Occupying places like Wall Street and Starbucks is a pretty straightforward enterprise, but what about occupying a city skyline? In a playful takeover of Madrid’s skyscrapers, the architecture office and collaborative PKMN [pacman] appropriated images of the city’s famous towers and constructed a populist rec room of Ping-Pong tables, slides, and minigolf for a recent installation at Centro Centro. The work, part of an exhibition called “User Guide,” turned an intangible mark of the city’s identity into a playground “occupied by Madrilenians having fun,” PKMN writes. Read more!

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Shopping for the architecture student in your life is always challenging. What do you get someone who prides themselves in having better taste than you and just about everyone else? How could you ever manage to please them? Well, have we got the gift guide for you.

Architizer’s new interns, fresh from architecture school, have hand-picked 12 products, games, and books that piqued their fancy; they think you’ll enjoy them, too. The list appeals to every whim and affectation you’re bound to develop in school, from growing nit-picky about typography and amassing an arsenal of shortcut keys to geeking out over useless (but oh so sweet) morsels of architectural history trivia and just going through your bike stage. Click through for the list!

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For those of us who grew up in arcades, there remains a level of attachment to pinball that is rarely replicated by other games. Invented in the 18th-century in, where else, France, pinball (née bagatelle) went from an aristocratic novelty to emblem of American pop jouissance in the post-war period, after the machine had been electrified and fitted with flippers. Its contemporary form helped shape a domain for the rising, increasingly autonomous youth by creating dynamic and flexible spaces exclusively suited to them, while the machine itself reconfigured the teen’s relationship with an expanding mechanized society. It was, in short, a unique interface different from radio, television and eventually the desktop computer in that it required the body to be alert and almost athletically poised.

With the digitalization of space, of course, that has all been changed. The noble mouse has even seen its day, its basic functionality made redundant by easier and more intuitive means of navigation. Instead, we have entirely digital environments, in which the material world, including our bodies and architecture, has been absorbed. Apart from the political and sociological implications of this reality, there has been a profusion of interactive installations which explore its more ludenic side. Created for Lyon’s annual Festival of Lights, “Urban Flipper” projects a fully-playable pinball game onto the facade of a neo-classical theatre. What differentiates the installation from the admittedly now-over light projection fad is that the architecture itself informs the design of the game. Windows, balustrades, reliefs, and even the capitals of columns become bumpers for the virtual ball passing across the facade. It even bleeps and boinks like the real thing!

[via Ufunk]

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Will Wright, creator of SimCity and The Sims.

In Tom Bissell’s hybrid of video game criticism and deeply personal exposé Extra Lives, the author speaks of squandering entire days fixed in front of an Xbox 360 and opting to exterminate zombies instead of watching the live inauguration of President Obama. With a writer’s charm, Bissell gets even a non-gamer audience to come around and embrace his obsessive habits with an odd mixture of self-deprecation and self-acceptance. I actually found myself trying to weigh the experientially enriching benefits of these time-sucking video games with their obvious social drawbacks.

But what if the addictive, immersive experience of a video game could facilitate interaction with the outside world instead of distracting you from it? In an interview on VentureBeat, SimCity and The Sims creator Will Wright outlines the premise of his latest project: HiveMind, a game that customizes itself for each individual player by considering a complex range of real-life situations as elements of the game. Read on.

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