Tonight at 7pm is the launch of the first edition of Evolo magazine at the Storefront for Art and Architecture. Don’t miss it, I’ve seen a preview of the magazine (courtesy of my good friend Carlo Aiello, Editor-in-Chief) and its is fantastic.
Read more about the history and mission of the magazine @ the Storefront’s site here .
See you guys there.
My good friends and hyper-talented guys behind studio[mode] – Gil Akos and Ronnie Parsons – have just launched mode[lab], the lab component of their studio. In their own words: mode[lab] “is conceived of as a laboratory and serves as a knowledge base for design research and experimentation. The laboratory is distributed in nature and operates across multiple time-scales and locations ranging from intensive workshops to design studios throughout North America and Europe.
Our primary objective is to discover novel and inventive design solutions through the identification of key concepts relevant to contemporary architectural discourse and the development of related maps of action.”
A passage from Manuel DeLanda’s book “War in the Age of Intelligent Machines” (1991), which I’m almost done with.
Almost without exception, secret service organizations have thrived in times of turbulence and, conversely, have seen their power vanish as turmoil slows. For this reason, they survive by inciting social turbulence, spreading rumors and inventing imaginary enemies, fifth columns, and bomber and missile gaps. They need to keep society in constant alert, in a generalized state of fear and paranoia, in order to sustain themselves. This has led to the development of a gigantic “espionage industry, ” whose entire existence is based on a bluff few governments dare to call:
If it is Obama, Clinton or McCain in regards to the U.S Middle East policy? Not much. Chomsky has a short article on some of the key points based on the candidates record/positions.
For the record: I agree.
Read it in his website here.
Recently, I’ve entered this discussion with a few of my friends and colleagues, after it came up in a conversation after our final review at Pratt.
Is the future round or square?
Nowadays, it seems like the future is turning rounder, smoother and more NURBS-like (or Subdivision-surfaces-like) than before. Perhaps it’s that part of the cycle where everything becomes smoothed -which seems to be somewhere about every 10 years or so- but for some reason it seems like this time around is not just some fluctuation but instead is here to stay. So, where is the square future?
Most of the work being produced at the schools right now (Columbia, Pratt, DRL, etc) seems to be getting smoother – I’m trying not to use the word blobby in here – the result not only of the processes of generation which aren’t inherently smooth but typically default to 3rd degree surfaces.
I will continue building up with this post, right now this is a very incomplete rambling.
Poking around the web, I found a picture of my good friend Mampe at the Architectural Association Design Research Lab (DRL) in their studio trip to China.
Mampe (who contributes to the blog as inframince) is erratica’s ‘London correspondent’. For those of you who are interested, the AA is probably the baddest-assest architecture school in the globe at the moment, and I can only begin to imagine what these guys are up to over there. Needless to say, Mampe you’ll have to post some pictures of your trip and your final project.
The final jury for the project was quite impressive:
Zaha Hadid, Ali Rahim, Hernan Diaz Alonso among others.
Ok man, your time upload!