Tag: urbanism

Subprime

it might be that the default risk is only $300b. by comparison, the tech crash was $9t.
2007-12-05: this is hilariously funny

2008-03-16:

a newsteam ventures to one of LA’s new shantytowns made up of people who’ve lost their homes in the subprime meltdown and now live in tents, improvised shacks or RVs on abandoned land. It’s the contemporary Hooverville, and, as the Subliterate Cinephile notes, I wonder why I found out about this from the BBC and not US media.

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

Resistant Maps

artistic actions in the interconnected urban territory, a conference and exhibition that investigated the ‘resistant’ practices and theories related to the territory imaginary and how once can inoculate political viruses in the re-thinking of the space.

mapping as it relates to politics, activism, urbanism