Jennnnnnga...

From ARBITARE.

Next Generation House is a small housing module for weekend use, located on the edge of a forest overlooking the River Kuma at Kumakura, opposite the temple of Shibatatehime.

The client is a timber merchant. The small pavilion, a 4x4 m cube, is made by assembling solid Japanese cedar blocks kept in place by their own weight and connecting metal cables running through vertical drill holes. Some of the inside cubes are laid off-centre to create shelves, small living areas and even steps to move from one level to another.

Offsets in the wall cubes also create windows with views of the surrounding countryside. The oblique glass windowpanes are held in place with plastic plugs. The mobile sheets are in transparent acrylic. Two roof skylights provide extra natural light – an architectural feature over which Fujimoto takes special care. At night, artificial light visible from the outside helps to dematerialise the cube by mixing the warm tones of wood with the amber glow of incandescent bulbs, emphasising the ways in which a structure made up of heavy wooden elements can seem so light and airy.

Sou Fujimoto (Japan, 1971) architect. He lives in Tokyo, Japan. His children’s mental health centre won an AR Award in 2006. He has taught in several Japanese universities. In addition to his work as an architect, he writes for international magazines like A+U. He is currently working on a series of housing projects: House N, Tokyo Apartment and the Future Primitive House.

He had a pretty interesting start at the ripe age of 20. Worthe a quick read HERE.

Let's go throw the proton around...

Over at DVICE, they've got 30 stunning images of the Large Hadron Collider. Judging by a quick summize of Twitter, we're all alive and (still) cracking jokes, albeit poorly written ones.

Be careful not to step in any strange matter.

String cheese theory and hard-on jokes seem to be especially popular.

It's raining regulatory code, hallelujah...

Catching rain water is against the law

August 12th, 2008 @ 11:49pm
By John Hollenhorst

Who owns the rain? Not you, it turns out. You're actually breaking the law if you capture the rain falling on your roof and pour it on your flower bed! A prominent Utah car dealer found that out when he tried to do something good for the environment.

Rebecca Nelson captures rainwater in a barrel, and she pours it on her plants. "We can fill up a barrel in one rainstorm. And so it seems a waste to just let it fall into the gravel," she said.

Car dealer Mark Miller wanted to do pretty much the same thing on a bigger scale. He collects rainwater on the roof of his new building, stores it in a cistern and hopes to clean cars with it in a new, water-efficient car wash. But without a valid water right, state officials say he can't legally divert rainwater. "I was surprised. We thought it was our water," Miller said.

State officials say it's an old legal concept to protect people who do have water rights. Boyd Clayton, the deputy state engineer, said, "Obviously if you use the water upstream, it won't be there for the person to use it downstream."

"Utah's the second driest state in the nation. Our water laws ought to catch up with that," Miller says.

Read the rest of the story HERE.

It came with a wrench...

Building with the Swedish system of closed panel wall elements in Sigtuna, Sweden.

Want.

My new guilty pleasure...

...is surfing the web...

...for a different kind of porn...

...known as stair porn.

Thanks to this website, I don't have to look very far...

Stair Porn

1. Wooden bookcase images from Living Etc, Elle interiör
2. Tolo House, Alvaro Leite Siza
3. Roarockit Skateboard Company Deck Stairs
4. Hanging Spiral Stairs, Didden Village, MVRDV
5. Wexford Hotel, Montego Bay, Jamaica

A homegrown post...

When we die, let's donate our land to the city with the hopes that they turn it in to a field of cement corn. Think of it, Eulalia...cement corn as far as the eye can see!

Flickr user jfsl3.

I'm not sure that that's exactly what Sam and Eulalia Frantz envisioned for their land before passing from this life to the next. Actually, I'm sure nobody envisions such an image. Regardless, that was the fitting tribute they gave this corn farmer and his wife.

Sam Frantz had/has a rich farm history in Dublin, OH. He is most well known for his corn hybridization techniques, most notably from the 1930's to the 1960's. And from my perspective, as a child, Frantz road really was the heart of Dublin. Aside from the upper-echelon houses and neatly-cropped golf courses, there wasn't much in the area but expansive farmland and soccer fields, all of which stretched along the perimeter of Frantz Road.

Today, however, farm titles have been bought Sam Walton-style in favor of track housing, "upgrade-available" condos, and malls, malls, malls - I can even remember (a number of years ago) one of our independent papers running a contest to come up with a new city motto, and a jaded reader submitted the wonderful, "Columbus: Malltastic!"

Such is the feeling for a good portion of Columbus development, including but not limited to, the outskirts of Dublin in the mid-1990's. Many other areas, such as Hilliard, Gahanna and Westerville experienced the same sort of development. Some fared the storm, while others folded in favor of the next housing development or mall expansion.

The Field of Corn

Also known as Cornhenge, the Field of Corn with Osage Orange Trees was conceived by artist Malcolm Cochran, and commissioned by the Dublin Arts Council in 1994. The site sits in a large grass field adjacent to Nationwide Insurance. Around the time of completion, 1,500 employees had relocated from Nationwide's downtown office in Columbus to the Dublin suburb - a trend omnipresent with the Central Ohio business model of that time. In fact, many other companies did the same, opting instead for the bright lights of the highway outer belt, over the parking-choked commute nightmare that was/is downtown Columbus.

Given the influx of residents to the suburbs, the decision was an easy one for most executives, even if it meant driving the city to one of the highest downtown vacancy rates in the nation, a trend that reached its worst from 00-02.

Now, however, with the development of the Arena District and surrounding areas --in addition to 10-year tax abatement programs for housing and other businesses-- Columbus is seeing a reurbanization of sorts.

So why the corn fields for a post?

Well, I've lived in Central Ohio for 80% of my life and never really explored some of the established attractions. As a result, Malcolm Cochran's cornfields caught my eye (or recaught, for that matter) because I've seen it surface every now and again on the interweb; from Scott Beale's experience at Laughing Squid to Neatorama's post, even Roadside America. Some people have even made videos of the field, like this one of a crazed man running through the corn sculptures. So it obviously catches a lot of peoples' attention, whereas I've kind of mentally written it off.

So again, why the fields?

They're odd, but they're the good kind of odd, and we don't get much of that good-kind-of-odd in Ohio. Not to mention, I think Cochran was trying to make a statement about the suburbanization of of our culture by permanently establishing a cornfield as, well, a cornfield!?!? And an absurd cornfield at that! 109 pieces of 8'0" friggin' tall corn.

From plaques on the site:

Corn has been cultivated in Ohio for approximately 1800 years. It was known to prehistoric Native American Hopewell peoples (A.D. 100-500). Prehistoric and historic Native Americans combined plantings of corn, beans, squash, and gourds in their fields and small garden plots. Two important varieties of corn were Northern flint corn, which had 16 to 20 rows of kernels on long, thin cobs, and Southern gourdseed corn, which had short, stubby ears with up to 32 rows of kernels. By the mid-1700s, Native Americans in Ohio grew great quantities of corn, often in larger fields. Particularly along the Scioto and Miami River valleys, it was not uncommon to see thousands of acres of cornfields. The Wyandot Indians, who are known to have camped on scenic Indian Run just north of Dublin village, were prominent among the historic Native American cultivators of corn.

OK, so the installation's plaque might not expound on my theory of cornfield-as-a-development-statement, but I still thought it was worth a post. And given the recent influx of cheap condos, loft-style apartments and plastic buildings going up in our fair city, who knows? Maybe one day we'll see a public park downtown with 109 strategically-placed tiny buildings scattered across a grass field - a fitting tribute to the over-development currently taking place.

Check it out when you have time:

Field of Corn (with Osage Orange Trees)
4995 Rings Rd
Dublin, OH 43017

Try it out in Google Streetview.

They have a FLARE for kinetic movement...

Some of you might know my obsession for the pneumatically actuated installation known as Hyposurface. I can't figure out if it's the flow or limitless functional possibilities that intrigues me more, but I'm fascinated by every color, click and wave.



Recently, a robot junkie peep of mine in San Fransisco pointed me to the water sculptures of William Pye and, for whatever reason, I was reminded more so of the mechanical movement in Hyposurface than the organic, hypnotic movement of Pye's water sculptures.

Call it an obsession with simulated movement, but for whatever reason, I'm more impressed with technological mimicry than its natural brethren. So I decided to go back to the Hyposurface concept and see if there was anything new on the market.

Needless to say, I'm in love with a new piece of technology. Take one part wall curtain, two parts stealth bomber, multiply by peyote and you've got:

FLARE: Kinetic Ambiant Reflection Membrane

FLARE turns the building facade into a penetrable kinetic membrane, breaking with all conventions of the building surface as a static skin. The FLARE system consists of a number of tiltable metal flake bodies supplemented by individually controllable pneumatic cylinders.


Due to the developed pattern, an infinite array of flakes can be mounted on any building or wall surface in a modular system of multiplied FLARE units.

Each metal flake reflects the bright sky or sunlight when in vertical standby position. When the flake is tilted downwards by a computer controlled pneumatic piston, its face is shaded from the sky light and this way appears as a dark pixel.

By reflecting ambient or direct sunlight, the individual flakes of the FLARE system act like pixels formed by natural light. The system is controlled by a computer to form any kind of surface animation. Sensor systems inside and outside the building communicate the buildings activity directly to the FLARE system which acts as the buildings lateral line.

Read more about FLARE Facade HERE.

Gary Fisher hits nail on head...

“Cars are the new smoking.”

-Gary Fisher

via Bike Portland, via via Matt Haughey on Twitter.

If cars are the new smoking, then SUV drivers are the new meth addicts.

Like Matt Haughey, I love love love this Gary Fisher quote. Can't wait to use it in a bar.