Ant Mega-City
Fuck yeah, science! So in this video, researchers want figure out what the underground lair of some crazy ant species looks like. So they pour concrete down the mofo, let it harden, then excavate the results—and the building looks like something by Gaudi. Video gets going after 2:50. Cynical-C via Kottke.
Lebbeus Woods
An interesting article about Woods—pegged to a new show at MoMA. He’s the quintissential paper architect, who produces drawings rather than buildings. The article makes him seem valiant, rather than retarded and naive (which is where my inclination lies):
In the early 1990s this irreverent New York architect produced a series of dark and moody renderings [...]
Saturday Shopping
Not known for their sample sales, and it’s a bitch getting there.
Courtesy of the Dean, holding it down in BR.
I-Beam Sonata
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 [...]
Klaus Nomi
[youtube:www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2Nn5JhKQyU&e 552 450]
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 [...]
MUTO
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.
Jason Rogenes
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 [...]
Stop
Just slowing down the barrage of dick-related posts, to point you over to Jan Chipchase’s Future Perfect. Love signage.
Name That Architecture Trend: Sci-Fi Brutalism
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 [...]