Belgian architects Pieterjan Gijs and Arnout Van Vaerenbergh‘s new installation “Reading between the Lines” is a 10 meter tall layered steel structure which manages at the same time to be present but also beyond the reach of physicality. The piece, which takes the form of the many steeple churches in the region, is meant to architecturally convey the contemporary “virtue” of transparency, while attempting to expand our notions of it. More on the project after the jump!

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Magnetic Void from James Miller on Vimeo.

Filmmaker James Miller captured the demolition of the British United Shoe Machinery Company in Leicester, England, then reversed the playback to create this moody video. According to Wikipedia, the BUSM was the largest manufacturer of footwear machinery and materials throughout most of the twentieth century and was once, naturally, the largest employer of jobs in Leicester. Things went awry after the company changed hands in the mid-1990′s and numerous lawsuits ensued. Following years of this bureaucratic standoff, the original BUSM  factory was set for demolition to make room for new housing developments.

Miller’s photography surveys the disparate natures between the construction of the decaying factory’s brick and mortar walls and the large hydraulic arms of machinery, which tear into the former with great effortlessness. However you read into the images, one thing is certain: neither the old machinery to which BUSM owed their prosperity, nor their contemporary counterparts can escape entropy’s reach.

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Capsule Hotel – 9 Hours from Christoph on Vimeo.

In Walden, Thoreau, upon seeing a tool shed measuring 6-by-3 feet, mused that a man could live comfortably in such capsule-like quarters, which offered freedom through economy (“economy is a subject which admits of being treated with levity, but it could hardly be disposed of.”) Now, most of us can hardly gauge the possibility of spending one night in such a box, let alone maintaining permanent residence in it. That is, unless you live in Tokyo.

Capsule hotels have existed in Japan for the past thirty years, but the 9 Hours “hotel” is distinguished by its minimalist design, characterized by clean lines and simple graphics. Designed by Cubic Corp. in collaboration with Studio S, the hotel experience is distilled down to the essential services one expects from a hotel which are then related across a time schedule: 1 hour to shower + seven hours to sleep + 1 hour to rest = 9 hours. Whether the guest must adhere to that strict linear cycle remains unknown. Aside from the conceit, the little hotel is impressive in the way its aesthetic is carried across all scales–everything has been designed, from sleepingwear and hand towels to the light-based system which acts as a silent wake-up alarm for guests inside the capsules. Sounds comfy, doesn’t it?

[via Laughing Squid]

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WTC Names Arrangement Tool from blprnt on Vimeo.

When the 9/11 Memorial opens next week, the names of the victims of the attack will be engraved along the granite frame of the “memory footprints” where the towers once stood. The arrangement of the names won’t be alphabetical, or even random. Their aggregational logic will be based on an algorithm that groups victims’ names according to the stories of friendship that emerged after the towers fell.

Take Victor Wald and Harry Ramos. The two men didn’t know each other until Ramos noticed Wald collapsed in the stairwell of the north tower as the evacuation was in progress. Ramos sat with Wald until the towers collapsed, telling him “I won’t leave you.” Their names will be engraved side-by-side on the edge of the memorial fountains.

The algorithm was developed by Jer Thorp and LocalProjects, who sent out a call to survivors’ families for “meaningful adjacencies” and received over 1,200 responses. Each adjacency request links two names together, then links those names to any other requests made, in a kind of “chain link” of moments. More on Fast.Co and Gizmodo.

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When The New York Times profiled theoretical physicist Geoffrey Scott last December, they labelled him, “the physicist who solved the city.” Being a profile, the anecdotal evidence provided–it seems Scott is mildly allergic to food–was just as interesting, if not more, than his work with cracking the mathematics of cities. Scott was depicted as a serious scientist who had no trouble comparing his work to the canonical work of Kepler, Galileo, and Newton, to which his seemingly rationalist approach attests. More interesting, however, was the fact that the Times piece drew an analogy–one which Scott is fond of–between the work of the physicist and that of urban commentator and speculator Jane Jacobs, who argued that the strength of the city lies not in its infrastructure but in the facilitation of human interaction. “One of my favorite compliments is when people come up to me and say, ‘You have done what Jane Jacobs would have done, if only she could do mathematics,’” West told the Times.

West’s TED presentation explores this mathematics behind his profound assertions. Throughout, he draws analogies with the statistical quanta of cities to the math-based laws governing biology, specifically aspects of growth and entropy. For example, while both biology and the city are determined by degrees of scalability, the rate of life in biological systems decreases as that scalability increases. The opposite is true for cities, West says, in that by doubling the size of the city every measure of human activity always increases by 15% per capita–a comprehensive thesis which paradoxically includes growth in waste and sustainability. This, of course, spells doom for a urbanizing globalization in which our thirst for comforts and distractions, such as iPads and other electronics, will sooner or later outweigh the city’s greatest ecological benefits, such as mass transit. As West told the Times “The only thing that stops the superlinear equations is when we run out of something we need. And so the growth slows down. If nothing else changes, the system will eventually start to collapse.” The only answer out of the problem? Endless creativity and innovation.

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Surface Tension from Smout Allen on Vimeo.

When we wrote a couple weeks back about the Geoff Manaugh-curated show “Landscape Futures: Instruments, Devices, and Architectural Inventions” at the Nevada Museum of Art, we only had installation photos to share with you. Now, almost 2 weeks since its opening, we have a series of images documenting the show’s colorfully creative and magically locomotive projects, including Liam Young’s Darwinian-cyberpunk mash-up of the Galapagos Islands and Smout Allen’s Rube Golberg-like system which conceptually generates power from the water passing through it.  Each project offers visitors “unexpected access to the invisible—and often fantastical—streams of data constantly generated by the landscapes around us.” Futurists, proceed!

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The most recent in the New York Times’ video series commemorating the tenth anniversary of 9/11 ascends the top stories of the under-construction World Trade Center Tower 1 (née Freedom Tower), where steel workers nimbly navigate the ferro-skeletal terrain to construct the . Set to a collage of workers’ voices commenting on the difficult, but rewarding aspects of their work, the stunning photographs document the relatively unchanged-working methods of the ironworkers, who still, just as they did a century ago, brave the vast openness to help guide and set in place raised and lowered beams.

The images do, in fact, retain the turn-of-the-century romanticism which framed the pioneering engineering and construction methods that begat the modern age of the skyscraper. Looking at the images and listening to the flood of pride emanate from the workers themselves, the building of towers still proves unfailing alluring. With clean, assertive geometries born of the strongest materials, they rise upwards, charting new, unstable territory where only the most capable and stalwart of workers venture. “So what’s the best thing about ironworking?” “The view.”

All Photos: Damon Winter/The New York Times

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THE END OF GEOGRAPHY from Tatiana Plakhova on Vimeo.

Tatiana Plakhova’s work visualizes vast fields of vectors projected onto landscapes, urban formations, and the sea. Plakhova’s “The End of Geography” is the latest entry in her series of “Complexity Graphics,” in which she constructs entire hybrid worlds, fictional sea creatures, and everything in between, solely through a deft application of highly articulated, seemingly algorithmically-determined clusters of lines. More after the jump!

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New York Times R&D Lab: The kitchen table of the Future from Nieman Journalism Lab on Vimeo.

The Research & Development Lab at The New York Times has a track record of inventing beautiful, smart technologies that interface with their product. For example, Project Cascade visualizes the life of a Times story on Twitter.

The latest R&D Lab project is a kitchen table that — not unlike a giant iPad — displays the Times’ content in an easily-consumable way. Incredibly, the touch-screen technology they’re using reacts to objects placed on the table. Put your mobile device down on the surface, and the table communicates with it.

Of course, the project provokes questions about the “infinite scalability” of touch-screens, and the problem of “economies of scale” therein. A lot of people are calling the project “brilliant” and “groundbreaking,” but I’ve been using my iPad as a table for a year (it’s all I have space for). Necessity is the mother of invention.

[via Gizmodo, Neiman Lab]

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This morning the New York Times released a video post featuring a revolving 3d model to visually articulate the programmatic diversity of and the architectural/infrastructural distribution across the 16-acre site. Set to the Time’s version of Muzak ( i.e. “contemplative”, repetitive measures of throbbing bass lines), the video explores the site’s projected above- and below-ground conditions with color-coded massing elements approximating the sizes and configuration of the more hidden aspects of the construction, including the new subway and PATH tunnels and accompanying pedestrian platforms and walkways.

Interestingly, we are shown some of the construction troubles which have befallen Santiago Calatrava’s ridiculous is-it-a-bird-or-not-and-why entrance hub due, in part, to a strange arrangement of circulatory systems–the pedestrian passage which extends from the street to some of the train platforms passes underneath the subway tracks, requiring workers to dig under the tunnel while keeping it in place. This inclusion of underground networks and mechanical systems such as a chiller plant and help to flesh out the project. The video is indicative of the great coordinative efforts of architects, planners, and engineers along with city officials and of the importance of the continuation of these efforts to guarantee the project’s expected completion date of 2020.

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