Month: July 2006

[Images: “In & Out” and “In the City” by Fabrice Fouillet; images originally purchased as postcards last week in Paris – though easily found online. There is also his “RDV.” (Very vaguely related: Xing Danwen’s Urban Fiction, via WMMNA)].

[Image: Graphing storms. This is the “3-D structure of a storm’s water vapor content,” as it approaches southern California. Also available in a huge 1.2MB version. Courtesy of – where else? – NASA’s Earth Observatory].

A new block of flats on the edge of Copenhagen, designed by Bjarke Ingels and Julien De Smedt of PLOT, was toured, analyzed, and photographically documented in last month’s issue of Metropolis. The article is by Tom Vanderbilt, a writer whose career I find well worth following. (Here’s his book).
The article will tell you a lot more about the project than this brief and hurried post will – but, basically, the building is like a huge game of architectural Tetris, with a bewildering variety of interlinked floorplans. Specifically, there are “76 floor plans in 221 units,” Vanderbilt writes, “with none repeated more than a dozen times and well over a dozen of them unique.” Further, he says, “flipping through the sales booklet, which has pages of unit plans, is like reading the assembly blueprints for some massive urban machine with interlocking component parts.”
So what does it look like? First, here are some 3D shape-diagrams for the “V block” of the building; they almost look like proteins – enzymes of European domesticity.

Below is the “M block.”

As Vanderbilt explains, the “V” and the “M” building shapes only entered into the design process after the architects “experimented with any number of permutations, the totality of which – collected on a display board – looks like some strange alphabet. They eventually settled on fashioning the south-facing block into a V and the north-facing block into an M. ‘By bending the shapes,’ Ingels says, ‘you open up the maximum toward the two canals, which ensures that the apartments, instead of just looking at one another, all have orientation toward the landscape.’ It also ensures that both evening and morning sun can enter the courtyard. The move shatters what would be a dense rectilinearity into a kind of crystalline parallax-view refraction of light and circulation.”
The whole complex was also finished with very tastefully bold, solid neo-Modernist colors. These eye-popping central corridors will, at the very least, wake you up every morning as you stumble out the door for work.

Finally, a note to property developers: “all 221 units sold out in three weeks, 80 percent on the first day.”
Good design pays.
Read more in Metropolis.

[Image: NASA’s Earth Observatory points us to this incredible series of images, showing the southward migration of agricultural fires across Africa over the course of 2005: “Season after season,” they explain, “year after year, people set fire to African landscapes to create and maintain farmland and grazing areas. People use fire to keep less desirable plants from invading crop or rangeland, to drive grazing animals away from areas more desirable for farming, to remove crop stubble and return nutrients to the soil, and to convert natural ecosystems to agricultural land. The burning area shifts from north to south over the course of the year, in step with the coming and going of Africa’s rainy and dry seasons.” Of course, if you want to know – or see – more, this page has an eye-popping quantity of global fire maps, spanning no less than six years and offered in three levels of resolution. While you’re at it, then, check out the somewhat less exciting MODIS Active Fire Mapping Program or the so-called Web Fire Mapper. Pyro-cartographers, rejoice].

“Bacteria can be persuaded to produce wire-like appendages that conduct electricity,” New Scientist reports. These wires are shown in the image, above: a bio-geometrical tangle.
“A deficit of metal atoms in the close vicinity of the bacteria can cause a bottleneck,” we read, “so the proliferation of nanowires allows the bacteria to consume more fuel.” In other words, the bacteria can use these metal atoms as structural parts of their own “bodies,” as they interact with and metabolize the immediate environment – in which case, does this constitute a kind of living metal? That simultaneously doubles as an electrical appliance?
“Now a study by Yuri Gorby of Pacific Northwest National Laboratories in Washington State, US and colleagues reveals that several other kinds of bacteria produce similar nanowires.” And in ten years’ time, your own dear son will start sprouting extension cords… You can plug Hoovers into him.
Meanwhile, Gorby studies something called biogeochemistry.
So will the electrical network installed in the walls of your house become a living thing someday, an organism of light and electricity, made of wires, prone to growing so you have to prune it back on Saturdays, a new chore – electro-topiary? Or you’ll grow whole gardens of the electrically self-modified, vines and ivy coiling through the undergrowth, lit up like Christmas lights, shining.
Wire gardens.

[Image: Apparently, “space-based maps of buildings and paved surfaces, such as roads and parking lots, which are impervious to water, can indicate where large amounts of storm water runs off.” In other words, these new cartographic tools can be used to predict where urban flash floods might flow – hydrology at a distance. The map you’re looking at, above, shows the Baltimore-Washington metropolitan area (in false-color). Here’s a massive 4.2MB version. Courtesy NASA/Earth Observatory].