Tasting Space –Lidia Klein Among the senses engaged in experiencing architecture, taste remains the least active. Edible architectural structures seem only to exist in fiction, in stories such as The Gingerbread House, a German fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm and published in 1812. The protagonists, Hansel and Gretel, are a young brother and […]

Inorganic Speciation by Iain Maxwell + Dave Pigram (supermanoueuvre) Form is the primary instrument through which architecture engages with the world. It is this firmly held position that motivates supermanoeuvre to develop custom methodologies of formation that allow for the explicit and open-ended negotiation between multiple architectural intentions and the complex milieux within which they […]

Nervou[s]ystopia Jon Bailey / Chad Porter / Julia Hager / Matt Noe On a tangent bifurcation of future possibilities resources of not oil or money is sequestered but that of human flesh and brain power. As prosthetics and technological enhancements propel us into a new reality we speculate on a future instance where we choose […]

Swarm What? Benjamin Bratton, 2012 What it is that designers actually mean when we/they talk about swarms, intelligence, and swarm intelligence? Usually we refer to rhythmic emergent processes –waves– but do this referring by sharing demonstrative images of swarm topologies, frozen or in motion. As information visualization becomes an increasingly global language of systems, events […]

Volatile Formation Roland Snooks – Log 25, Summer 2012 Volatility is a critical condition for design. Within the intensive processes of formation that underlie complex phenomena, those which self-organize and are capable of catastrophic change, it is the volatile nature of the system that is generative. From these far-from-equilibrium conditions new forms of order emerge, […]

Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias Michel Foucault’s, Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias (1967) [translated from French]… The great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history: with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis, and cycle, themes of the ever-accumulating past, with its great preponderance of dead men and the menacing glaciation of […]

Virtually Augmented Realities “The extended human is the technium. Marshal McLuhan, among others, noted that clothes are people’s extended skin, wheels extended feet, camera and telescopes extended eyes. Our technological creations are great extrapolations of the bodies that our genes build. In this way, we can think of technology as our extended body.” – Kevin […]

Is Construction the Least Innovation Industry? This article resumes the conversation on the article, “Is Construction America’s Least Innovative Industry” and the HKS Viewpoint by Design Director Dan Noble. Dan touches on the many innovations the architectural practice has adopted, including BIM software, parametric modeling, and fabrication technologies. This article highlights the adoptions and innovations […]

Today’s guest writer essay is written by Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, co-director of the The Westminster International Law & Theory Centre in London. Andreas was kind enough to center his text on the figure of the Funambulist who incarnates both the body that experiences and creates the atmosphere (s)he is in. He uses Tomas Saraceno‘s sculptures as […]

Architecture’s Next Ontological Innovation Patrik Schumacher, London 2012 Bill MacDonald and Erik Ghenoiu asked me to write a “critical assessment, counterpoint, or position statement in light of this issue’s material, showing both the importance of, and problems with, the arguments that have been emerging in architecture’s reception of object-oriented ontology and the new thinking about […]