The City of Copenhagen launced this bicycle counter yesterday, on May 1st, 2009, on the City Hall Square. Complete with an air pump for your convienence. Yes, it’s free
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Popularity: 8% [?]