Images (c) Constance Mensh.

There are big questions surrounding the role of the art museum in the digital age. Maintaining relevance in today’s unending stream of information and entertainment is a challenge for cultural institutions whose programs operate on a larger scale. One strategy museums have found success with is the digitization of the museum-going experience itself: podcast tours and interactive websites globalize an otherwise local show. Another strategy is the construction of a new building or addition built by a big-name architect, attracting civic and international attention. Examples of this abound. The most striking is perhaps the MAXXI in Rome, designed by Zaha Hadid, which had its grand opening without a single piece of art on view.

Still, a key part of the museum experience seems to be missing: a focus on the experience of the museum-goer as a social, engaged participant.

Philadelphia-based duo Megawords is broaching the topic of the post-digital museum with an installation currently on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. At the PMA, the duo turned a dark alcove that once housed an ATM and a payphone into a carefully-curated book and ‘zine store. In an adjoining space, previously used as a green room, Megawords installed a reading lounge with pillows and chairs for comfortable perusing – complete with a soundtrack played through a speaker on the floor. According Anthony Smyrski, who makes up one half of the Megawords team, their work at the PMA is concerned primarily with “the activation of unused space” within cultural institutions. Click through.

Images (c) Constance Mensh.

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What do you bring on your trips to the laser cutter? Passive aggressive foot-tapping? Tears? What about a steaming Americano?

A newly-opened coffee shop in Shibuya is placing its bets on the success of the latter. The Fab Café offers typical coffee shop fair alongside a rentable laser cutter. For the uninitiated, a laser cutter is a machine that reads a 2D drawing and cuts its lines into a piece of material placed in its flat bed. Architects use it to speed up model-making, while fashion designers often use it to cut patterns for clothes (still others use it to give themselves nerdy tattoos).

Customers come armed with vector files and materials, and caffeinate while they cut. According to Spoon & Tamago, prices will seem outrageous to those used to free access in studio: an uninterrupted half-hour on the machine runs about $60, or 5,000 Yen.

Fab Café opened two weeks ago and already has a loyal following on Facebook. And before you call it an unsustainable niche market, keep in mind that Tokyo is a hotbed of successful niche coffee shops.

[Via Spoon & Tamago]

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A model for John Powers’ proposal to build nine Freedom Towers in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Image courtesy John Powers.

Artist John Powers had a few words to say on Rhizome today. While the title of his essay, Image of Democracy: Why I want to Build Nine Freedom Towers in Tiananmen Square, was admittedly what hooked me in, it was the author’s deft delivery of ideas, which synchronized personal storytelling, reflection, and astute critical analysis of social and architectural practices, that had me scrolling my way to the end.

The proposal in itself—the scheme to fill the 38 paved acres of Tiananmen Square with nine identical Freedom Towers—comes off immediately as absurd. But this very absurdity is the culminating statement of issues that have surfaced consistently throughout the artist’s life. Using the premise of a design proposal, Powers begs us to reconsider how authority and dissent become amplified or stifled in urban centers, and he does this by outlining the political and spatial significance of his proposed ‘mash-up’ of two symbolically loaded architectures: that of New York’s rising Freedom Tower and Beijing’s expansive Tiananmen Square. Read on.

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Rendering of the BMW Guggenheim Lab in Kreuzberg; Image: BMW Guggenheim Lab/ Atelier Bow-Wow

The BMW Guggenheim Lab, the world’s first (only?) mobile urban laboratory, will not be bringing its itinerary of lectures, events, and thought-games to Berlin’s Kreuzberg district, as it was scheduled to do so this coming May. The Guggenheim Foundation have canceled the trip, reports Bloomberg, after activists have leveled threats at the Lab, which they believed would have accelerated the area’s gentrification.

The Lab, designed by Atelier Bow-Wow as a collapsible space to be shipped around the world, was set to travel to nine different international cities over the next six years to provoke public discussion about future urban life and, in doing so, begin to “confront” the comfort which insulates individual and collective social responsibilities. The project opened to, mostly, welcome crowds in New York last August, where young, hip creative professionals mingled amid a decidedly comfortable scene of brightly colored summerwear and artisanal treats while a giant Whole Foods loomed in the background. Enough to warrant the “violence” supposedly promised by the opponents of the Berlin project? (Of course not, duh.)

In a statement released yesterday, the Guggenheim expressed regret for canceling the second leg of the Lab’s tour, especially since the project’s expressed purposed “is to create a space for public discussion, open to the widest possible range of views. While we welcome vigorous debate, we cannot risk the possibility of violence, as raised by a small minority.” For now, the Lab will move elsewhere, though the exact location has yet to be announced.

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The EPA estimates that toilet flushing consumes some 4.8 billion gallons of water each day in the United States alone. Why not turn recycle this waste water and put it to use, say, in the service of generating heat for building? Green tech start-up OriginOil believes it’s possible to do just that by collecting the flushed water and re-using it to grow algae, which is then processed into heat. As Smart Planet reports, the company claims that furnishing large buildings with their own algae production “labs” could yield a large heating source that would significantly reduce the structures’ overall energy consumption and help them to produce their own clean energy–the first steps towards becoming net zero.

OriginOil has developed a flat panel photobioreactor (PBRs) that can be applied in a manner similar to solar cells and panels, which is to say, they can be placed on large area rooftops and even vertical surfaces of tall office building and high-rise apartment complexes. The algae-laden photobioreactor has one key advantage over other these photovoltaic systems, in that not only can it produce energy, but it can also purify wastewater by absorbing CO2 and other chemicals inherent within it. The company, which is currently testing its systems in France and elsewhere, expects their panels to become competitive at an area of 4000 m2 and beyond. According to the Riggs Eckelberry, OriginOil’s CEO, an algae farm of this size “installed on a 10,000 floor area building would generate 40 kWh per m2 of floor surface per year.” For every unit of power produced, there is a return of 4 units of heat, which, when projected at large-scales, can be converted for heating usage.

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There is no shortage of overlap between design and food. Both fields gather materials from the environment and reconfigure them into forms of nourishment, whether for the body, the mind, or perhaps both. And in both areas, our interference with nature can sometimes yield damaging consequences and, in other times, glowing results.

When I came across Chris Kabel’s Wood Ring installation at Paris’s Galerie Kreo, I could not help but draw parallels between Kabel’s elegant wood furniture and the burgeoning artisanal food scene that has upheld farmer’s markets and seasonal ingredients over the imported, the processed, and the mass-produced meal. As Domus explained: “Product quantities and seasonal deadlines are not on the conceptual horizons” for Kabel, who instead concentrates on the “intrinsic qualities” of his chosen materials. More after the break.

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Tallwood, a 30-story tower constructed of wood members, by architect Michael Green

Since the invention and development of steel and concrete, the combination of which would spawn the birth of the skyscraper, megastructure, and everything in between, wood as a building material has been, generally, marginalized as simple construction ephemera, used to form concrete or to structure building frames advanced with the expressed purpose of producing single family homes or large estates and to furnishing their plush interiors. With its long association with craftsmanship, wood must, in current markets, fulfill the dual performative roles of simulating domesticity, promising both “warmth” and “familiarity”, and artistry, with carvings of dubious intent seemingly attesting to the material’s storied history as a cultural artifact. Implicit in this same history, it cannot be forgotten, is wood’s vulnerability to fire, probably the single greatest factor in restricting use of the material to smaller structures. But change is coming, writes CNN, as wood has become transformed by a handful of dedicated engineers and architects–Shigeru Ban most notable among them–and put to use in the service of large-scale structures like Michael Green‘s proposed “Tallwood” skyscraper in Vancouver. Continue.

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100 Yen: The Teaser Trailer from Strata Studios on Vimeo.

For those outside of it, Japanese culture can seem impenetrable, like an enclosed terrarium that breeds fascinating, inexplicable visions, ideas, and customs. And within it, one will find an even more insular subculture, one centered around the steadfast phenomenon of Japanese video games. Subculture can hardly be used to describe the cult of the Japanese arcade, which is the subject of a new documentary called 100 Yen: The Japanese Arcade Experience. Producer Brad Crawford burrows deep into downtown Tokyo, where five story buildings filled with arcade cabinets extend their neon signs outward and tower over the narrow streets. “Welcome to Japan,” the film’s Indie GoGo campaign explains, “a place where the arcades of the 80s and 90s not only exist but thrive and have evolved into an elaborate, unmatched gaming experience.”

The trailer gives a glimpse of sights we may have seen before: a line of Japanese youth, seated stationary before a row of arcade cabinets; a duo moving effortlessly on a neon platform to a manic display of light and sound; a gamer crammed into a booth, eyes fixed on a screen while fingers coordinate joystick movements and button-mashing. Meanwhile a voiceover tells us in Japan, “it’s not fun; it’s our life to be the best.” We were particularly intrigued by the teaser’s peek into the architecture of Japanese arcades: “As you get more involved with games, you’ll find yourself heading higher and higher in the arcade. That’s essentially how the arcades are designed,” another voiceover explains. Looks like this documentary may take us to the top floor.

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The Architectural Digest Home Show begins at the end of this week, bringing together interior designers, manufacturers, and architects for the weekend at Pier 94 on the Hudson River. Under the auspices of co-sponsors The New York Times, the AD Show will be hosting discussions amongst industry leaders in their Designer Seminar series.

Architizer CEO and HWKN principal Marc Kushner, who will speak with Joel Sanders and Galia Solomonoff, will bridge the divide between architects and interior designers by asking “where do we draw the line?” between the two professions. All three speakers own their own firms and have worked extensively on both sides of the interior/architect divide, which should make for an interesting debate.

Click through for images of their work and details on our AD Show opening party, as well as the talk.

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RUIN from OddBall Animation on Vimeo.

The premise behind “Ruin”, a short animated film about a post-apocalyptic future, is classic sci-fi. There’s the rich scenery comprised of a sprawling urbanscape of fragmented, decaying towers and large bands of infrastructure overtaken by foliage; the quintessential rogue protagonist set adrift among the chasms of abandoned skyscrapers, struggling to survive and make sense of their place in a bleak world; a high-wire chase scene involving a large aircraft of anonymous origin with plenty of firepower and an array of semi-autonomous detonants it deploys in pursuit of the sword-wielding, motorcycle-riding protagonist with a blatant disregard for physics; and, of course, a terse orchestral score that cues narrative surprises or roadblocks and augments the visual momentum. In other words, it’s an action thriller, much in the vein of Spielberg–all chase, slight on sociopolitical insight or commentary–just tidily packed into 8.5 minutes.

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