Circuit IV (2007), Roberto Cabot
From the latest issue of l’architecture d’aujourd’hui centred on drawing.
Circuit IV (2007), Roberto Cabot
From the latest issue of l’architecture d’aujourd’hui centred on drawing.
There is a talk on tomorrow night at the RAIA that I have helped organise, titled ‘Spatial Investigations’.
Four artists and architects will talk about their work in the context of how art is able to deal with spatial relationships in ways that architecture often cannot. Given the complex requirements- contractual, functional, legislative - architects often struggle to make a clear statement about the occupation of space. However, within the art world, many artists are posing questions and formulating spaces which force us to view the world in new and unexpected ways.
It is on Tuesday 30th October at 6:30pm the RAIA
3 Manning Street
Potts Point NSW
The artists speaking are:
Margaret Roberts and
I hope to see you there!
This year will see two games released in which rethinking spatial organisation will become the principle gameplay element. Yes.
Thus eliciting all the moral dilemmas surrounding console choice I thought that I had moved on from long ago. I thought that I would be fine with just a Wii, but it appears that that little box of wonder is not enough, and that all three are now back on the agenda….
First up is Echochrome on the PS3 and PSP. It is a simple enough game - get from point A to point B via a series of checkpoints. The route that is navigated, however, is at first glance impossible. Stairs lead nowhere, pathways do not connect and there are holes everywhere.
Rotating the view however, joins paths making them accessible, puts holes over the top of solid ground and blocks gaps from view making them disappear.
We are told that are five basic laws:
All of this is best described through the wonders of the moving image:
The Second, Portal, is a mini-game spin off from Half-Life 2 in which you are armed with the ‘Aperture’ weapon, a device that acts like a short range wormhole creator.
Point it at a wall or floor to open an exit point, point it somewhere else to open an entry point. Then jump through. Or open a hole in the floor, drop a box into it, and see it knock over a sentry gun on the other side of the room. Or make a hole in the ceiling and one in the floor, and jump into an infinitely deep hole. Awesome. Again, the video makes it much clearer…
The possibilities are, of course, infinitely sweet.
I learnt to swim at one of these pools, waking up at dawn to walk down to the pool with my cousins every morning of every summer for far too many years. We would trudge down, get shouted at and our strokes demolished by an ex life guard by the name of Johnny who it seems, had never spent a moment out of direct contact with the sun and had the skin to prove it. If Johnny was feeling particularly nasty, he would lead all the kids up to the point, and instruct us all to jump and swim back to shore.
Sydney, as we all know shares one of its edges with the Pacific Ocean, and another with the Blue Mountains. Along the eastern edge are many beaches, and to my surprise in putting this post together, almost all of these beaches has its own pool carved somewhere into its rocky perimeter.
The geometry of each is slightly different. They are skewed rectangles, triangles, they are of indeterminate length - although most are around about 50m - they are embedded along the edges of cliffs, they sit solitary on reefs, they occasionally like at Narrabeen, spectacularly hinge off the point of a peninsula. At Wylies Baths they play host to a wonderful timber platform. At Collaroy, the ocean side edge of the pool bends as an abstraction of the bend of the cliff behind. At South Bondi they have a mythical status and provide the foreground to fine dining and summer boozing while at North Bondi, the pool recalls Corb’s ear of God at La Tourette.
So, from North to South here are Sydney’s 26 ocean pools:
Palm Beach
Whale Beach
Avalon
Bilgola
Newport
Mona Vale
Narrabeen
Collaroy
Dee Why
Curl Curl
South Curl Curl
Freshwater
North Steyne
Manly - Fairy Bower Pool
North Bondi
South Bondi
Bronte
Clovelly
Coogee
Wylie’s Baths
Maroubra
Malabar
Cronulla
Shelly Beach
Oak Park
[I am no expert on these things - if I have mislabelled one of the pools, or missed anything, then let me know!]
Another new project. The project is for alterations and additions to a brick cottage, the conservation area of Watsons Bay, Sydney.
Full details, and loads more images may be found on the project page.
The Lifeboat Foundation has published a list of the Top Ten Transhuman Technologies. It is a most interesting list. It postulates that if humans are able to think of something then, it is a matter of time before the idea is realised.
“Transhumanists tend to take a longer-than-average view of technological progress, looking not just five or ten years into the future but twenty years, thirty years, and beyond. We realize that the longer you look forward, the more uncertain the predictions get, but one thing is quite certain: if a technology is physically possible and obviously useful, human (or transhuman!) ingenuity will see to it that it gets built eventually. As we gain ever greater control over the atomic structure of matter, our technological goals become increasingly ambitious, and their payoffs more and more generous.”
Making up the top ten are Cryonics, Gene Therapy, Self Replicating Machines, Molecular Manufacturing and so on. It is as you may imagine mostly interesting stuff, and at number three sits ‘Megascale Engineering’. YES.
A world of enormous planet dwarfing structures supplying infrastructure to the exponential growth of the human and transhuman peoples. Obviously, the construction of these behemoths would require more than man power however we are told that, with the help of some good ol’ self-replicating robots
“the production of such large structures could be done largely by autonomous drones, with intelligent agents only managing the highest top-level functions and architecture. Considering that mankind’s long-term future is in space, and that space right now is pretty devoid of any structure useful or habitable to humans, we have a lot of work to do, and if you can make the projects megascale, why not?”
Indeed, why not? Tow of the references mentioned in particular, caught our eye - Globus Cassus and the Dyson Spheres. Globus Cassus - literally Hollow Sphere - is a proposal by Christian Waldvogel and formed a part of the Swiss Pavilion at the 1994 Venice Biennale.
It takes the form of a compressed icosahedron that surrounds the point where the earth once was. The inside of the sphere forms the habitation, with two large continents facing each other across the empty centre.
The structure is made by gradually excavating the earth’s crust, mantle and core, which are transported outwards via four symmetrically placed space elevators. The gradual excavation of the earth results in the melting of the ice caps, all water vapourises and condences on the inner surface of the sphere forming rivers and lakes (Don’t ask, okay. It just does.) leaving the inner surface of the sphere fit for human habitation. The process leaves earth as the second largest planet in the solar system.
The Dyson Sphere (although proposed 35 years earlier) steps it up a notch to propose a network of solar powered satellites surrounding a star, capturing its entire energy output.
While Dyson only ever speculated a ring or a swarm of such satellites, others have extended the idea, speculating that such a network would eventually become so dense that it became a solid shell completely encompassing the star.
Dyson himself was a fascinating dude. Aside from being an accomplished physicist, aside from the Dyson Sphere, he also speculated on a number of ways in which space may be occupied or made habitable. The Dyson Tree, where a genetically modified plant could be implanted on a comet, potentially producing a breathable atmosphere in the hollows of its surface being one example.