Tag: architecture

Easy VPN

Wouldn’t it be nice though? If you could have servers, like you did in the 1990s, with the same simple architectures as you used in the 1990s, and the same sloppy security policies developer freedom as you had in the 1990s, but somehow reach them from anywhere? Like… a network, but not the Internet. One that isn’t reachable from the Internet, or even addressable on the Internet. One that uses the Internet as a substrate, but not as a banana. That’s what we’re working on.

Green BQE

Bjarke Ingels Group has released details of transforming a 6-lane highway into a connected realm between the city and waterfront. The scheme centers on the Robert Moses-designed Brooklyn Queens Expressway. As officials prepare to carry out needed repairs on the highway, existing proposals fail to address the barrier created by the infrastructure, dividing the city and waterfront. BIG’s scheme outlines how the Expressway could be turned into parkland, accommodating vehicular traffic without compromising on the quality of public space. The first step in the BIG scheme is to construct an at-grade roadway along Furman Street and Brooklyn Bridge Park covered with a simple deck structure. The deck provides a platform for adding significant new parkland along the underused corridor while connecting the Brooklyn Heights and Brooklyn Bridge Park with a series of crisscrossing rampways, greenery, and park amenities. Local park access is accommodated on a meandering parkway, while space is created for a potential spur of the nearby light-rail line. The deck also extends south to Atlantic Avenue, creating a new crossing and urban nexus that serves as an introduction to the linear park.

Re-Imagining Central Park

The results of the LA+ ICONCOCLAST competition have been published, asking designers to reimagine and redesign New York’s Central Park following a fictional eco-terrorist attack. In total, over 380 designers from 30 countries submitted over 190 designs, culminating in 5 equal winners. Hailing from the UK, USA, China, and Australia, the winning entries ranged from “megastructures to new ecologies and radical ideas for democratizing public space.” Jury chair Richard Weller praised the winners for “how designers can move beyond the status quo of picturesque large parks and embrace the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century.”

Castle Reconstruction

6 Ruined British Castles Come Back to Life

Onward and NoeMam Studios have joined forces to digitally reconstruct 6 ruined castles across England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. The series of gifs sees the castles fluidly re-emerge from the landscape, retelling the sense of place by showing “the true splendor enjoyed and defended by yesteryear’s barons, queens, and kings.

Boring Prospects

Boring Company has started work on an 29km tunnel in Chicago from downtown to the airport. Successfully completing the airport tunnel will make the tunneling company worth as much as $16B. This valuation will be before any full speed hyperloop implementation. If Boring Company succeeds in lowering the cost of tunneling by 10-100x then they will enable high-speed transportation to be used inside and between cities. This would not only mean capturing most of the existing tunnel and infrastructure projects but increasing the tunneling projects by 100x.

2021-12-17: New tunneling methods are being tried. They’re currently about as fast as Prufrock, the Boring machine (which does 10 m / hour)

Petra, a 3-year-old startup is developing tech to cut through rock without grinding into it. A mix of gas and heat above 1000 degrees Celsius breaks rock into small pieces. Sensors attached to small rods touch the rock, but the excavation is carried out by the heat and gas. Petra is testing its tunnel-drilling method in a Minnesota quarry on Sioux Quartzite, 8x tougher than most forms of concrete. In the test, Petra says its method is moving through rock at 12 m / hour. Once the rock is broken into tiny pieces, a vacuum is used to suck rock fragments out of the hole.

AR Urbanism

What does the virtual space that “belongs to us” look like? Would could it look like? We might imagine a future as steeped in AR as Matsuda’s Hyperreality, but where instead of a hybrid landscape dominated by ads and obfuscating distractions, augmented overlays are used to highlight the hidden dimensions of place, or serve as a distinctly spatial platform for alternative forms of communication and culture. Inverting the vision of a commodified hybrid landscape, the seemingly inevitable barrage of immersive, interfacial capitalism could perhaps be transmuted into something democratic, artful, and even beautiful: a conduit to mobile urban discourse and learning; to collectively owned and managed hybrid spaces, and to community as a social body intersecting physical and digital worlds. But if this more hopeful image of an AR-saturated future is to come to fruition, it will require a deeply collaborative spirit between programmers and urbanists, artists and technologists, activists and educators — and most certainly architects as well.