Ken Robinson: Changing Paradigms (about education)

BIG conference in Spain (ETSAM)

Bjarke Ingels @ ETSAM, "Yes is more" from mstrpln blog mx on Vimeo.

BIG

Indoor Clouds (Cloudscapes) by Tetsuo Kondo Architects + Transsolar

I were in the Architectural Biennial in Venice last week, and one of the most promising things for me to watch was this indoor clouds. But sometimes destiny plays its own way and I end up watching a room full of humidity and thats about it. Even though it wasn't the Biennial fault nor the artist, the problem is that in order to make interior clouds there must be certain conditions (stacking a warm humid layer 25º and 100%RH between a lower cool dry layer 18º and 40% RH and a higher hot dry layer of 37º and 60%RH) without these conditions clouds won't form indoors.... So the problem there was that the door was open half of the time because it is an exhibition and you can't  forbid people from moving to the next intervention in their way, and obviously it was impossible to keep the air in the proper form. But anyway I still think that it is very interesting, hopefully for the first visitors during the morning they probably had the chance to watch these spectacular cloud formations.







Tetsuo Kondo Architects


Transsolar

Venice Architecture Biennial

Gary Chang's 24 - Room Apartment

One of the best useful ideas of how to make the most of the space... I have some trouble trying to figure out if this should be tagged as container architecture or sleeping units or prefab houses, so at the end I didn't use any of this options. What do you think about it? Maybe it could also have the tag Robotics and industrial design. Is quite hard to make decisions with something like this!

TED talks: REX Architecture

Some more info over REX

When Copyright Goes Bad

The debate is a hot spot since some years back... And there are some really unfair actions going on. So I am just dropping you this info:





Electronic Frontier Foundation

Max Lamb for Commissioned

I like the fact that this stone alike furniture don't have anything to do with rock but they have a really interesting process of making them. Just watch the video...

Poly Chair from Max Lamb on Vimeo.


"amongst his pieces
is 'scrap poly furniture' whereby a process of destruction is used to create a chair, stool
and bench. here a variety of simple tools are used to make the furniture manually. the piece
are carved and the soft tactile polyurethane rubber finish is applied on top."

Max Lamb

Alpha Blast by Marco Dessi

I just discovered sandblast... It's not like I haven't heard it before, but I never realized how easy is the process and how many things you can do with sandblast. Looking through this article about a Mouthblown glass designed in 1952 by Hans Harald Rath and redesigned thanks to a really easy sandblasting technique on its surface, really opened my mind to a whole new set of possibilities. The designer of the reinterpretation is Marco Dessi. You can just check in the pictures the whole process:






Then I am posting some videos (nothing great to speak in the name of truth) with some of the infinite posibilities of sandblasting and different examples of sandblasting machines depending on the material applied. And this are just few examples:

Metal:


Jeans:


Glass:

Winscape or a virtual window in any room

Now a room with no real window has no excuse to be a impressive place, thanks to this application + device. I imagine this could become a big issue in near future if they get to know how to promote and propel the project.





Winscape

My Playground by BIG

BIG and propaganda... This guy (well all the studio too) is an amazing architect as well as a great seller. He does comics to promote himself, gives talks... and now makes videos involving people jumping around his buildings. Obviously it is not chance, it is a very thoughtful marketing enterprise based on the idea that architecture alone might not be easy to sell but if you ad a cool wave with some cool activity/people. A lot of people will seem to be interested, and the most important fact is that the main focus is young people?? Whom better to sell the architecture they will be willing to consume? (they might not know it yet, so lets push them a little further...)

UK Pavilion at Shanghai Expo 2010 by Thomas Heatherwick

The pity here is that this building already called The Seed Cathedral could have been done by R&Sie(n) or by Philippe Rahm but it's not. So back from that fact, I think that is a great Ad, and don't be surprise because thats what a pavilion is all about... Advertisement. It has always been by default the most iconic architecture reflecting the countries way of thinking, since the beginning of the World Fairs it always have been this way.

UK has one of the best education in Landscape Architecture, and the inhabitants of UK in general love and appreciate landscapes and working on landscapes. So this iconic building focus on this issue and adds the sustainable point of view, which is the obsession to collect every single seed from the earth so they could be preserve.

Also the buiding has a very abstract shape, thanks to an "enclosure that throws out from all faces a mass of long, radiating cilia. Their length means they gently sway in response to any wind movement. It rests on its soft forest in an urban field, surrounded by a concrete canopy that resembles unfolded wrapping paper." Giving a really contemporary aura to the building (and the country) while making the building perception a truly enjoyment.

"The pavilion is covered in 60,000 transparent rods, each containing seeds from the Millennium Seed Bank in the UK."







Images of the project during last stages of construction:
















Heatherwick studio

My only dislikable aspect is that is a copy from an older project also done by Heatherwick Studio called  Sitetooterie II in Essex Uk, meaning literally "sit oot" in a building.

The orange glow in that project are explained this way: "As the long thin windows all point at the exact centre of the cube, it only takes a single light source, located at this central point, to send light through every tube, causing the windows to glow orange. A small number of them also project into the cube to form seating."

How to create Scent by Luca Turin

Luca Turin on the science of scent. Via TED


I find Fascinating, the fact that you can control, create and substitute one compound of scent for other that is exactly the same. Making natural scents in a complete artificial way.

Barcelona regulated LED lamps, high technology.

A great idea to reduce energy to reduce unused light, to focus on individuals and groups. To manage the intensity of light depending on different issues involving the surroundings of the lights and the hours and months when they are in use. A really efficient use of LED lightning technology. What I don't get is why everybody else don't do the same?

Why "Tron Legacy" Will be Awesome: the Director's an Architect

Tron was one of my favorite films when I was a Kid (that's why I am probably a little freaky). Anyway, I am expecting much from the film and I just read an amazing thing... The director is not a film director, it's an architect. At first I was shocked so I just had to look the reason of doing such thing (picking an architect instead of someone from the film industry). And after searching I just realized that it just makes completely sense.

At this point is when everyone is expecting the WHY. Ok, who else can say that has an amazing design background, Web-design, a fine appreciation of space and how it flows, the texture of the movie means that he also had to have a knack with graphic design and product-design; and the heavy CGI means he has to understand animation work flows like a master.

Who else but a trained-architect has a resume like that?







Then here you can see a conference with Joseph Kosinski (the director).

Nature by Numbers

Automatic Internet and the Internet of Things

A Smarter Planet

Biomimicry = The next frontier

I was looking how wetlands can be used to treat water and I came up with this piece of gold. Enjoy!!

Mumbai Builds Miles of Elevated Walkways

What happens if the pathways get too crowded... maybe this could be part of a solution, and it could evolve into interesting projects.

TED Talks: Barry Schuler; Robin Chase; David Keith

Some of the videos are here not because I am interested in the main topic but because certain detail or part of them. For instance Robin Chase main topic doesn't interest me a bit, as CO2 reduction focus shouldn't be mainly over cars (that's what a big part of the industry wants us to think), and as David Keith says... the economic reasons implied in lowering CO2 are blocking us into making other important decisions being worth talking (also even if we are ever able to reduce CO2 emissions the concentrations in the atmosphere will still be there as concentration means = accumulation over the years). What I do appreciate about Robin is in fact the collective reasons of information and transportation, the zipcar as a new urban formula and the future it brings (apart for the eloquent green topic behind).

Keith main topic is extremely interesting and important (I am not saying with this: "forget about CO2", I also think it's important to go "sustainable" and to reduce CO2, with out forgeting that sustainable doesn't only imply CO2). And Barry Schuler is fresh air, how to read the new manual of codes (also thanks because I never thought before about medicines as let's see if it works). As I pointed in a quote one or two days ago "if you don't know how to do it then you don't understand it".

Tron Legacy

Tron was one of my favorite movies as a kid, so I am expecting quite a lot from this film. It's going to be a long waiting until next winter...