Tag: architecture

Climbing Mt. Improbable

transforming iowa corn silos into ice climbing walls, temperatures permitting

Briggs spends most winter nights hosing down a quartet of grain silos on a friend’s farm – and relies on the Corn Belt’s frigid temperatures to transform the water into frozen walls of ice that tower 20m straight up. “By the time he’s done, the ice encasing the outside of the silos is 1m thick in spots – and ready for the onslaught of ice climbers drawn to this strange marriage of farming and extreme sports.”

Scifi Architecture

stuff like this makes me want to be an architect. but then again i would not have wanted to sleep on the floor in school, hunched over my cardboard model

Tom Foster, then, proposes a “swarm of hyper crystallisation submersible robots” that will spend an entire winter underwater in the Gulf of Helsinki, “artificially enhancing the ice sheet from underneath.” This – referred to as “ice periphery management” – is done in the service of an “ice suburb” that “will exist [out on the ice] for 5 months of each year.” The ice sheet can be strengthened with “coolant filled reinforcement bars,” and the ice suburb will generate its own energy “from high winter winds and sea/ice movements.”
So you’ve got an entire sci-fi trilogy, economically compressed into a few renderings and photo captions.

2007-03-21:

So what does all this have to do with cinema and architecture – or even with science fiction and the city? Well, by talking not to architects but instead to the people who actually design the sets, backdrops, cityscapes, environments, buildings, rooms, etc., in which cinematic action takes place – from X-Men 3 to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – you should be able to get at least some sense for what architecture can mean, on a narrative level, to those outside the architectural field.

man, the only time ever that i regret not being in LA

2007-05-14:

There’s a not-so-hidden influence on contemporary architects that’s widely acknowledged but rarely discussed: the speculative architectures in fantasy and science fiction movies.

crossing boundaries

Rolamite

As basic as the lever or pulley, the simple concept called “Rolamite” promises a revolution in mechanical design. What’s a Rolamite? It looks like a simple gadget made with 2 rollers and a steel band, but it’s much more. As basic as the wheel, the lever, or the hinge, it is the only elementary machine discovered this century. Its use will be widespread — in everything from switches, thermostats, and valves to pumps and clutches, and as almost frictionless bearings.

this makes me wonder if there is a list of basic mechanisms? sort of like the atoms of language, or the most fundamental algorithms