Nature Version 2.0: Ecological Modernities and Digital Environmentalism
Jan. 21 ­ Feb. 16,  2008 @ Colgate Universityis Clifford Gallery, Hamilton,
New York.

http://www.ecoarttech.net/sustainablefutures

Featuring works by Natalie Jeremijenko, Brooke Singer, Joline Blais, Jane
Marsching, Colin Ives, Alex Galloway, Amy Franceschini, Tom Sherman, Michael
Alstad, Don Miller (aka no carrier), and Andrea Polli. Curated by EcoArtTech
(Cary Peppermint & Christine Nadir)

---------------
Nature Version 2.0 is a survey of artists who reinvent environmentalism for
a digital age in a number of ways: by examining how digital technologies can
make ecological problems more salient, by reusing and recycling obsolete
technologies for new uses, and by exploring how digital spaces and the
public domain may require environmental protection much like nature.
Re-imagining the relationship between nature and technology, Nature Version
2.0 suggests an ethics of the network and an environmentalism of natural,
built, and digital spaces.

This exhibition is in conjunction with Environmental Art and New Media
Technologies: Imagining Sustainable Futures, a two-day symposium on
interdisciplinary, digital, and networked art and research that draws upon
environmental science, computer science, design, hacking, gameplay,
engineering, and ecocriticism. Following the Nature Version 2.0 artists¹
reception on February 8, keynote speaker Natalie Jeremijenko will launch the
two-day Environmental Art and New Media Technologies symposium in Golden
Auditorium, Little Hall, at 7pm. ³90 Degrees South,² a multimedia
performance by Andrea Polli will follow at 9pm in the Clifford Gallery. The
symposium will resume in Golden Auditorium on February 9 for a day of talks
and presentations by critics and exhibiting artists, 9am-5pm.

Hosted by Colgate University¹s Clifford Art Gallery, the Department of Art
and Art History, and the Environmental Studies Program, these events were
made possible through funding provided by the Institute for the Creative and
Performing Arts, the Film and Media Studies Program, the Environmental
Studies Program, and the Center for Ethics and World Societies at Colgate
University. All events are free and open to the public.

---------------
Exhibition & Symposium Events for Friday February 8th, 2008:

Artists' reception
5­7pm, at Little Hall, Clifford Gallery

Environmental Art and New Media Technologies Symposium, Keynote Presentation
Natalie Jeremijenko
7-9pm, at Little Hall, Golden Auditorium

'90 Degrees South,' a multimedia performance by Andrea Polli
9pm, at Little Hall, Clifford Gallery

----------------
Located on the first floor of Little Hall, the Clifford Art Gallery presents
approximately six exhibitions a year. A teaching gallery, all exhibitions
are selected by Colgate¹s art and art history faculty to provide examples of
work executed in a variety of media that demonstrate issues originating in
the academic curriculum. Another focus of the gallery is the display of
professional work by contemporary artists, who are often featured in the
weekly public lecture series.

The Clifford is free and open to the public from 10:30 a.m. until 4:30 p.m.
on weekdays and from 1 p.m. until 5 p.m. on weekends.

Pathetic Fallacy: Weather and Imagination

January 7 - February 27, 2008

Works by Richard Bosman, Peter Brooke, Fernando Ferreira de Araujo, Malcolm Fenton, Joy Garnett

@

Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of the Imagination

247 East 82nd Street, New York, NY 10028

Artist's Reception: Saturday, January 12, 5:30-7:00pm.

In his five-volume work Modern Painters (1843-60), John Ruskin wrote of the poetic practice of ascribing human characteristics, such as emotions, feelings and sensations, to inanimate objects or to nature, thereby coining the term pathetic fallacy. The Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination is pleased to present the exhibition, Pathetic Fallacy: Weather and Imagination, which examines diverse ways in which artists and scientists record, capture and analyze the phenomenology of weather. From the roiling background in Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” to Shakespeare’s tempests, weather forms an underlying context across artistic disciplines. How do actual weather conditions affect the sensibility of an artist? How does the climate influence his or her representations, and what of the impact on the viewer? A concurrent display in the Annex will address how scientists, track, quantify, and forecast—via meteorology—the processes and phenomena of the atmosphere.

"Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it." -Mark Twain

Artists Richard Bosman, Peter Brooke, Fernando Ferreira de Araujo, Malcolm Fenton, and Joy Garnett, through painting, photography and printmaking, consider the implications and consequences of weather on human activity, and vice-versa.

Hallie Cohen, Curator

Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art

Hong Kong Island (Chinese),(detail),1998 Carved marble 65 x 120 x 80 cm (25 5/8 x 47 x 31 in)

Secret for Snow Leopard:
Yutaka Sone
19 September - 16 December, 2007

Preview 18 September, 6 - 8pm
7:00 pm: Performance by
Benjamin Weissman
Phenomenolgy of Snow,
a fiction reading

Parasol unit
foundation for contemporary art
14 Wharf Road, London N1 7RW
T +44 (0)20 7490 7373
F +44 (0)20 7490 7373
E info@parasol-unit.org

http://www.parasol-unit.org

---

Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art is pleased to present Secret for Snow Leopard: Yutaka Sone, the first solo exhibition of Sone�s works in a UK institution.

Sone's great love and fascination for nature, combined with a wholly open approach to life and art galvanizes a highly unconventional art. Working in various media, Sone makes installations, performance art, and films; he paints; and like a traditional sculptor carves hard marble and crystal. A common thread recognisable throughout Sone's work is his willingness to take risks and experiment, which at times can make some works appear to be unfinished or in a state of flux.

Sone's work is deeply influenced by his experiences, particularly those he has had during various expeditions in the Himalayas and in the jungle -- two very different environments which for him represent extremes of life. In his work Sone fuses art with life, his vision informed by their infinite possibilities and a genuine desire to give tangible form to that which is quintessential in all things. This constant seeking for perfection is evident in all of his work.

In this exhibition, Sone shows several of his exquisitely carved marble pieces, some of which have never been shown before; a recreation of the jungle, a maquette-like architectural landscape that includes snow-capped mountains, rivers and tropical plants, all within the same self-contained world; and some twenty crystal snowflakes.

Yutaka Sone was born in 1965 in Shizuoka, Japan. He studied architecture at Tokyo Geijutsu University, but opted to become an artist. His work is held in public collections worldwide including: Art Institute of Chicago; Daros Collection, Z�rich; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Kanazawa City Museum of Art, Kanazawa; Kunstmuseum Bern, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art. In 2003 the Tate acquired Highway Junction 110-105 (2002) with funds provided by the 2003 Outset Frieze Acquisitions Fund. The artist lives and works in Los Angeles.

Secret for Snow Leopard: Yutaka Sone is accompanied by the publication of a full-colour catalogue

 

via Rhizome.org:

While scientists calculate the long-term prognostics for the health of the planet, artists continue to take the natural world–and its fate–as both a medium and a subject in their work. The Natural World Museum and the United Nations Environment Programme have gathered a group of 79 such examples in the volume Art in Action: Nature, Creativity, and Our Collective Future. Representative projects range from the crowd-pleasing site-specific work of Christo and Jeanne Claude to Olafur Eliasson’s immersive provocations–just in time for a recently-opened mid-career survey of his work at SFMOMA–and the book is separated into sections that track artists rendering nature as everything from a fantasy Eden to a fallen wasteland of unchecked human development. The title makes the book’s overall purpose clear. As much as it documents individual projects that engage with and manipulate ecology, the intent is a cumulative attempt to draw awareness to the ever-more fragile state of the planet.

[Link]

This entry was posted by William Hanley on Tuesday, September 11th, 2007 at 12:45 pm.

Grand Unification Theory, Agnes Denes, 2002

Background
SEPTEMBER 14 - DECEMBER 21, 2007 -- "Weather Report: Art and Climate Change" is an exhibition curated by internationally renowned critic, art historian, and writer Lucy R. Lippard. It is presented in collaboration with EcoArts.

This exhibit partners the art and scientific communities to create a visual dialogue surrounding climate change. Historically, visual arts play a central role in attracting, inspiring, educating and motivating audiences. "Weather Report: Art and Climate Change" will exhibit artwork, in the museum and our partnering venues, and in outdoor site specific locations throughout Boulder, that will activate personal and public change.

Our collaborating partner EcoArts is a new effort bringing together scientists, environmentalists, and performing and visual artists - along with producers, presenters, scholars, spiritual leaders, policy makers, educators, businesses, and people from all walks of life - to use the arts to inspire new awareness of, discussion about, and action on environmental issues, with new possibilities for envisioning a sustainable future. Its programming principles are artistic excellence, scientific accuracy, environmental effectiveness, ethical practice, and whenever possible, presenting activities that strive to follow "the middle way" of being either non-partisan or bi-partisan to reach the widest audience possible.

Participating Artists:
Kim Abeles, Lillian Ball, Subhankar Banerjee, Iain Baxter&, Bobbe Besold, Cape Farewell, Mary Ellen Carroll (Precipice Alliance), CLUI (Center for Land Use Interpretation), Brian Collier, Xavier Cortada, Gayle Crites, Agnes Denes, Steven Deo, Rebecca DiDomenico, Future Farmers (Amy Franceschini and Michael Swaine), Bill Gilbert, Isabella Gonzales, Green Fabrication (via Rick Sommerfeld, University of Colorado, College of Architecture and Planning), Newton & Helen Harrison, Judit Hersko, Lynne Hull, Pierre Huyghe, Basia Irland, Patricia Johanson, Chris Jordan, Marguerite Kahrl, Janet Koenig & Greg Sholette, Eve Andree Laramee, Learning Site (Cecilia Wendt and Rikke Luther), Ellen Levy, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Patrick Marold, Natasha Mayers, Jane McMahan, Mary Miss, Joan Myers, Beverly Naidus, Chrissie Orr, Melanie Walker & George Peters, Andrea Polli, Marjetica Potrc, Aviva Rahmani, Rapid Response, Buster Simpson, Kristine Smock, Joel Sternfeld, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Ruth Wallen, Sherry Wiggins, The Yes Men, Shai Zakai

PRIMARY EXHIBITION SITE:
Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art
1750 13th Street, Boulder, 80302
http://bmoca.org
Tuesday-Friday, 11am to 5pm
Saturday during the Boulder County Farmers' Market (through October), 9am to 4pm
Saturday (beginning November), 11am to 5pm
Sunday, 12noon to 3pm

ADDITIONAL INDOOR GALLERY SITES:
Boulder Public Library, 1000 Canyon Blvd.
University of Colorado, Norlin Library Galleries, 1720 Pleasant St.
University of Colorado, ATLAS (exhibit Sept. 13?Oct. 6, 10am to 2pm), 125 Regents Dr.
National Center for Atmospheric Research, (NCAR) Mesa Lab, 1850 Table Mesa Dr.

OUTDOOR SITES:
Boulder Municipal Campus (Along the Boulder Creek to Boulder Public Library)
Boulder Public Library, 1000 Canyon Blvd.
Central Park (park directly west from the museum)
Eben G. Fine Park, 101 Arapahoe Ave.
National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Mesa Lab, 1850 Table Mesa Dr.
Twenty Ninth Street (Canyon St. and Broadway)
17th and the Boulder Creek Path

via ArtInfo:

FROM MODERN PAINTERS

Becoming the Weather

By Adrian Searle
Published: May 13, 2007

REYKJAVIK, Iceland (Modern Painters)—Even in the city you could tell the weather was wrong, the seasons out of kilter; spring blooms in November, frogs clumsy with spawn before Christmas, birdsong too insistent for February. There were signs and portents everywhere.  But the temperature was dropping when I left London in mid-March, plummeting as I took off for Iceland, where, famously, there is less a climate than continually sampled instances of weather—glorious sun one minute, a howling gale the next, snow then hail then sun again. Total night or no night, depending on the time of year.

The sudden jolts and lurching barometer probably tell us less than those deceptively flat periods of unexpected, lulling mildness that just arrive one day and stay. What if it were always like that? What would an absence of weather tell us? “Weather,” observes Roni Horn, “is the key paradox of our time. Weather that is nice is often weather that is wrong. The nice is occurring in the immediate and individual, and the wrong is occurring systemwide.” There was snow on my arrival. The edges of lakes were caked in a messy slop of broken ice and twice-frozen slush; the spate rivers porridgy and swollen with snowmelt; the sea troubled, definitely troubled. There were places along the drive north from Reykjavík where it was impossible to tell where the ridges and troughs of the lava fields ended and the waves began, or exactly where the arc of the ocean and the flat-skied brightness met. The air sometimes so clear it was hard to tell if the vanishing point was inches away or miles.

Once or twice I thought I caught a glimpse of the cone of Snæfell, the dormant volcano inside whose crater Jules Verne imagined a pathway descending to the center of the earth. The conical peak, uncoupled from the horizon, was as distant and tantalizing as Mount Fuji, as though it were hovering somewhere above the farther rim of the Arctic Circle. And then it was gone.

Horn once said that she comes to this high-latitude mid-Atlantic island “to get at the very center of the world,” echoing both Verne and the poet Emily Dickinson, who, Horn noted, “stayed home to get at the world.” Home, for Horn, is an island like this. She has been coming here regularly, back and forth from New York, for more than 30 years. Her visits began in a desire for solitude and distance, space, an urge to measure herself against something new. In the early years she traveled with a motorbike and a tent. As much as wanting an encounter with nature and wildness, she wanted an encounter with herself. Iceland became both her studio and her material, backdrop and foreground, means and subject. It is as elemental a place as I have ever been.

Passing through the small town of Stykkishólmur in the early 1990s, Horn noticed a building standing at the end of a bluff. It was then the local library, and had been built during the 1950s. Horn has described it as looking like “an art deco gas station.” It was built too late to be that, but with its jaunty angles, slanting roof, and rounded prow with wraparound windows overlooking the harbor and the sea beyond, it brings to mind both a ship’s bridge and a solarium. The structure doesn’t so much sit on the rock as ride through the days, turning into the weather. Its position also reminded Horn of a lighthouse, perched above the harbor, and from which one could survey the enormous expanse of Breiðafjörður, its northern horizon gnawed by the highlands and peaks of the Western Fjords, fingering up toward the Arctic.

Perfectly placed and oriented, the building is what the Spanish would call a mirador, a secluded, sequestered place in which to linger, and from which to gaze out and contemplate the panorama of the world beyond, and (perhaps more importantly) to sink into oneself, in the awareness that one is perched somewhere near the end of the world, with the irregular, complicated coastline winding out of sight like a rambling, unfinished sentence, and the fjord punctuated by islands with names as abrupt and cursory as the islands themselves: Flatey, Brokey, Arney, Skaley, with the far cliffs and table mountains on the northern horizon, the town below at the foot of the bluff.

It is in this former library (a new, larger library with easier access has been erected below) that Horn is installing Vatnasafn/Library of Water. The given of the building, its aspect and position, are almost enough, and Horn is returning to the town something that has been here for years, but has mostly gone unnoticed.

Perfect, plain, identical floor-to-ceiling clear glass columns stand about the largest room, crowding near the entrance. The columns are filled with water. Some stand apart, others cluster to form a loose, convivial group. Moving between and among the columns, one thinks of a grove and of people—especially when Horn slips her arm round a column and leans against it, giving it an affectionate embrace. Momentarily, I am nervous. These things weigh tons, and only a few of the columns are properly fixed in place yet. Each is filled with around 50 gallons of water, melted and collected from Iceland’s glaciers—Vatnajökull, Hofsjökull, Drangajökull, Snæfellsjökull, which is on the slopes of the mountain I caught a distant glimpse of earlier and where we intend to drive tomorrow.

As it is, we stay in the library from late afternoon light to total dark, watching the light fade, which, in Iceland at this stage of year, already takes a long time. Every day is a dial slowly turned, and each perceptively longer than the last. Tomorrow, I realize, is the equinox, when day and night are of equal length. This is the tipping point, after which the days will begin to slide together toward the day-lit nights of the summer solstice, the sun barely dipping into the horizon.

We sit on the floor, in a clearing among the incomplete stand of columns. Each column reflects and refracts the light, presenting an elongated, distorted image of what lies beyond it. Looking through the water-filled column nearest the window, it seems to magnify the horizon, drawing the world into it. Virtual images and reflections slide over the surfaces of the columns and are held captive in them. The effect is unexpectedly complex, and more than a perceptual game of the sort I generally get impatient with. This place slows you down.

The water also clarifies the view and, like Iceland’s air, acts as a lens of peculiarly austere and steely brilliance. Things appear more clearly, more focused and crisp than the reality beyond the window, which the fading daylight is beginning to soften. This sharpness is contrasted by the warmth of the room itself and the muffled acoustics, damped down by the thick, rubbery floor beneath our feet.

The only internal illumination is provided by spotlights recessed into the ceiling above each column. The light fills the glass. The water from some glaciers is gin-clear, rendering their columns so absolute in their clarity they might just as well contain a vacuum. Others are glaucous or milky, others turbid with dissolved volcanic minerals and ash, clay, and pumice. Slowly the suspended particles are separating out and sinking to form thin strata at the bottom of the glass. Some of these glaciers, Horn tells me, are melting so fast now that they may not be with us in a decade, “but this is only accidentally about the endgame.” It is difficult not to take the passing of the natural world personally, equally hard not to feel impotent in the face of it. Horn, I think, wants to avoid the obviousness of art as ecological protest.

She has lengthened the original windows almost to the floor, providing a sweeping view of the town below: the little streets and houses, the concrete church with its extravagantly arching and decorative buttresses whose design might once have seemed futuristic but is now as quaint as an alien spaceship in a 1950s sci-fi story. Fantasies of the future inevitably come to tell us something about the past and almost nothing about the present. [read on...]

 via NEWSgrist:

SILENT MIGRATION
Brandon Ballengée
The Arsenal Gallery in Central Park
5th Avenue at 64th Street, 3rd Floor

Please join us for the opening of artist Brandon Ballengée's Silent Migration exhibition at the Central Park Arsenal Gallery on Weds March 7th at 6pm. This exhibition is the fourth event of the Human/Nature series, a joint partnership of the organizations Ecoartspace, The Nature Conservancy and New York City Audubon in conjunction with the New York City Department of Parks.
 
Ballengée explores local issues threatening New York City’s bird populations. Over 300 species of birds visit New York City each year. Birds fly from as far away as Patagonia and Greenland to visit our metropolis. NYC is located along the Atlantic Migratory Bird Flyway and during the spring and fall thousands of birds pass through the city. Many species of birds migrate at night, and can be disoriented by illuminated structures—particularly when weather conditions force them to fly at lower altitudes. 

In this exhibition, Ballengée explores to local issues threatening our bird populations. Using actual historic prints by John James Audubon, Ballengée has cut and removed extinct and declining birds. In a photographic series titled Electric Stars at Dawn, the artist will demonstrate the light pollution problem that New York City buildings create for birds. The Great Atlantic Fly-way is a large collaborative artwork generated from hundreds of migratory bird photographs taken by the public throughout the Americas and placed along a painted mural of the Atlantic coastline. In addition the artist has created three tropical dioramas contrasted by video footage of exotic birds attempting to survive in the concrete jungle of New York City.
 
A panel discussion with Brandon Ballengée, Mike Feller, NYC Park's Chief Naturalist; Denise Markonish, Curator, ArtSpace, New Haven and Rebekah Creshkoff, the founder of NYC Audubon's Project SafeFlight program will take place on Tuesday, March 20th at 6pm. The panel discussion will be moderated by Ecoartspace curator, Amy Lipton. 
 
This lecture is free, reservations are not necessary. For additional information, please contact 212-381-2195 or nycevents@tnc.org

more info on Brandon Ballengée:

www.greenmuseum.org/ballengee
www.wavehill.org/arts/brandon_ballengee.html
www.scicult.com/artists/brandonballengee
www.disk-o.com/malamp
http://media.nyas.org/content/podcasts/snc/ballengee.m4b

Queens Museum of Art
New York City Building
Flushing Meadows Corona Park
Queens, NY 11368-3398
718.592.9700
www.queensmuseum.org

Lillian Ball: GO ECO

February 4 - May 27, 2007

GO ECO is an interactive installation that illuminates the different perspectives of several participants involved in a wetland preservation project. The concept is metaphorically based on the ancient Asian game of Go, (originally, one of the Four Arts of China along with music, painting, and poetry) which uses strategies to capture territory through balancing tactics. GO ECO also functions as an informational “serious game” installation of video vignettes. Digitally manipulated images with sound are projected in quadrants on the screen to lead players through to the next move. The final outcome of the game is determined by the teamwork of players making their way toward a solution that enables all sides to win or to lose together. GO ECO allows players of many ages to be empowered and to learn about the issues through an art experience that maps paths of action.

Bruce Sterling writes:

    I never realized that James Howard Kunstler, prophet
    of suburban oil-peak doom, is a painter.  The guy is
    a pretty darn good painter, actually.

Here's a snippet from the interview and some info on his '93 book, Geography of Nowhere:

An Interview with James Howard Kunstler
Bring It On Home
by Mark Givens

James Howard Kunstler has written four books on Urban Design and Suburbia including the ground-breaking "Geography of Nowhere" in 1993. He has also written nine novels, the newest of which is entitled "Maggie Darling" and it's a doozy. He is a passionate author, a painter, an insightful social critic, and a sharp-witted observer. His latest book is called "The Long Emergency" and it talks about life after "peak oil" - or, as he describes it in this interview, "the cheap oil fiesta of the late 20th century". His "Clusterfuck Nation" is loaded with his commentary on our social condition and his "Eyesore of the Month" serves to remind us, with wit and sincerity, of the horrible things we're doing to our surroundings. But most of all, James Howard Kunstler gives voice to the uneasy feelings that bubble up within us, from the discomfort and confusion regarding our current urban environment to the uncertainty regarding our future post-cheap oil.

MungBeing: Your background is not in urban planning or architecture. Where does your passion for urban design come from?

James Howard Kunstler: Well, I've had to live in the shitty environments of daily life here in America for half a century, and I have strong feelings about it. The books I wrote represented to a large extent a personal struggle to understand why we could do such damage to our civilization.

MB: What attracted you to New Urbanism?

JHK: When I was writing "The Geography of Nowhere," I went up a lot of blind alleys. I talked to a lot of people who were, in fact, part of the problem -- for example, "star" architects like Bob Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown, who thought all the suburban crap was wonderful, playful, marvelous. When I finally encountered Andres Duany, I realized I had finally come to the right source. That very year, 1993, Andres along with his wife Lizz Plater-Zyberk, Doug Kelbaugh of the U of Washington, Peter Calthorpe, Stefanos Polyzoides, and a bunch of other dissatisfied architect / urbanists were organizing the official group that came to be called the Congress for the New Urbanism  -- the name was supplied by it's founding director, Peter Katz. These guys knew the score. I had found my way home.

[read on...]

The Geography of Nowhere:
The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape (Hardcover)
by James Howard Kunstler
303 pages
Simon & Schuster (June 1993)
ISBN-10: 0671707744
ISBN-13: 978-0671707743

From Library Journal
In this spirited, irreverent critique, Kunstler spares none of the culprits that have conspired in the name of the American Dream to turn the U.S. landscape from a haven of the civic ideal into a nightmare of crass commercial production and consumption.

Kunstler strips the bark off the utopian social engineering promoted by the machine-worshiping Modern movement of Gropius, Le Corbusier, and Frank Lloyd Wright and skewers the intellectual camps (e.g., Venturi) that have thrived on making academic glory of the consumer wasteland.

With the fervor of an investigative reporter and in the vernacular of a tabloid journalist, Kunstler exposes the insidious "car lobby" and gives case studies of landscapes as diverse as Detroit, Atlantic City, and Seaside, Florida, to illustrate both the woes and hopeful notes.

The ideas in this book are not new (Jane Jacobs and William H. Whyte Jr. were bemoaning the loss of civic life a quarter-century ago), but Kunstler gives their case an urgent, popular voice. An eminently relevant and important book; highly recommended.

- Thomas P.R. Nugent, New York
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

User's Guide for the 21st Century

Architectural Sci-Fi

 

[Image: Steve Pike].

I picked up a few books yesterday at Hennessey + Ingalls, including a collection of student work from Unit 20 of the increasingly exciting Bartlett School of Architecture in London. The book is edited by Marcos Cruz and Salvador Pérez Arroyo, and its projects date from 1999-2002.
It's also amazingly interesting.
I can't find any links to it online, however, so I'll just give you a random walk-through of the book's contents...

 

[Image: James Foster].

There's James Foster's "Inhabitable Growthscape," a "series of incubators" which he constructed from vacuum-formed perspex and electronic circuitry; the system's larger architectural applications are pictured above: it's part boatyard, part aeroponic farm for the cultivation of "disease free cloned plants."
There's then a ten-page spread by Kevin Chu illustrating the industrial use of "clustering robots." Chu describes a colony of "mining robots breeding on a lake in Helsinki," as well as a cluster of similar robots "forming a silicon mining factory in Tenerife." These are "small-scale insect-like robots which form a tactile and transformable surface," although "the overall form alters according to the relocation of individual entities." In other words, it's an Artificially Intelligent swarm of robots transforming the surface of the earth into a quarry...
In fact, if I can interject something here, the book is a little preoccupied with insect shapes and machinery – to the point of looking like a deleted scene from Minority Report 2 – so I will say that architectural studios should be wary of turning themselves into machine-development classes; but that's a minor complaint, and a larger discussion.

 

[Image: Lisa Silver].

We then turn to RIBA Award-winner Lisa Silver, whose architecture consists of "alien objects... fused, subverted and juxtaposed to form a unified whole."
Specifically, Silver presents a space defined by "surfaces and meshes of varied transparency," made from roof suspension systems and ramps. The result is a bricolage of car chassis and old farm implements, assembled on the banks of the Mississippi River.

 

[Image: Lisa Silver].

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.

 

[Image: Annika Schollin].

Returning to land, Annika Schollin writes about urban decay, abandoned buildings, and the formation of "micro-jungles within the urban structure."
Concentrating specifically on London's Brick Lane, Schollin describes how the unmaintained city is soon "reeking of rot and humidity." Her project is a way of "[c]elebrating decay," she explains, "as the organic inhabitants of the site begin to take over, weaving through, ambivalently undermining and reinforcing the built structure." The actual architectural proposal appears to involve constructing a kind of permanent exoskeleton around the ruined markets of Brick Lane, complete with "water dispensing ducts" and a "hydro percolating roof."
So – almost literally to repeat myself – architectural design becomes more and more like science fiction.

 

[Image: Annika Schollin].

Other projects have a distinctly biological theme – including open bacteriological collaboration with the microbiology lab at University College London. Steve Pike, for instance, outlines an "algaetecture" of blown glass and high transparency acrylic. Inspired by the industrial manufacture of car windshields, these glass structures look simultaneously deformed, alchemic, and bio-anatomical.

 

[Images: Steve Pike's "vitreous occupational chambers" and "monitor vessel support infrastructure"].

Pike explains how he built glass Interaction Vessels, Monitor Vessels, and Transformer Vessels, studying so-called algaetectural "parallels to human occupation." He has an essay later in the book about contamination, the London Underground, and "non-sterile environments," in which he proposes a catchment mechanism for airborne particles (the illustrations of which look like a scene from Alphaville).
I could go on and on here. I just think the ideas are great (excuse the enthusiasm, if this isn't your thing).
For instance, there's a project by Mark Mueckenheim called "London Urban Farming." Mueckhenheim points out that the decline of farmland throughout the EU will necessitate "bring[ing] farming into the urban fabric." He thus proposes a food processing plant "with a fish hatchery attached to its façade."

 

[Image: One of Mark Mueckenheim's urban farms; again, note the insectile nature of student work produced for this unit].

The rest of the book confronts us with acoustic wind membranes; the city of Chicago as a kind of machine made out of retractable bridges; health clinics and sports research institutes; a hydroponic farm, by Stephen Clements, apparently modeled after the human nervous system; and even a Finnish fish farm, by Natalia Traverso Caruana, where "research labs and fish nets creat[e] a new luminous landscape" in the sea.

 

[Image: Natalia Traverso Caruana's cultural HQ for Texaco].

Caruana's next project is a "cultural branch" for the headquarters of Texaco – it's magnificently colored and practically leaps off the page.
There are strange photographic labs, and elevators that appear to analyze their passengers' DNA. There's even a plastic surgery lounge, or "Body Transformation" complex, proposed for Heathrow Airport, by Jia Lu (something tells me this will actually be constructed). Andy Shaw jumps in at the very end of the book with some robotic machine-space studies for "technical appliances based on the work of Eduardo Paolozzi."
Etc. etc. etc.
In other words, I like the book. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear to exist anywhere online, so you'll just have to take my word for it – or you can visit the Bartlett's various Unit 20 homepages.
Finally, my larger point in citing and describing so many of these projects is to demonstrate, in perhaps exhaustive detail, that some of today's most imaginative artistic, technological, and even literary work is being produced in architectural studios. Whether you like their projects or not, in other words, architecture students are out-thinking, out-structuring, and out-performing novelists, hands down.
It is now architecture that lets us rethink the world anew.

by Geoff Manaugh • permalink