Hollein

Just to keep this thing alive as I am fully immersed in work, here are random images from Hollein's website:


And to make us all feel better that success isn't dependent on your thesis, here's Hollein's "Masters Dissertation." I think we should start calling it that too. Also, we probably have to redefine success a little to make that joke work.

Breuer UNESCO

My First UN Visit

The pictures are nowhere near as informative as the visit was, but I figured I would post them nonetheless:

Peabody Air Slideshow

This is Peabody Air. A brief photo-documentary looking at air and its infrastructure in a Peabody Terrace apartment (mine). Almost identical to the one on the left:



I am attempting to bring together:
1) Modernism
2) State of Exception (?)
3) Peabody Terrace
4) Infrastructure
5) Air
6) Google
7) Tactics

Ambitious? I think not.
Let the images do the talking (composition does matter):

Yosemite Grid

Hans Hollein

is crazy.

Internet Black Holes

(Also from AB) States of Exception on the Internet:

Jones Partners - ProDek System

- Related enough when I saw it that I thought I'd include it. Architecture as infrastructure, as a machine for the living of/with other machines. Cohabiting in a machine with other machines of your choosing/specification. I love the accommodation of pre-designed corporate units, and the idea of the street as infrastructural delivery vein (here on the roofs), which is in line with Vidler's reading of infrastructure from Hausmanian Paris.

Two quotes (different articles, probably not relevant).

- "Here Eisenman is presented with a tactical difficulty since he does not have enough program to literally overwhelm, or even outflank Mies, which us the point of any Eisenman project. He must relinquish what Jacques Derrida has shown to be the superior position. In architectural terms, though, there is another level at which the concept of frame can be thought, another position opposed to figure: the ground, or the foundation of the frame, the frame of the frame. This becomes the site of his intervention and the vehicle for his critique." 110

- instead of ducks, Koolhaas builds duck-billed platypi (campus-as-architectural-zoo), therefore the IIT center is "all this platypus splooge" within a one-story box. wow.

anyway:

Downtown NY Security Zone

Downtown Security zone (Outside the Stock Exchange, Etc) with Will.

cityofsound: The Anti-Fun Palace: APEC Fence, Sydney lockdown

cityofsound: The Anti-Fun Palace: APEC Fence, Sydney lockdown: "As Marcus points out, this design work now also include a tightening of the informational grip on the city, by deliberately eroding data services over strategic locations. He describes as a 'lo-fi-ing of Sydney, resolution as security measure', in which Google Earth/Maps high-resolution imagery of the Sydney CBD is subtracted, such that it becomes temporarily blurred over the Opera House and other related places. One speculates as to how that happened. (Of course, Google wouldn't want to be held responsible if anything terrible did happen, as will no doubt have been pointed out to them. Though it's a little ludicrous to suggest that their service offers the potential plotter anything over the many readily accessible, detailed paper maps of Sydney apparently still in existence.) It's also strange to note just how overly precise the blurring is. In this image below, of Google Maps on my phone taken on Wednesday, note how the edge of the Opera House (left) is the exact point at which the blurring/sharpening occurs. A curiously limited definition of the danger zone."








So...a virtual zone of exception, huh? I'm not sure I totally buy it because the blurred zone follows a neat line between sat-photo angles and resolutions that you can track along the landforms to the east. Here's the link. Nonetheless, its a fascinating idea.

The World's Largest Anechoic Chamber

The World's Largest Anechoic Chamber"The architecture, engineering, and construction support services for this major complex have been provided since 1987 by DMJM (DBA Holmes & Naver, Inc.). The anechoic chamber supports ground testing of electronic warfare systems on full-scale aircraft and is a massive 250 x 264 x 70 foot steel plate box enclosed in a metal hangar building. The walls, ceiling, and floor are covered in 816,000 pyramidal foam cones designed to absorb radio frequency signals, and the chamber is RFI shielded to over 100dB. The center of the chamber is equipped with a 160 foot diameter turntable capable of rotating a full 360 degrees while holding objects with a mass of over one million pounds!"











Crazy...it's like a tiny state of exception...just an audio-state instead of a legal state.