Off the Record

Stumbling around the Architectural Record mega-site earlier today, I came across Off the Record, "the brand-new blog written by the staff of Architectural Record...where the magazine’s team of experienced, award-winning editors offer their insightful, informal, opinionated takes on architecture-related trends, conferences, exhibitions, projects and personalities."



Record is not the first architectural print magazine to venture into the realm of blogs. Architect Magazine has a few; Building Design has a bunch; Dwell has its daily. Regardless, there's something about Record's venture that seems to legitimize the efforts of other architectural blogs, or at least it further breaks down the boundary between the content of print magazines versus online blogs and vice versa. But with the ever expanding print and online content of magazines like Record, it's becoming a bit overwhelming; so many words, so little time.

Today's archidose #117

Jyväskylä, originally uploaded by jmtp.

A building at the University of Jyväskylä (formerly Pedagogical Institute) in Jyväskylä, Finland by Alvar Aalto (1952-56).

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Proper Project Orientation

[Image: A wonderfully disorienting image, called Proper Project Orientation, by Vancouver-based photographer Bill MacEwen – an image so spatially evocative, with its labyrinth of scaffolding, ladders, surfaces, and stairways – a horizontal universe of painterly self-connectedness – that I'd rather not reveal what the photo actually is. Is it a billboard, re-designed by Lebbeus Woods? Or a painting? Perhaps it's a drive-in cinema after an atom bomb has hit... It's better just to stare and enjoy – while viewing the original photo here. (Thanks, Bill!].

Little Earth

[Image: Little Earth by London Fieldworks].

Speaking of surrogate earths, the science-minded arts group London Fieldworks has a project, from 2004, called Little Earth.
Little Earth was a "four channel synchronised video installation with surround sound," featuring scenes "shot on Haldde Mountain in the Norwegian Arctic, Ben Nevis in Scotland, and on the island of Svalbard, with computer animations of the Earth’s magnetosphere modeled by the Leicester Radio & Space Plasma Physics Group."

[Image: Another glimpse of Little Earth by London Fieldworks].

The Independent refers to these latter projections as being "an animated sequence of the Earth enmeshed within its magnetic field lines, which trail off into the solar system."
Here are some video stills of the project.

[Images: Film stills from Little Earth by London Fieldworks].

Meanwhile, London Fieldworks also produced a short publication about the project; the book includes essays on art, meteorology, and physics.
But I was interested to see that the project is at least partly about Norwegian scientist Kristian Birkeland. From the project's website:

The Little Earth project identifies two physicists, C.T.R. Wilson and Kristian Birkeland, as significant contributors to 'big science'. Both researchers were stationed at mountaintop observatories studying natural phenomena at the end of the 19th-century. They relied on naked-eye observation and simple instruments in extreme environments and were perhaps the last of the natural philosophers. Associated with the mountaintop experiences of Wilson and Birkeland are two celebrated machines: Wilson’s famous ‘cloud chamber’ and Birkeland’s lesser-known ‘terrella’. The instruments promoted understanding of phenomena at the micro and macro scale – signaling new frontiers for exploration.

Among many other reasons, this caught my eye because Birkeland and his "terrella" – which London Fieldworks describe as an artificial "plasma universe" – were the subject of one of the very first BLDGBLOG posts... a post which, in an almost freakish coincidence, I was re-reading just this morning, several hours before I discovered Little Earth (via we make money not art).
It's an old post, so it's strangely formatted and a little over-casual, but it's also one of my favorites – so check it out if you get the chance.
And if London Fieldworks sounds like an interesting group, you'll be pleased to know that there are several other cool projects described on their website.

(Note: Little Earth spotted over at we make money not art).

Inside these spans are circles

[Image: The construction of the Nicholson Viaduct; spotted a few days ago at Coudal. While you're at it, take a good, long look through Coudal's voluminous architecture archives].

The Oxygen Garden

[Image: The Oxygen Garden, from Sunshine; courtesy of DNA Films].

The sci-fi film Sunshine – which finally opens in the United States tomorrow – includes a set called the Oxygen Garden.

[Image: The Oxygen Garden, from Sunshine; courtesy of DNA Films].

As the film's official website explains: "Oxygen production is vital for manned long-term space flight." Accordingly, "a long-term mission should have a natural, unmechanical way of replenishing its oxygen supplies."
Making a few visual references to NASA's early experiments with "space gardens" – and to other artificial landscapes, such as Biosphere 2 – the film's artistic team thus wired together a network of plants, aeration devices, cylindrical grow chambers, and hydroponic vats.

[Image: The Oxygen Garden, from Sunshine; courtesy of DNA Films].

The Garden is "one of the most interesting sets" in the film, the website claims, "as the cold, clean 'spaceshipness' is juxtaposed with the wild, dirty nature – this is the only set where there is anything 'green'. All of the plants you see on the set are real, there's not one plastic fern in there at all. When you walk in you are immediately struck by how the set smells. It smells alive."

[Image: A close-up of the Oxygen Garden, from Sunshine; courtesy of DNA Films].

I have to admit to a certain fascination with surrogate earths: those portable versions of our planet, and its climate, that pop up everywhere from hydroponic gardens, terrariums, and floating greenhouses to complex plans for manned missions to the moon.
If only for the purpose of growing vegetables, how can we use technology – fertilizers, UV lights – to reproduce terrestrial conditions elsewhere, in miniature?
Under rigorous interpretations of, say, The Bible or The Koran, would this be considered a sin?

[Image: A glimpse inside the Oxygen Garden, from Sunshine; courtesy of DNA Films].

And, finally, what does it mean that the earth itself can enter into a chain of substitutions – a whole economy of counterfeits and stand-ins, referring, through simulation, to a lost original – only to produce something so unearthly as a result?

MVRDV LACKing Inspiration

This is too good not to pass along. Archinecter o d b posts this news bit:

"MVRDV selected as architects for Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam with design resembling a piece of furniture [LACK series] commonly found in Ikea stores."

Gotta say, I wholeheartedly agree.



This MVRDV misstep reminds me of another one by a fellow Dutch office.