Tag: architecture

Let the Pantheon Crack

John Ochsendorf wants to tear down Rome’s iconic Pantheon. He wants to pull apart its 2000-year-old walls until it’s gorgeous dome collapses. Destroying it, he believes, is the best way to preserve it.

But the Pantheon that Ochsendorf, a professor of engineering and architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has in mind to destroy is less than 50 cm high, and it’s made of 492 3D-printed blocks. It’s designed from laser scans of the real building. A gaggle of MIT engineering students will place it on a table with a sliding base and pull the walls apart, then put it back together and tilt it until it crumbles.

Frank Gehry on Costs

The first documentary ever to focus on the tense process of architectural competitions, The Competition captures a fascinating account on how 5 world renowned architects – Jean Nouvel, Frank Gehry, Dominique Perrault, Zaha Hadid and Norman Foster – “toil, struggle and strategize to beat the competition.” The premise is based on a nearly forgotten, 2008 competition for a new National Museum of Art of Andorra, a small Pyrenees country nestled between Spain and France, which has yet to be realized.

Rayleigh scattering lights

Developed by CoeLux in Italy, this new form of artificial light is able to dupe humans, cameras and computers alike using a thin coating of nanoparticules to simulate Rayleigh scattering, a natural process that takes place in Earth’s atmosphere causing diffuse sky radiation. Far beyond simply making lights brighter or bluer, this approach accurately replicates how miles of atmosphere transform light within just a few millimeters of surface space.