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All-you-can-eat brain mulch. The creative process stripped open and the wires fiddled with. Free chunks of media: animal, vegetable, musical, printed and tangible.
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Posts Tagged ‘architecture’
NOAH: New Orleans Sci-Fi Floating Arco
Thursday, March 4th, 2010
NOAH is an Arco (get it? Noah’s Arco!) designed by E. Kevin Schopfer AIA, RIBA is a self contained scifi futury type building designed to survive hurricanes, float, and be as self-sufficient as possible. Oh, and its in the Mississippi river in New Orleans.
Arcology was popularized by Paolo Soleri and his work with Arcosanti in the American southwest. It’s also a staple of a healthy science fiction diet.
I’m not sure if this is real work, spec work, or imaginary work. Most architects I have worked with tend to think “if this can be done in 3D on a computer, it can be done in real life.” As its obvious this project has a large scope.
The architect Schopfer’s firm’s website, which like all architecture firm websites is a poorly designed monstrosity, contains sparse information. No date for completion or date of initiation is given. He has worked on some prominent projects such as the Roswell UFO museum and the World Trade Center. He also seems to be into yachts, which could be important for a giant hulking floating city.
There are a few problems with this:
- It’s going to be expensive and New Orleans, the state of Missisippi don’t have that kind of money.
- There are many empty buildings and spaces in New Orleans.
- It blocks and sharply contrasts any of the French Quarter architecture.
- It’s ridiculous.
Though it would be cool.
Tags: architecture, Arcology, Futurism, scifi
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Structure Synth is the DNA of the Machine That Will Consume All of Our Tomorrows
Monday, January 11th, 2010
I woke from a dream of a 3-D printer that had gained sentience, hooking itself to a digester unit to feed its ravenous hunger for the raw materials of creativity. Its mind was stuck in a loop, printing boxes that gained in size then shrunk, ebbing and flowing like a sine wave was at its center, guiding the flailings of its insane electric mind. Buildings were struck down like a hand moving through water, then fed into its maw and spun out into these new, terribly precise shapes that soon filled the land from horizon to horizon.
I’ve been playing around in the software genre of Things That Make Shapes, with little straightforward success but a pleasant amount of brain fermentation. There’s the old stand-by Processing, of course, with its familiar code structure and broad scope to mess with 2-D, 3-D and audio. And Terragen is a fun way to blow time on Amtrak and feel real Old Testament, making the mountains and plains then flying by them, frame by frame. I also admit to ogling City Engine. (Anyone got a few grand lying around?)
But the one that seems to have some potential as the homicidally rational core of some sort of grey goo scenario-style compulsively transforming AI fabricator gone awry is Structure Synth. I don’t have much new to say about it, as that I am presently at the “poke and see if it breaks” stage of exploring its potential. Still, it gives me visions of a force that is compelled to build and build, tearing at the land like a wild beast to assemble nonsensical arrangements of concrete, rebar and glass, continents full of empty halls built for little reason beyond the process of building them.
Or is that just the human race? Build, fray, bulldoze, repeat. When’s that next real estate bubble getting here?
Tags: ai, architecture, dystopia, grey goo, software
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Colossi on the Brain
Monday, November 2nd, 2009
For whatever reason, I’ve been stuck thinking about massive statues of the human form lately. I think a great deal of the enduring appeal of colossal humanoid statues is some kind of innate human tendency toward idolatry. Somewhere in these crazy primate brains there’s a fixation on the idea of directly building a god.
Is this how termites feel about building their mounds? Do honeybees approach their hives with the same fascination we feel when catching a glimpse of the 305 ft Statue of Liberty? Maybe if it was a functional structure…
One of the most compelling visions of colossi as infrastructural elements would be the nearly unwatchable 1997 movie Batman & Robin. Waiting for the next scene to feature a sixteen story colossus holding up a winding highway overpass was all that kept me from walking out of that one. Odd that supervising art director Richard Holland doesn’t appear to have worked as an art director since.
My assumption is that these dreams of Gotham are not reflected in real world urban design because they’re not practical (right triangles are more stable architectural elements than the human form) and don’t seem to stand the test of time all that well. The Colossus of Rhodes was felled by an earthquake. The colossus of Barletta and Rome’s bronze Nero were repeatedly repurposed and eventually used as raw materials for other projects. They won’t let me build an A&W in Thomas Jefferson’s head.
The 12 Jin Ren have a similar origin story to the Colossus of Rhodes (defeat enemies, melt their weapons into statue makings) but very little is out there in the way of further info.
Practicalities aside, there’s something about living in an environment with a lot of epic statuary. Some kind of inspiration floating in the air, a reminder of human potential that makes a city feel more then a several billion dollar heap of brick, plastic and electricity.
Stills from Batman & Robin via Batman Unmasked
Tags: architecture, art, batman, brain mulch, colossi, colossus, infrastructure, jin ren, rhodes, statues
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I Googled ‘Narcotecture’ So You Don’t Have To
Thursday, August 27th, 2009
Yes, that’d be the house that rocks built. Look close.
Since first coming across that delightful term ‘narcotecture’, I’ve had an eye out for examples of how drug lords are playing Extreme Makeover: Home Edition in their fiefdoms. Here’s some clicky things with minimal commentary:
-P.J. Tobia’s photos from Kabul. Highlights: a ‘For Rent’ sign on one (‘Roommate wanted. Must like cooking base and Wii Tennis tournaments.’) and what appears to be the headquarters of the Green Lantern Corps.
-RE: Columbia’s white powdery boom years:
The business brought fast and easy money to a hungry society and the money brought power. Those who had it flaunted it and a whole new aesthetic bulldozed its way into Medellin, spreading out across the world.
El-Cartel investigates this aesthetic and defines ‘Narcotecture’.
Plus a blurry MPEG of some nightlit narco-ruins. Warning: site comes complete with a barking dog on the main page for some reason. Taste is the enemy of narcotecture, after all.
-C-Monster gives a quick tour of Miami ‘narchitecture’, defining it thusly:
Narchitecture is the pit bull of architecture. It grabs you by the (eye) balls and doesn’t let go, marrying a bevy of Mediterranean styles—neo-Classical, Spanish Revival and Fascist—with the vernacular American school known as Contemporary McMansion. The structures are big, overly-decorous and unabashedly gaudy, and, in their placement, show a complete disregard for their environment.
Apt. Swap in some more-favored styles–Persian, comic book, Bond vilian–and that could work just as well in Afghanistan.
-A cool little story about savoring beer and pork sausages in Afghanistan with interludes of discussing navigation by narcotectural landmarks. Fella named Gregory Warne knows a good butcher in Kabul, apparently.
-On a tangent, here’s BLDGBLOG’s excellent post ‘Geology in the War on Terror‘. Remember the giddy thrills of diagram porn when every major news outlet was churning out those drawings of Bin Laden’s secret mountain caves of evil? One can assume that at least one opium baron saw that, looked at his own digs and got thinking about a Pashtun playboy’s life in a location more defensible. Say inside a mountain. One can only wait for the day when that guy pops up on the narco lifestyle channel equivalent of Cribs.
- – -
Beyond narcotecture, I’d be interested to study up on the sort of public goods, communication, transportation and facilities that either result from the drug trade or are built by public image conscious drug lords. A study of ‘narcostructure’ if you will.
Tags: afghanistan, architecture, bldgblog, castle, columbia, drugs, interior decorating, mario, narcotecture
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