2014 Holiday Gift Books, 2 of 4

This year I'm presenting a selection of 40 holiday gift books from the same number of publishers, presented alphabetically in chunks of 10. Some none-too-serious recommendations of who might like the titles are indicated. See the others here.

Click covers ↓ to visit Amazon - or click titles ↓ to visit publishers' websites.

	For the lover of cities: Urban Acupuncture: Celebrating Pinpricks of Change that Enrich City Life Jaime Lerner Island Press Hardcover, 160 pages
	For the lover of Venice: Elements of Venice Foscari Giulia Lars Müller Publishers Hardcover, 696 pages
	For the non-architect interested in architecture: Architectural Styles: A Visual Guide Owen Hopkins Laurence King Publishers Paperback, 240 pages
	For the completist:  Elements: A series of 15 books accompanying the exhibition Elements of Architecture at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale James Westcott (contributions by Rem Koolhaas et al.) Marsilio Paperback w/slipcase, 2,336 pages in 15 books
	For the lover of offbeat graphics: Earthquakes, Mudslides, Fires and Riots: California and Graphic Design, 1936-1986 Louise Sandhaus (contributions by Lorraine Wild, Denise Gonzales Crisp, Michael Worthington) Metropolis Books Hardcover, 432 pages
	For the proud Luddite: Why Architects Still Draw Paolo Belardi, translated by Zachary Nowak MIT Press Paperback, 136 pages
	For the art lover who doesn't want to spend more than $2.50: New York's Underground Art Museum: MTA Arts and Design Françoise Bollack The Monacelli Press Hardcover, 264 pages
	For the tactical urbanist: Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities Pedro Gadanho Museum of Modern Art Paperback, 176 pages
	For the alternative energy optimist: Landscape and Energy: Designing Transition Dirk Sijmons nai010 Publishers Hardcover, 430 pages
	For the lover of reprints: Los Angeles Boulevard: Eight X-Rays of the Body Public 25th Anniversary Edition Doug Suisman ORO Editions Hardcover, 144 pages

2014 Holiday Gift Books, 1 of 4

This year I'm presenting a selection of 40 holiday gift books from the same number of publishers, presented alphabetically in chunks of 10. Some none-too-serious recommendations of who might like the titles are indicated. See the others here.

Click covers ↓ to visit Amazon - or click titles ↓ to visit publishers' websites.

	For the creative (co)worker: a+t 43: Workforce: A Better Place to Work a+t research group a+t Paperback, 160 pages
	For the naturalist: Animal Architecture Ingo Arndt Abrams Hardcover, 160 pages
	For the aural architect: Shape of Sound Victoria Meyers Artifice Books on Architecture Hardcover, 144 pages
	For the phenomenologist: Architectural Atmospheres: On the Experience and Politics of Architecture Christian Borch, editor (contributions by Böhme, Eliasson, Pallasmaa) Birkhäuser Hardcover, 112 pages
	For the beginner: Conditional Design: An introduction to elemental architecture Anthony di Mari BIS Publishers Paperback, 160 pages
	For the Eurocentric history buff: The Morphology of the Times European Cities and their Historical Growth Ton Hinse DOM Publishers Paperback, 304 pages
	For the techno-theorist: Paradigms in Computing: Making, Machines, and Models for Design Agency in Architecture Edited by David Jason Gerber, Mariana Ibanez eVolo Hardcover, 408 pages
	For the eternal dreamer: Imagine Architecture: Artistic Visions of the Urban Realm Lukas Feireiss, Robert Klanten, editors Gestalten Hardcover, 240 pages
	For the landscape artist: Composite Landscapes: Photomontage and Landscape Architecture Edited by Charles Waldheim, Andrea Hansen Hatje Cantz Hardcover, 176 pages
	For the Mies disciple: Last Is More: Mies, IBM and the Transformation of Chicago Robert Sharoff, William Zbaren Images Publishing Hardcover, 160 pages

Today's archidose #798

Here are some photos of the Roman Temple of Diana Environments (2011) in Merida, Spain, by José María Sánchez García Architects, photographed by Gonzalo Mauleón.











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Just-in-Case Informatics

[Image: A screen grab from the homepage of Orbital Insight].

Proving that some market somewhere will find a value for anything, a company called Orbital Insight is now tracking "the shadows cast by half-finished Chinese buildings" as a possible indicator for where the country's economy might be headed.

As the Wall Street Journal explains, Orbital Insight is part of a new "coterie of entrepreneurs selling analysis of obscure data sets to traders in search of even the smallest edges." In many cases, these "obscure data sets" are explicitly spatial:

Take the changing shadows of Chinese buildings, which Mr. Crawford [of Orbital Insight] says can provide a glimpse into whether that country’s construction boom is speeding up or slowing down. Mr. Crawford’s company, Orbital Insight Inc., is analyzing satellite images of construction sites in 30 Chinese cities, with the goal of giving traders independent data so they don’t need to rely on government statistics.

If watching the shadows of Chinese cities from space isn't quite your cup of tea, then consider that the company "is also selling analysis of satellite imagery of cornfields to predict how crops will shape up and studies of parking lots that could provide an early indicator of retail sales and quarterly earnings of companies such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Home Depot Inc."

[Image: A screen grab from the homepage of Orbital Insight].

The resulting data might not even prove useful; but, in a great example of what we might call just-in-case informatics, it's scooped up and packaged anyway.

The notion that there are fortunes to be made given advance notice of even the tiniest spatial details of the world is both astonishing and sadly predictable—that something as intangible as the slowly elongating shadows of construction sites in China could be turned into a proprietary data point, an informational product sold to insatiable investors.

Everything has a price—including the knowledge of how many cars are currently parked outside Home Depot.

Read more at the Wall Street Journal.

Art Arm

[Image: "Untitled #13," from "Scripted Movement Drawing Series 1" (2014) by Andrew Kudless].

San Francisco-based designer and architect Andrew Kudless is always up to something interesting, and one of his most recent projects is no exception.

For a new group of small works called "Scripted Movement Drawing Series 1" (2014), Kudless is exploring how robots might make visual art—in this specific case, by combining the instructional art processes of someone like Sol Lewitt with the carefully programmed movements of industrial machinery.

[Image: The robot at work, from "Scripted Movement Drawing Series 1" (2014) by Andrew Kudless].

In Kudless's own words, "The work is inspired by the techniques of artists such as Sol Lewitt and others who explored procedural processes in the production of their work. The script, or set of rules, as well as the ability or inability of the robot to follow these instructions is the focus of the work. There is almost a primitive and gestural quality to the drawings created through the tension between the rules and the robot’s physical movement. Precisely imprecise."

[Image: "Untitled #16," from "Scripted Movement Drawing Series 1" (2014) by Andrew Kudless].

These giant robot arms, he continues, "are essentially larger, stronger, and more precise version of the human arm. Made up of a series of joints that mimic yet extend the movements of shoulder, elbow, and wrist, the robot has a wide range of highly control[led] motion. The real value of these robots is that, like the human arm, their usefulness is completely determined by the tool that is placed in its hand."

So why only give robots tools like "welding torches, vacuum grippers, and saws," he asks—why not give them pencils or brushes?

[Image: "Untitled #6 (1066 Circles each Drawn at Different Pressures at 50mm/s)," from "Scripted Movement Drawing Series 1" (2014) by Andrew Kudless].

The results are remarkable, but it's specifically the unexpected combination of Lewittian instructional art with industrial robotics that I find so incredibly interesting. After all, Kudless ingeniously implies, it has always been the case that literally all acts of industrial assembly and production are, in a sense, Sol Lewitt-like activities—that conceptual art processes are hiding in plain sight all around us, overlooked for their apparent mundanity.

It's as if, he suggests, every object fabricated—every car body assembled—has always and already been a kind of instructional readymade, or Sol Lewitt meets Marcel Duchamp on the factory floor.

With these, though, Kudless throws in some Agnes Martin for good measure, revealing the robot arms' facility for minimalist lines and grids in a graceful set of two-dimensional drawings.

[Image: "Untitled #7 (1066 Lines Drawn between Random Points in a Grid)," from "Scripted Movement Drawing Series 1" (2014) by Andrew Kudless].

Kudless explains that "each of the works produced in this series was entirely programmed and drawn through software and hardware":

None of the lines or curves was manually drawn either within the computer or in physical reality. Rather, I created a series of different scripts or programs in the computer that would generate not only the work shown here, but an infinite number of variations on a theme. Essential to the programming was understanding the relationships between the robot and human movement and control. Unlike a printer or plotter which draws from one side of the paper to the other, the robot produces the drawings similarly to how a human might: one line at a time. The speed, acceleration, brush type, ink viscosity, and many other variables needed to be considered in the writing of the code.

Various drawing styles were chosen to showcase this.

[Image: "Untitled #15 (Twenty Seven Nodes with Arcs Emerging from Each)," from "Scripted Movement Drawing Series 1" (2014) by Andrew Kudless].

[Image: "Untitled #3 (Extended Lines Drawn from 300 Points on an Ovoid to 3 Closest Neigh[bor]ing Points at 100mm/s)" (2014) from "Scripted Movement Drawing Series 1" (2014) by Andrew Kudless].

[Image: "Untitled #12," from "Scripted Movement Drawing Series 1" (2014) by Andrew Kudless].

[Image: "Untitled #14," from "Scripted Movement Drawing Series 1" (2014) by Andrew Kudless].

There are many more drawings visible on Kudless's website, and I am already looking forward to "Scripted Movement Drawing Series 2."

You can also purchase one of the prints, if you are so inclined; contact the Salamatina Gallery for more information.

(Very vaguely related: Robotism, or: The Golden Arm of Architecture).