Archived entries for architecture
Design Writers
“Design writers are a dying breed because they operate in the two most unprofitable industries: Design and Writing.”
[via Darkly Euphoric]
Shirky on Innovation & Workspaces
The second half of the video (about 14 minutes in) focuses specifically on the connections between creativity and workspaces.
Cities as Interaction Machines
Above, William H. Whyte’s The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. Very cool sociological documentary of how people move within and occupy city spaces.
I found the video at Swiss Miss, but it was just the tip of the iceberg. Her source was a wide-ranging Atlantic article by Kio Stark, an NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program prof, describes her course, Stranger Studies 101: Cities as Interaction Machines:
There are three broad themes during the semester.
- Why stranger interactions in cities are meaningful
- The spaces and the significance of the spaces in which strangers interact, and
- How strangers ‘read’ each other, how they initiate interactions, how they avoid interactions, how they trust each other and how they fool each other, how they watch, listen and follow each other.
Then there is the secret theme. I want students to fall in love with talking to strangers, to do it more, and to make technology that creates more plentiful and meaningful interactions among strangers.
[via swissmiss]
Very Large Array
Douglas Koke’s Signal to Noise is a stop-motion video featuring the Very Large Array, located outside of Socorro, New Mexico. I was surprised, when I was there in early 1990s, to find out that the radio telescopes move extraordinarily slowly, to the point that their motion is almost imperceptible.
Ice Cube Celebrates the Eames
Best thing I’ve seen on the web all week.
Sleep No More: Macbeth as Spatial Narrative
Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More enacts Macbeth as architectural space in which the audience wanders freely throughout a hundred-room, 100,000 square-foot building, invited to open drawers watch actors play out scenes. Reviews remind me of early responses to hypertext (a connection I missed Mark Bernstein pointing out way back in 2009). Here’s a bit from playwright Deborah Yarchun:
Earlier (or later dependent on when you stumble into the scene), you may catch Macbeth’s return to the three witches in an orgiastic and Dionysian ecstasy, complete with a naked dancing man wearing a goat head.
And if you’re not careful—you could end up watching the same scenes twice, but you may not want to let yourself be too visually seduced. There’s so much more to experience.
And from a NYT review:
The idea is once you’re let loose on one of the floors of the hotel, you pick out a single character and pursue him or her (though you can switch any time you want), as the performer runs, dances and vaults all over the place. Dressed in drop-dead, Deco-era evening clothes, scanty lingerie or nothing at all, these characters include the Macbeths (of course), Macduff and his wife (who is conspicuously pregnant), Duncan (the king) and various witches and hotel employees. (Because the roles are mostly double-cast, I am not mentioning individual performers, but they are all lissome enough to make the audience look slow and dumpy.)
Studio 360 (where I found out about Sleep No More) has an interview Felix Barnett, Punchdrunk’s artistic director.
