philipp schaerer’s photography is a unique examination of how build for relates to its context. his bildbauten series looks at buildings as negative space and his meereshorst series investigates a variable relationship of building form to its surroundings. schaerer’s work is a collection of fascinating minimalist images that seem to build off of the work of andreas gursky and carlo van de roer, but manages to manipulate the relationship of subject and surroundings in a very potent way.
this is my first post from my google phone, so please forgive anything unusual or unsightly…
I came across an interesting article on aecbytes.com about using ruby to generate bezier splines in sketchup. Curves and scripting in sketchup? This poses an interesting challenge to rhino, especially when coupled with plugins like IES, which gives sketchup BIM-esque functionality.
one could say that all architects do is represent data. from the conceptual sketch to the sd rendering to the cd submittal set, architects are simply representing information graphically as a means of communication. sure there’s consultant meetings, client calls, and other office-type activities, but all of these actions are in support towards providing a clear, comprehensible, graphical representation of information.
here’s a blog post from webdesignerdepot.com that shows 50 absolutely incredible representations of data. looking at these graphics from an architectural perspective, it’s interesting to try to identify how web app design might start to effect architectural representation.
last week mcneel and associates launched their new grasshopper specific website. the site not only features the typical tutorials and info pages, but it also has a very robust social networking element. the site has a forum, user webpages and blogs, and user generated photo and video galleries.
the emphasis on user generated content is an interesting move- and it seems to be working. in a little over 7 days, there have been almost 100 topics generated on the forum boards, over 320 images and over 35 videos posted in the gallery… all for a software that hasn’t been officially released…
if you look at the perception of sustainable architecture today as opposed to 10 years ago there is a pretty remarkable shift. more and more there is less emphasis on off-the-grid cabins in bucolic landscapes and much more mixed-use projects and transit orient developments. the pastoral solar cottage as sustainable icon isn’t going anywhere, but as there is a collective realization of the scale of the problems sustainability needs to address, there is more focus on how architects can make cities themselves more green as opposed to isolated homes. as alex steffen wrote in worldchanging, “if you want to be green, live in a city.” the efficiency of having large masses of people in the same area to bring resources to will trump any sort of gains met by a wind-powered rural cabin, especially as we look to greening our society as a whole.
one of the main issues with sustainability on a city level is how the residents move around within it. unfortunately for many american cities, this is more of a planning issue than anything else. mass transit in a city with a dense central core like new york, philadelphia or seattle is much more successful than a more diffuse city like los angeles or phoenix.
the term Personal Rapid Transit sounds a little bit like an oxymoron or a desperate re-branding of the automobile by GM. while it sounds like “personal” would be referring to either the size or scale of the vehicle, it is more a reference to how the system works. the only built PRT system in morgantown, west virginia uses vehicles that are sized for 20 riders- but what makes it “personal” is that the riders collectively decide where the vehicle goes and that the cars are dispatched as needed. if the there are more riders at one station as opposed to another, the system sends the cars there and if the riders on a car aren’t heading to a specific stop the car bypasses it.
while the WVU system is interesting, it still only runs along a single line. this is a fairly conventional model of how we understand transit it to work- one line takes us a set of destinations where we can either use a different form of transportation or transfer to another line. but what is interesting about a networked or intelligent system is that it has the potential of breaking this model and creating a more facile one. a route is simply a conceptual machine to help a rider understand where that vehicle will take them, but if the rider were to tell the vehicle where they needed to go, the idea of a route would no longer be as important.
the remarkable flexibility of the system is why PRT could have the potential of working incredibly well in more spread out urban and suburban areas. urban planners and transportation designers frequently describe the biggest issue with mass transit is the problem of the last mile- mass transit can frequently take people from one general area to another general area well, but moving people within those areas is a challenge. but with a “personal” mass transit system, the possibility of people quickly and conveniently moving from their houses to a larger transit hub seems likely.
so what makes a PRT system different from the currently form of flexible, personal transportation (the car)? parking. aside from the implied emissions and energy usage improvements of electric vehicles, parking is a clear advantage of a PRT.
in an article titled “we paved paradise”, salon.com reported the effects that municipal parking requirements have had land use policy, the classic example being that a typical code for a restaurant would require five times as much space for parking than the actual restaurant. at one point I had been told (though I can’t seem to source it), that in LA there are five parking spots for every car. while the environmental effects of that many impermeable surfaces and that many heat islands is massive, the real problem is how more and more parking spots continue to spread out our cities more and more- making the need for parking more and more necessary.
this is where the PRT is a really compelling idea. in theory, PRTs are never parked. they either constantly move or shuffle themselves to the station that has the highest probability of needing a vehicle the soonest. so the energy efficient, non-emitting communal machines were already compelling enough to most environmental advocates, but reducing the need for automotive parking could not just provide a cleaner alternative but could begin to significantly alter the way our cities are organized. a more efficient, closer urban fabric is easier to navigate by foot or by bike, which reduces the need for an artificially powered vehicle to begin with- which is ultimately the most sustainable goal of all. more than energy efficiency and resource use, a vehicle that can act as an agent against suburban sparsity will ultimately reduce the needs for vehicles to begin with.
PRTs as a commonly used urban vehicle is still a long way off- but at the moment they provide a clear example of how the vehicles in which we choose to move ourselves can directly effect the space we inhabit. it’s not just about the energy our vehicles use- it’s all of the resources they demand that will determine if they are sustainable or not.
it’s also interesting that qhull has created a grasshopper script. the two forces that brought us 4 years of voronoi architecture (david rutten, the creator of grasshopper and qhull) are intersecting paths again with similar geometry but in a new interface with implicit history.
I recently came across ted ngai’s website and blog. ted’s blog has some interesting video of a robotics seminar he taught at rensselaer polytechnic institute, but it’s his page on his website titled “experiments” that is truly remarkable. ted has done some really incredible work with grasshopper, utilizing the algorithmic editor as an environmental analysis tool that can graphically reflect solar input. what’s striking about ted’s work is that he has been able to control geometry in rhino through environmental data, so creating an architecture that is generated and informed by this data does not seem far behind. judging from his scripts that moves data between rhino and ecotect, it looks like this is his intent.
a selection of ted ngai’s grasshopper and rhino scripts are publicly available on is website, tedngai.net.
sure, eating local is a nice way of feeling sustainable if you live in southern california. you take a little extra time in your whole foods examining your avocados before you place them in your canvas bag, hop on your fixed gear and ride away. but if you live in barrow alaska, the northernmost settlement in the US, eating locally means you’re eating whale blubber- and a lot of it.
jonathan harris’ the whale hunt is one of the most unique and compelling websites I have come across. the shear beauty of the photographs would be worth visiting on their own, but the interface and the method of documentation is really incredible. the amount of photos taken during a specific interval is determined by what is heart rate was at that point- the higher his heart rate, the more photos taken. while there are obvious moments where you’d expect an observer’s heart rate to be high (when a whale is pulled onto the ice by a village of people by hand), there are other moments where you wouldn’t expect a high heart rate that adds an incredible personal touch to the story.
richard saul wurman, creator of the TED conferences, has a created an online proposal to examine 19 cities in the world, with 20 million people, in the 21st century.
even though he hasn’t actually done/published the research yet, the initial analysis of our global population as an “urban species” is very compelling and the site design is pretty slick.
for years it’s been difficult for algorythmic designers to have a resource for scripts. typically, you used to have to wait for david rutten or andrew kudless to post something and then hope that it was what you were looking for. a good friend of mine and TOSD, nick pisca, has created a wiki devoted to creating an online database of various scripts- BLAST. nick and others have done a very good job seeding the initial site with very interesting scripts and the range of software they cover is striking- everything from maya and rhino to running journal files in revit.
my name is alex webb and I am an architectural designer who is primarily interested in performative algorythmic design, environmental sustainability, sustainable transit and building information modeling (BIM).
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