Cliched Christmas Card + BMW M5 = FUN

Christmas card result of an illustrator performing his craft in the new BMW M5. You can see the video of the process in the link below:

http://fastestchristmascard.ch/

Candy's City

New Orleans artist and graphic designer Candy Chang has been finding new ways to express the wants and needs of her neighborhood.  Click this link to read an article on grist.org about how Chang has created art interventions that give voice to the masses.  Check the link to her Neighborland site as well!

"What do we want of architecture?"

An essay from 1970 by Australian architect, Robin Boyd.

You're the One

 A 2009 installation in Osaka, Japan, by artist Florentijn Hofman asked the question: Who doesn't like rubber duckies?  From the artist's website:

"The Rubber Duck knows no frontiers, it doesn't discriminate people and doesn't have a political connotation. The friendly, floating Rubber Duck has healing properties: it can relieve mondial tensions as well as define them. The rubber duck is soft, friendly and suitable for all ages!"

Bathtime equals healing.  Although the Osaka setting might start to remind one of Godzilla. 

Click here to see the installation.  Follow the righthand column to see other versions by the artist.  Click here for a NYTimes article on the history of our squeaky friend.

Thread-not-so-bare

Sometimes it takes a change in the medium you're working with to yield incredible results.  These 'paintings' (I apologize for the quotes on principle) are stitched with thread.  Click this link to see the article on fastcodesign's website and more examples of Cayce Zavaglia's work.

Bike Your Way to a Better You!

This infographic (the best kind of graphic) wants to show you how bicycling to work (or 30 minutes a day) will make you healthier, wealthier and wise. For instance, did you know that the average person will lose 13 lbs in their first year of riding to work?

Air Swimmers

Fun, fun, fun, fun, fun!  How bummed are you for not inventing this?  Apparently they're a little tough to set up, but totally worth it!  And who wants to bet the shark sells out way faster than the clownfish?  At $28 apiece, you'd be foolish not to get one.

Science Friday

Auer + Weber's "Residencia" at Paranal in Chile may have caught the eye as an evil aesthete's dream lair in "Quantum of Solace", but the real stars on remote mountain tops are the telescopes they support, and the bizarre housing that protect them.

This is the VLT (yes, very large telescope) and it works by using three of the mirrors in unison to create a viewing area larger than any single mirror that could be built.

The Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) in Arizona has massive rails that slide aside doors to allow the dual mirrors a clear view of the night sky. Temperature differentials can cause the mirrors to warp, so huge duct work pumps outside air into the chamber to keep the equipment at the ambient air temperature during the day.

Mirror construction is an arms race to create the largest visible field possible to see farther away, and further in to the past. The contrast between the science at work, and the dry acronyms that name these projects is entertaining. Of course the logical conclusion is this project:

Behold the OLT. Yes, the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope.

These are wonderfull monstrosities for their scale and sci-fi boldness even if they do lack in some refinement. But there are beautiful telescopes as well, and maybe architects should take a look at these prosaic projects once again. SOM's solar observatory at Kitt Peak is surely a masterpiece of modern architecture.

And when James Turrell finishes his work at Rodin Crater, we may have the most ambitious intersection of art and science since the Egyptions (or at least the 10,000 year clock, but that's another post...)

Urban Poetry from NYC

The urban environment can provide a variety of poetic moments from sublime spaces to the complex interactions of inhabitants. New York City has added to that list by including poetry to their traffic signs (follow the link below to the read the full story from NPR).

NPR: Haiku Traffic Signs Bring Poetry to NYC Streets

Ice Cubism: The Hardest Rapper lends design some street cred

While he was balancing being a hard-core gangster rap icon, presumably with days filled with 'rolling up on fools,' Ice Cube also packed a T-square. That's not slang.  Cube studied architectural drafting at an Arizona trade school and now the New York Times’ "Home & Garden" section has featured his take on design. Sure, we may not all agree with his personal taste, but who wants to argue with a former member of NWA and, even so, it at least helps us prove that maybe we're not in such an old-man's club anymore afterall... 

Did you move to a big house in the hills once you became successful?
Ain’t that what it’s all about: providing a better way for your family than you had? It’s a Mediterranean-style house and it feels, to me, like an Egyptian palace. Though I haven’t been on my architect game in 25 years.
But you still try to make good design a part of your life?
Yeah, a lot. What I learned from architectural drafting is that everything has to have a plan to work. You just can’t wing it. I can’t get all the materials I need for a house and just start building.
Whether it’s a career, family, life — you have to plan it out.
How are your drafting skills these days?
You don’t want to live in nothing I draw. I got a certificate. For a year. In ’88. I don’t think I picked up a T-square since.

There is no conspiracy...

OR IS THERE?!?  Stephen Colbert looks to unlock the mysteries of the design of Denver International Airport.  Click this link for the video on the Denver Post's website.  [Scroll way down past all the blank page and advertising to see the video.] 
Learn the truth!  Marvel at the horrors!  Be surprised by a hilarious element at the midpoint of the video!

To Greeley...And Beyond!

Colorado has applied for federal designation as a US Spaceport!  Read the story here.  Look for an upcoming Funday activity where we solicit designs for our local connection to the cosmos...

Fun with Motion

This time-lapse video is by photographer Rob Whitworth.  It's a dizzying, and at times spatial-reconsidering, look at the many modes and forms and patterns of movement in booming Ho Chi Minh City.  The intended uses of a space aren't always realized in application.  Cultural norms, new technologies and plain-old time will inform our designs in new and evolving ways.  Good design will always include room for change.

Know the Warning Signs!

This is a campaign for Detroit's College for Creative Studies (CCS), via the terrific people at Core77.com

A Digitally Remastered Funday Classic: Door Handles

What subject could be more pertinent in today's tumultuous world that door handles?  We at Funday agree an have reproduced a Funday Classic from all the way back to last year's very first Funday thanks to the archival efforts of Ron I.

Ron's foundational presentation compares the great personalities of 20th century design with their personal takes on that most tactile of building elements, the door handle.  Make your own Freudian presumptions about how each work represents its respective designer and enjoy this timeless Funday presentation.

Cultured Coffee with Carl

It's a good thing the guy got a Starbuck's card for his birthday because Funday presenter Carl H. is a coffee afficionado.  In fact, he likes the beverage so much that he'll travel all the way to exotic I-talian locales thousands of miles away just to enjoy it.  And, don't worry, he won't let little things like being able to pronounce those places where he had the coffee get in the way of his passion. 

As far as we can discern, these are the only pictures Carl took on his trip...

In the November edition of Funday, presenter Eric Watson surveyed the various architectural implications of sport.  From hi-design fooseball (or garage sale quality as may be the case in our office) to the spatial complexities of the beautiful game, the presentation draws parallels and observations from the organized movement that and the spaces within and around it.  Thanks to Eric for turning us from spectators into analysts and making sports sophisticated.

UNDERCITY, a film

This film by Andrew Wonder shows the parts of New York City that you hear about much more than you see.  Enjoy!

How To See: Skier's Edition

 
I can't rave enough about this segment from the All.I.Can ski/environmental movie by Sherpas Cinema.  It's a fascinating way to analyze a built environment, albeit from a gravity-intensive point of view.  And the cinematography is just terrific.  Please follow this link to view the video.

"Landscape is valued, while architecture is not."

Click on the title above for a link to an essay on how architects use site to rationalize building form.  There are interesting questions on form generation and how architects can be disingenuous in their site analysis.  From the essay:

"Architects are not required to be intellectually rigorous. They only have to convincingly sell ideas about how value is embedded in form in order to build. It is precisely this need that makes architectural intellectualism so suspect, and, just to reiterate, nothing sells today like landscape, however shoddily conflated in theory. The conceptual problems I have been describing are thus not a big deal professionally (though they are frankly unforgiveable within academic architectural discourse). Still, given that architects are, in my experience, a fairly conscientious group, it's interesting to speculate why so many continue to go out on this particularly logic-challenged limb, despite its evident flaws as theory."

Collaborative Consumption

Rachel Botsman speaks about shared resources in this 17 minute video from TEDxSydney.

Architecture Fight!!!

We think Coco may have gotten a flyer from FA004, and now he owes us some royalties.  Click the title above to follow the link...

Far Out

That's all I have to say about this....

Murmuration

If you have enough birds, they become spatial.  This is amazing filming and canoeing by Liberty Smith and Sophie Windsor Clive.  Enjoy!

More from Mr. Foster

For those who tuned-in to 'How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster' and even those who missed it, here's a series of short essays on various design and practice related topics from the man himself. Happy reading!

Building Futures: Required Reading

The Royal Institute of British Architects released a publication examining the future of the building design profession in 25 years. Through interviews and analyses of small, medium and large practices, the study explores the implication that contemporary economic conditions pose for our profession.  While we've emerged from a period of rapid growth and change into a stage of stagnation, designers are at the forefront of global change and the building future's group is seeking out what will make us viable during changed times ahead.

 

"It can sometimes seem that the long shadow of the gentleman architect still hangs over the profession, obscuring the fainter, earlier memory of the master builder. Contemporary society has more interest in the latter than the former. While the future for the practice of architecture as a discrete business is uncertain, the opportunities for architects have never been greater, notwithstanding the current recession. However to grasp those opportunities architects will need to develop greater financial nous and commercial acumen, to welcome the integration of their work with others in the wider industry, and continue to work hard to promote the extraordinary benefits which society gains from the design process. "

A quick read of the 'Practice Futures' report will be a great primer for a special December Funday featuring Douglas Parker of the Greenway Group and the Design Futures Council - a national design thinktank (put December 19 @ 8 a.m. on you calendar!).

Mighty Mitts: Photographs of a modern John Henry

This really has nothing to do with design, other than being documented by some very nice photography by Thomas Prior, but it's totally nuts. Basically, it fits into our awesome things category...

"Big Rich" Williams is a 6'3", 410-pound giant of a man with amazing hands.  They don't really look any different than yours or mine apart from the fact that he used his to shatter every grip-strength record there was earlier this year.  Sure this is a very obscure thing to take note of, but imaging holding a 163-pound anvil by its horn (that's the smooth, tapered part) and walking it around a room.  Or imagine tearing the pages of a phonebook in half (and not along the binding side).

Unless your day job is at the anvil plant, grip skills can lie dormant, unobserved and unheralded. And that makes grip the rarest of abilities -- something you are born with that you stumble across via happenstance. A genuine surprise. A gift. Williams discovered his gift in October 2008, after walking into Sorin's gym. "Rich is a wonder," Sorin says. "He came in and lifted the anvil and looked at me like, 'What's so hard about that?'" Sorin's eyes widen. Then he points to another patron. "That guy over there? He can deadlift 800 pounds. But he can't lift the anvil once. It staggers me what Rich can do. He's like a tall tale you'd hear, the man who can lift medicine balls with his fingertips."  (ESPN Magazine, April 2011)

 

Beyond that, the guy's personal story is pretty interesting as detailed by an article in ESPN Magazine and Thomas Prior's visceral images tell the story pretty well.

monstrous!

The only thing better than public art made out of tape, is public art made out of tape that you can inhabit. This "Tape Melbourne" project by Numen/For Use design collective is the perfect combination of bizarre and interactive. The textured translucency of the shell created by varying layers of the tape (it looks like packing wrap to us) creates an organic appearance as if a mutant funnel spider has made home in Melbourne's new art galleries. We imagine those who balk at its appearance are soon won over by a crawl around inside. Silliness taken seriously. What if our homes, and parks, and offices had more spaces conducive to play and playful thinking?

We also wonder how much this whole structure weighs? Another of their tape projects weighs just 86kg (190lbs) and doesn't appear to be much smaller. It certainly borrows support from its building hosts, but this is a dramatic example of the efficiency of tension and compound curved surfaces to create usable forms with minimal material.

We could also imagine the development possibilities of these interstitial webs where whole tertiary spaces are created between buildings to serve tertiary programs and constructed in a week for $2 a square foot (or maybe these are better tracked by the cubic foot?) Numen/For Use has other examples of their cocoon creations in Germany, Serbia and Austria on their site that are worth checking out.

Bing Thom: Crowd-Sourced Community Input

Among the presenters at last week's AIA Colorado Design Conference, Michael Heeney, principal at Bing Thom Architects had one of the most interesting presentations - at least judging from the amount of notes I took.

One of many innovative practice and design approaches discussed was the implementation of social networking to generate community input for a public library in Surrey, British Columbia (a suburb of Vancouver).  Given the project's truncated schedule, Bing Thom established a public Flickr account and asked for photographic submissions from the community for ideas and inspiration for the library design. 

image: Bing Thom Architects

The result of the process was a network of crowd-sourced ideas, representative of more of the population than simply those who are motivated enough to attend community meetings...and it probably saved a little time for the city and the design team as well.

FM Extra - Snohetta's Car Commercial

In addition to designing terrific buildings, the firm Snohetta also works on product and advertising design.  This video is a commercial they made for a Norwegian zero emissions car.

FM Extra - Camera Ball!

Today's FM Extra is a throwable, panoramic camera, via core77.  This seems like something easily militarized.

Funday: Now for early birds

Yesterday kicked off our first installment of Funday Morning at the ripe time of 8:30 a.m. Who knew we could pull things together first thing in the morning? And to add to the excitement, it was kicked off by the first annual Fundies - recognizing some of the finest past Funday presenters in a somewhat disorganized fashion.

Our carefully crafted MDF and gold spraypaint (real gold spray paint, that is) trophies went to:

-Jen Bolton : Best Selection of Crackers and Beer

-Carl Hole (3d Projection) : Most Able to Present at the Last Minute

-Sydney Hamilton (Bompas and Parr) : Jigglyest

Thanks to everyone who attended and look out for the next Funday on November 21st!

(image from: http://fieldstudy.tumblr.com/post/4338286952/its-been-one-week-since-the-official-launch-of)

FA 005

Sarah Moll

Kathy Barrett

Dominic Weilminster

Vincent Moon

Vincent Moon is a Parisian filmmaker, an innovative "videographer" and creator of "Take Away Shows," a video podcast stemmed from the French online music site "La Blogotheque" he co-founded. Over the last 2 years he has made over 200 videos with diverse musicians across the world, including many popular musicians like REM, Arcade Fire, and Andrew Bird. Vincent's style is a departure from the mainstream commercial format of a music video, and his use of lo-fi technology blurs the line between creator and audience, capturing the intimacy, spontaneity, and energy of the musicians in impromptu settings. This more natural approach allows the audience to focus on the beauty of improvisation. With each project, Vincent tries to figure out "how to push a band in another situation and see what happens." He is "amazed how little time we spend thinking about how people create compared to how people make money from creations." He has challenged the idea of what a music video should be and has influenced many young filmmakers to take his same approach.

In addition to filming music, Vincent's latest projects include filming his travels, and documenting them in the same style as the Take Away Shows. He hopes his videography will inspire people to explore the world as he does.

Read more about him on his website: http://www.vincentmoon.com/about.php

See his filmography work: http://www.vincentmoon.com/list.php?cid=6

Visit the Takeaway Show website: http://www.blogotheque.net/

Chicago!

Last november, RNL sent me to Chicago to attend the annual Greenbuild conference.  As way of demonstrating that my reimbursables are valid, I put together the below presentation to justify the expenditure and really prove that I was in Chicago.  For real.

FA 004

Carl Hole
Sarah Moll
Michelle Richter

16th Street vs the Highline

This post is the content of our very first FA presentation, a powerpoint by Todd that examines urban spacemaking and how Denver's 16th Street Mall has held up over the years. For contrast, it is compared with the newly opened Highline Park in New York City. Different planning goals, program elements and physical qualities still yield similar urban experiences.

 

FA 003

 

Rachel Petro
Eric Watson
Nate Huyler

FA 002

Michelle Richter
Allison Beardmore-Nash
Craig Johnson

Videos from today's funday session -

How to Tie Your Shoes - a TED talk with Terry Moore

A Miniature of San Francisco - from Fast Company Design, follow the link to the videos in the article.

Way Back Home - Danny MacAskill

thanks to Carl for sharing.

FA 001

 
Todd Wenskoski

Ron Izzo

Mary Beth Caccitolo