Rivers & Roads from Ryan&Heidi on Vimeo.

Welcome the afternoon with this delightfully shot video of Manhattan. Filmed from the 51st floor of the Bank of America Tower–the second highest point in the city–the timelapse video compiles footage taken over the course of one day and condenses it into one minute, capturing the flows of New York’s rivers and roads against the frenetic play of light and time. Shadows cast by skyscrapers punctuate the tabula lumen (yes, I made up a term in Latin), creating a checkerboard pattern which heightens the staccato of pedestrian and vehicular traffic moving up and down avenues and cross-town. Passing clouds animate the otherwise static river blues–or more, accurately, greys–with ferrying boats scurrying along the surface of the Hudson and East Rivers. The edits are cut to A Bowerbirds-esque tune (acoustic guitar + piano + girl/boy harmonies + earnestness), but the music proves robust enough to handle the sheer scope of the footage.

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NO-CHAIR-DESIGN Year 2012! from Eero Y on Vimeo.

It’s common knowledge that the building industry generates more than a third of the United States’ carbon footprint. A study recently conducted at UMASS-Amherst shows that new construction not only wastes more, but also produced 1/2 as many jobs as renovation work. There is perhaps no better illustration of the contradiction of “sustainable architecture” than a brand-new home built with the latest in green-powered technology: renovating an older structure would generate far less waste, but then who would notice your commitment to sustainability?

So yes, building new buildings is an incredibly wasteful practice. But as a country, and a profession, we are a bit addicted to it. The cult of personality surrounding modernism’s great architects does much to perpetuate the addiction — how many of these masters became famous for renovating old structures? — as an implicit value of the profession. Vanity design, as it were, is no more evident than in the chairs that some well-known architects turn out on a yearly basis.

Finnish designer/fabricators Ore.e Ref. hope to draw a attention to this reality with a little challenge for designers: Don’t design a single chair in 2012. Designing chairs “isn’t mandatory,” say the video’s stars, who were lauded on Fast.Co Design recently, “it comes through your educational system.” Instead, they suggest, work on renovating the chairs we already have! “Consider this the ultimate challenge for you to rethink how sustainable design should be manifested.” Word.

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Venerable LA rapper Ice Cube once studied architecture – and became a big fan of Charles & Ray Eames in the process. The Getty Museum’s postwar research arm, Pacific Standard Time, recently filmed Ice Cube (née O’Shea Jackson) touring his favorite spots in the city, culminating with a meditation on the Eames’ 1949 home.

“Off-the-shelf factory windows, prefab walls,” says Ice Cube, “they was doing mash-ups before mash-ups even existed. The Eames made structure and nature one. This is going green 1949 style, bitch. Believe that.”

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Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.

It’s friday! Let’s be glad. To celebrate, here’s a beautiful timelapse video of earth, shot from the International Space Station and edited by filmmaker Michael König. König manipulated (cut, sped up, deflickered, etc.) footage taken from the ISS from August and October this year, picking and choosing the most dramatic “earthscapes,” including a few amazing Aurora Borealis moments, as well as several clear-sky shots that capture gold starbursts of cities far below. The full list of shooting locations is after the jump.

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You may be familiar with the Essex Street Trolley Terminal if you’ve taken any interest in the so-called Low Line project, covered here. Now, perhaps reacting to public interest stirred by the Low Line’s seductive renderings and the sci-fi allure of an underground park, the MTA, which owns the property, has produced a video tour of the subterranean vacancy in an attempt to lure potential investors and design professionals. As tour guide and MTA employee Peter Hine suggests, the space is conducive to all manner of inventive reuse, not the least of which includes an elitist restaurant with views to the paupers riding on the adjacent subway line or, of course, a night club. Never does he mention the idea for a park, as his revenue-driven proposals implicitly deny the plausibility of realizing a public project such as the Low Line. Given that most public parks aren’t the High Line–meaning they generate little to zero profits for the parties involved–it seems sadly unlikely that anything remotely creative or funky as the Low Line will occupy the abandoned Trolley Terminal beneath Delancey Street any time soon.

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Address Is Approximate from The Theory on Vimeo.

Do you know what your desk toys will be doing while you’re gone for Thanksgiving?

British filmmakers The Theory postulate on the secret lives of your belongings in this stop motion short, Address is Approximate. In the film, lonely office toys use their owner’s computer monitors to tour the world using Google StreetView.

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A 22-year old Filipino architecture student named Vincent Ocasla spent four years developing a strategy to beat the “unbeatable” urban planning computer game, SimCity. As you can see in this video, it took countless messy graph paper calculations and a whole lot of demonic video game music to perfect the urban grid that would allow a city of 6 million to function healthily (although it seems like most of its population dies at 50?).

Ocasla show us two test cities in the video, then unveils his final, game-winning “Magnasanti.” In the great city of Magnasanti, there are no roads, only subways. Super-dense high rises populate a grid whose octagonal shape was  inspired by “the wheel of life and death.” Ocasla’s influences, according to his video, are as follows: Paolo Soleri’s utopian experiment in the Arizona desert, Arcosanti; the Godfrey Reggio/Philip Glass landscape epic Koyaanisqats; and the Spanish Armada.

Vice interviewed Ocasla, a self-described “former” Buddhist, who has some pretty dire views on planning, policy-making, and human nature in general. He describes his city as deeply ironic, a perfect grid full of citizens who have been “successfully dumbed down, sickened with poor health, enslaved and mind-controlled just enough to keep this system going for thousands of years. 50,000 years to be exact.”

Ocasla concludes that Magnasanti functions because the sims “don’t rebel, or cause revolutions and social chaos. No one considers challenging the system by physical means since a hyper-efficient police state keeps them in line.” A prescient comment, as the majority of American cities are in the throes of police/citizen conflicts stemming from the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations.

One of the YouTube commenters ran the numbers, and according to Magnasanti’s population density, the entire world’s population (7 billion) could fit on a grid the size of West Virginia.

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Photo: Bryan Derballa/Wired.com.

Today Occupy Wall Street returns en force with a day of “global protest,” including a roving protest that will take objectors down into the subways, and eventually, across the Brooklyn Bridge. #OWS is staging increasingly complex, orchestrated demonstrations; meaning that police crackdowns and location-specific conflicts are happening with greater frequency, far afield from Zuccotti Park. Documenting and broadcasting these events (gripping livestream here) is arguably the most important aspect of Occupation, and today, Wired gives us a look into the secret media hub (somewhere near the Bowery on Manhattan’s Lower East Side), where a sophisticated team of videographers, programmers, and tech-expert volunteers bring #OWS online. Continue.

How many cameras can you count? An image from today’s #N17 protest, via.

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> Salk Institute | Louis Kahn | La Jolla | California | 1959-1966 from pablo casals-aguirre on Vimeo.

Filmmaker and Architect Pablo Casals-Aguirre captured this footage of the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California – a rare portrayal of canonical architecture in every-day use.

Louis Kahn, speaking about solving the “problem” of Salk, once said that “When one knows what to do, there is only little time one needs for doing it. It is only when one does not know what to do that it takes so much time.” He concluded that “to know what to do is the secret of it all.”

The Salk Institute is perhaps no better proof for such a thesis. Kahn made a pointed decision to ignore that comments of the scientists he talked to before designing the center, instead perceiving a simple problem and solving it with a simple problem: “I would not listen to [the scientists] as to what should be done. And I realized that there should be a clean air and stainless steel area, and a rug and oak table area. From this realization form became. I separated the studies from the laboratory and placed them over gardens. The garden became outdoor spaces where one can talk. Now one need not spend all the time in the laboratories.”

A powerful argument for the expertise of an architect.

Check out more of Casals-Aguirre’s work here.

Salk Insitute by Louis Kahn; Photo: flickr user dreamsjung

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This week, Microsoft “dropped” a new video about the future of their mobile technology which, according to the video, will mainly enable (a) new business deals, (b) never having to talk to the service people around you, and (c) green walls (a lot more on that later).

The film’s plot arc is loosely sketched around a few business people who magnanimously travel the world, doing deals and bringing something Microsoft calls “Green Roof Sustainability” to the ungreened masses. Let’s take a look at some of the film’s most poignant moments.

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