'Animaris Mammoth'

At the risk of repeating another article, I'll just quote liberally instead: Lakshmi Sandhana writes in *Wired* (24 Jan 05: *Wild Things Are on the Beach*) about Theo Jansen, an artist 'evolving an entirely new line of animals: immense multi-legged walking critters designed to roam the Dutch coastline, feeding on gusts of wind.' 'His latest creations contain lemonade bottles in their body structure into which the wind is slowly pumped, enabling the creature to walk for a couple of minutes afterward. (...) He says a future version - a 12-ton behemoth, big enough to have several rooms inside - could be called the Animaris Mammoth.'
A friend of Jansen's, Carl Pisaturo, another robotics designer, refers to a collapsed Jansenian creature as 'a tipped-over, short-circuited machine half-buried in beach sand' - surely outdoing the end of *Planet of the Apes*, or at least competing.
So could you do that with a bldg? It captures wind in huge flexible sacks that gradually return to normal size, pumping the air into a complex network of pneumatic tubing; these then power the elevators, vents, and whatever else you need. The plumbing perhaps. When you go through the doldrums of a windless Spring, the bldg effectively shuts down. But in a windstorm...: you'd be forgiven for thinking the bldg was artificially intelligent. Constant motion, unpredictable internal rearrangements.
Artificial intelligence through wind. An architectural version of the Aeolian harp. Covered in sails and windsacs. A huge architectural lung, traveling slowly over the coastal landscape, fourteen thousand years after humans have gone extinct.
And then it collapses...

Comments are moderated.

If it's not spam, it will appear here shortly!


Anonymous Anonymous said...

Impressesed.

December 07, 2005 2:22 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Sailing on like the building-galleons in The Crimson Permanent Assurance, the prelude film to Monty Python's The Meaning of Life.

Still images here.

July 30, 2006 2:09 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"An architectural version of the Aeolian harp" - An acoustic lyrical mechanism

July 02, 2012 2:27 PM  

Post a Comment