2011. január 27.

Mobile Cities: The Future of Portable Flat-Pack Tent Towns

http://dornob.com/mobile-cities-the-future-of-portable-flat-pack-tent-towns/



 Prefabrication and portability keep cropping up as themes in contemporary architecture, from emergency post-disaster housing to modular shed homes and cargo container offices. BldgBlog (and Dornob and others) now raise the question: are portable camps (military, corporate and otherwise) a precursor to a world consisting of ever-more-completely mobile cities, disposable settlements that are strategically erected overnight but might disappear the very next day?


Weatherhaven, for example, is a curious company co-founded by an odd couple: an expedition organizing team and a construction company that, together, provide ” temporary shelter in remote places … a complete service including design, manufacture, packaging, transportation, and erection of buildings, all of which [are] created specifically to respond to the logistical problems of remote deployment in harsh environments.”


What we are talking here goes beyond a simple camp-out, festival or ordinary tent city – forethought, planning organization on the scale of the fully-gridded Burning Man (a there-then-gone temporary annual city that rises for a week in the Nevada desert, starting again very shortly), but more even than that, which is tied to just one place each year. This is a fly-in-and-drop-off operation in which residents can move in immediately and have a fully-functioning town (water, houses, hospitals) up and running in days.


 And then, in the end, they can be packed up, moved or removed from the face of the planet entirely, leaving no real trace behind – no physical signs of their history or even existence. This is the ultimate commodification of the the cosmopolitan experience – whole urban centers that are easily created and as disposable as any other manufactured product of modern times.




2011. január 26.

még egy kis burning man

http://www.thepolisblog.org/2008/01/community-spirit-of-black-rock-city-by.html

 ha valaki nem olvasná a polis-t..

The Community Spirit of Black Rock City, by Noah Flower





“At Burning Man, participants create the city they want … People realize that they can do things — maybe small things — that improve how they experience and interact with their fellow citizens.” Nate Berg’s introduction to that yearly festival of urban creation and destruction was poetically stated, and those lines of his conclusion resonated with me. He spoke to part of the reason why visiting the Black Rock Desert with 45,000 strangers is, for me, a chance at personal renewal of the way that I experience my urban environment and personal community for the rest of the year. I think his point hints at what I think is the deeper implication hidden in Burning Man’s very existence for the way we conceive of modern urban life.

Burning Man is not only a place where creativity and participation happens. Beyond the bare essentials provided by the setup and cleanup crews, it is created entirely by the participation of the people who come. It is a place where the public transit, nightclubs, amusements, performances, bars, and other activities are mostly provided by what we would typically refer to as “hobbyists,” amateurs who have day jobs and offer these things to others of like mind simply because they’re fun to do and it feels good to provide them. There is a massive brigade of people who volunteer, as part of their rather expensive vacation, to walk around for hours in odd-looking outfits silently lighting the hundreds upon hundreds of oil lanterns that light the night-time streets. It is a veritable orgy of community spirit.

Compare this to how our communities function at home. Optimizing for scale, efficiency, economic growth, and individual choice, we tend to live lives that are relatively disconnected from those around us. Many of us, if not most, went to high school with one group of people but then went to college elsewhere and lived in another city after that. We live in neighborhoods that may or may not contain friends but don’t typically know our neighbors, and rarely know them well. We have places in cities that we frequent—coffee shops, bars, restaurants, parks, shops—but if we see someone there that we know, it’s a surprise, and it’s not often that we take any deep sense of ownership over those spaces. The tribes we stay connected with are dispersed across neighborhoods, adjacent cities, neighboring states, and (increasingly) the world. There is very little reason to be involved in any particular place. And, I would argue, it is largely for this reason that we see declining levels of participation in politics at every level, and a steadily degrading level of sophistication in the national discourse. There can be no simple reasons for these things, of course, but I do think that we would see greater engagement if people felt bonded to their place and the people who live there.

I think one lesson we can learn from what happens at Burning Man is how possible it is for people to bond deeply with a place even if they inhabit it only for a short period of time. Everyone who buys a ticket is encouraged to participate in whatever constructive way most taps their passion, and the result every year is a city that stands as a living monument to the energies that drive its inhabitants. That creative expression is easy to see as an explosion of ego, a geyser of self-centeredness that bursts forth from a group of people who spend most of their year feeling stifled by the fact that their workplaces frown on their innate desire to wear fake fur and walk around painted red without any clothes. But the greatest works at Burning Man are carefully crafted to tickle the fancies, palates, eardrums, and eyeballs of the people who come. They are given, and like all gifts, thoughtfully shaped to please the receiver. We have words for that kind of giving, where the recipient is the group of others around you: community service, civic engagement, or public spirit.

Somewhere along the way we’ve forgotten the importance of that feeling. We’ve let it slip through our fingers as we chased geopolitical dominance, free trade, and the growth of our mom and pop shops into titans of the global marketplace. It was the first chance we had at those goals and we understandably shot for the moon. But now we’re left with a society where enough people feel that loss for 45,000 of them to pick up stakes, drive or fly to the middle of nowhere in Nevada, and throw a yearly orgy of giving, just to give themselves enough fuel to run on for the rest of the year or two before they have to come back for more.


A similar spirit is in evidence after a major disaster, as the San Francisco author Rebecca Solnit describes in great length in A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster. She argues persuasively that we can and should bring more of that spirit into the structure of our urban lives, and I think the same is true of Burning Man. Stories abound of the ways that people have channeled that spirit of giving in their own lives after attending, in small ways and large. One of the most notable is the group Burners Without Borders who organized to help out New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and continue to provide aid around the world. But we can tap that spirit of participation and giving in many more than just the Burners if we get creative about how to provide opportunities for it in our cities at large. As Solnit notes repeatedly, the desire and ability to identify with a community and provide something for that group is resident in all of us. The temporary utopia that happens in disasters and at Burning Man is just a hint of what could be released.

I don’t have anywhere close to all of the answers, but a few somewhat-related examples come to mind. One is the description of the political culture in Portland that I found in Robert Putnam’s Better Together: a city where there are associations for every small neighborhood and every political concern, and where the machinery of the city government is designed to require listening to those voices. Both identity with place and participation in the process are strong. Another is the many murals of San Francisco’s Mission District, all of which are created by local artists and/or schoolchildren. They are rarely defaced in a neighborhood otherwise covered with graffiti scrawl. Another is Front Porch Forum, a Craigslist-style site where you see only what your neighbors put up, which has had tremendous success rebuilding social capital in the places where it has become available. And finally, the rapid growth of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies is evidence that many entrepreneurs are seeing their small businesses as a way to tie together their communities rather than pull them apart. There are many ways to give people a sense of ownership over a place, connection with the people nearby, and the opportunity to contribute something meaningful. It’d be nice if we didn’t have to go to the desert to do it.

Noah Flower does research on innovative methods of achieving social change for foundations and nonprofits at the Monitor Institute, where he also edits the blog Working Wikily. He first began attending Burning Man in 2003.

2011. január 25.

Penthouse Slums: The Rooftop Shanty Towns of Hong Kong

http://dornob.com/penthouse-slums-the-rooftop-shanty-towns-of-hong-kong/



Shanty towns are nothing new in large cities with little (enforced) regulation, but this is something you have to see to believe: everything from small shacks to multi-story structures, individual buildings to entire villages, all spread out in organic mazes over the rooftops of apartment structures and skyscrapers throughout Hong Kong – a set of smaller communities within the larger surrounding city.


In Portraits from Above – Hong Kong’s Informal Rooftop Communities by Rufina Wu and Stefan Canham, a particularly stunning set of rooftop dwelling structures is explored through vivid and though-provoking pictures, drawings, diagrams and the stories of a few families who live their lives in makeshift houses built piece by piece on existing buildings. Who comes to live on rooftops, after all? How? Why? 


The penthouse is historically the most prized property of a building, but that was not always the case. Before the introduction of the elevator – an invention that made the tenth floor far more appealing almost overnight – the poorest people were forced to walk the stairs to their high-up homes. 


2011. január 24.

Tjebbe Beekman

további szocioimpressziók Tjebbe Beekman tollából, http://www.tjebbebeekman.com/







2011. január 23.

pulit a Holdra!

About the Google Lunar X PRIZE

The Google Lunar X PRIZE is igniting a new era of lunar exploration by offering the largest international incentive prize of all time. A total of $30 million in prizes are available to the first privately funded teams to safely land a robot on the surface of the Moon and have that robot travel 500 meters over the lunar surface and send images and data back to the Earth. Teams must be at least 90% privately funded, though commercially reasonable sales to government customers are allowed without limit.

magyar résztvevő! remélem még lessz alkalmunk szorosabban együttműködni! hajrá gyerekek!!!






A Puli csapata befizette a Google Lunar X Prize regisztrációs díját

  • A Puli Space Technologies sikeres „fund raising” akcióját követően befizette a Google Lunar X Prize 50 ezer dolláros regisztrációs díját

Budapest, 2011. január 10. – A Puli Space Technologies örömmel tudatja, hogy 2010 szeptemberében indult, sikeres „fund raising” akciója után elutalta a Google Lunar X Prize (GLXP) verseny 50 ezer dolláros nevezési díját a versenyt kiíró X Prize Alapítvány számlájára. A magyar csapat célja, hogy a 30 millió dollár összdíjazású verseny húsznál is több nevező csapata közül elsőként küldjön a Holdra egy magánerőből épített űrszondát, amely ott, a GLXP kiírásának megfelelően, különböző feladatokat teljesít. Habár a regisztráció csak az Alapítvány formális jóváhagyásával és bejelentésével válik véglegessé, a csapatnak és rajongóinak minden oka megvan feltételezni, hogy rövid időn belül ez is megtörténik.

A minden bizonnyal sikeres nevezést követően, az eddig leginkább szabad idejében, de folyamatosan és keményen dolgozó csapat olyan céggé kíván formálódni, amely már a GLXP verseny kihívásának való megfelelés mellett fenntartható üzleti modellt kíván állítani és követni. A „magyar pulik” egyelőre leginkább mérnöki és tudományos erejükre építenek, továbbá eltökélt szándékuk, hogy működésükkel bebizonyítsák: érdemes, kívánatos és építő a GLXP-hez hasonló kihívásoknak megfelelni. Ezek mellett a csapat tagjai továbbra is folytatják ismeretterjesztő munkájukat, amelyek során a tudományos és laikus fórumokat kihasználva népszerűsítik a tudományos és műszaki életpályát.

A csapat köszöni a lelkesítést és anyagi támogatást minden a Puli nevezését támogató magánembernek és cégnek, illetve továbbra is lehetővé teszi és várja a magyar űripar és tudomány ügyét fontosnak tartó magánemberek, cégek támogatását és érdeklődését, valamint további felajánlásokat akár a Kis Lépés Klub”-ba, akár a Puli Indítóállás építőkockáiba. A csapat szeretné, ha a Puli eddigi és jövőbeli sikereit minden magyar ember a sajátjának tekintené.

A csapat működéséről és eredményeiről folyamatosan beszámol honlapján, illetve tájékoztatja a médiumokat.


Br(az)illiant: Restructuring Shanty Towns For the Future

http://dornob.com/urban-shanty-town-photo-collages-of-sao-paolo/

hát ez gyönyörű! legujabb kedvencem, Dionisio González





http://www.architecturalpapers.ch/

bence küldte ez a linket, érdemes megnézni alaposabban: http://www.architecturalpapers.ch/

néhány címszó alább:

Current Topic
After Crisis (2010)
Contemporary architectural condition

 Architectural papers fifth issue concentrates around the new conditions for architectural practice and around the new epistemologies that may inform it in the next future. That is, in the period after the financial bubble has collapsed and living and working conditions have significantly changed. Essays, studies and interviews, along with a selection of indicative projects, tackle the actual issues of growth and shrinking, economy and ideology, craftsmanship and social space in the city, materiality and sustainability in architecture. In a logical sequence, they depict the current reality of architecture.



 Alexander Brodsky
Lecture at the chair of Dr. Josep Lluis Mateo at the ETH Zürich

81 / 95º Restaurant was conceived as a structure of the kind that is widespread in Russia – a temporary waterfront building with an unclear purpose – either a shed, or a boardwalk, or a wharf, or all three combined. These buildings are often neglected and deserted: as soon as they are not used any ...



SUSTAINABLE URBAN DESIGN
Interviewed by Isabel Concheiro & Ramias Steinemann. ETH Zürich, May 2010

98 / ECOLOGY AND URBANISM
I prefer not to use the word ecological, but instead, I rather speak about sustainable urban design. Ecology is just one of the aspects of sustainability, besides economical and social aspects. Our research contributes to the sustainable design of existing and future cities. We...

2011. január 16.

Dla2011jan9

feltettem a féléves dolgozatom egy aloldalra, ha rákattintassz akkor olvasható