David Byrne is still cool.

Playing the building is a sound installation in which the infrastructure, the physical plant of the building, is converted into a giant musical instrument. Devices are attached to the building structure — to the metal beams and pillars, the heating pipes, the water pipes — and are used to make these things produce sound. The activations are of three types: wind, vibration, striking. The devices do not produce sound themselves, but they cause the building elements to vibrate, resonate and oscillate so that the building itself becomes a very large musical instrument.

More pics / Video

Via DGSF Stefan Gruber

A classic, via The Moment, which attempted a kind of high-brow survey, asking people to send in their fave videos about “dancing about architecture. This was Andreas Angelidakis’s submission. (He’s the guy that did these interesting buildings in second life.) After the jump, a nice but somewhat static video Angelidakis made, inspired by Nomi:

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Italian street artist/muralist/whatever BLU just posted a pretty mind-blowing animation. Excellent drawings of a constantly morphing body-horror odyssey are animated on walls, streets, sidewalks, etc in Buenos Aires. His site blublu.org is worth a look too.

Went to Contemporary Arts Center over the weekend, checking out Zaha Hadid’s building in that bastion of progressive architecture, Cincinnati. Sol Lewitt is on the 2nd floor, and above that is “Space is the Place,” an exhibition that surveys a recent, widespread interest in space exploration in visual art, as the brochure put it. I dunno about art, but advertising is already there.

Jason Rogenes (above) makes rockets with styrofoam and mood lighting.

Just slowing down the barrage of dick-related posts, to point you over to Jan Chipchase’s Future Perfect. Love signage.

That image is OMA’s proposal the Hamburg Science Center. And I think it perfects a strain of architecture I’ve been noticing lately: Sci-Fi Brutalism. Namely, it’s the highly formal, Brutalist architecture of the 1950s-1970s, but updated with a post-utopian (post-apocalyptic?) feel—these are buildings worthy of Bladerunner. But don’t take my word for it. Check out the backstory…

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