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.”

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:

The agencies justify their peacetime existence by promising to provide timely warning of a threat to national security… Over the years intelligence agencies have brainwashed successive governments into accepting three propositions that ensure their survival and expansion. The first is that in the secret world it may be impossible to distinguish success from failure. A timely warning of attack allows the intended victim to prepare. This causes the aggressor to change its mind; the warning then appears to have been wrong. The second proposition is that failure can be due to incorrect analysis of the agency’s accurate information… The third proposition is that the agency could have offered timely warning had it not been starved of funds. In combination, these three propositions can be used to thwart any rational analysis of an intelligence agency’s performance, and allow any failure to be turned into a justification for further funding and expansion*.

Shouldn’t this be mandatory reading in every country at a very early age?
This is an incredible book. Go buy it.

*Knightley, Second Oldest Profession., pp. 6 and 389.

Read it in his website here.

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.

Where is the square future? Mies’ Glass Skyscraper unbuilt project was the future. Superstudio’s Continuous Monument was what the web is nowadays too, formally a grid, yet topologically a network, but it’s was in my mind, it’s hard edge-ness and the way it intersected -or swallowed- that which was existing what embodied the future (nevermind the discourse…). Le Corbusier of course jumps right in, with most of his masterplans and Ville Savoye.

Back in the 60′s, the Metabolists -among many others- were pushing for their organic architecture, the whole current seems to have died -from the academic mainstream- but since the late nineties and with the use of these new tools, with the simple click of a button (the smooth button) becomes ‘organic’ or rounded.

And is there a right one? Why do rounded edges make something look cool, and is cool a synonym of good?

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!

Visit their site here

via [Archinect]