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 [Image: Red Bull New York offices by INABA; photo by Greg Irikura].
I got a handful of preview shots from the new Red Bull New York offices the other night, with interiors designed by INABA, and I thought I'd post them here.
 [Image: Red Bull New York offices by INABA; photo by Greg Irikura].
INABA, of course, already designed the connected Red Bull Music Academy, and the private office space continues that aesthetic, albeit deliberately stripped even of the constrained maximalism of that project's bold colors and public-facing spatial entertainments, down to a minimalist, calm workplace distinct from—or perhaps offsetting—Red Bull's identity as an international energy drink monolith.
  [Images: Red Bull New York offices by INABA; photos by Greg Irikura].
As architect Jeffrey Inaba explains, "the company wanted its New York offices to be low-key. The 16,800 SF project doesn’t celebrate the company’s values with eye-catching forms, nor is its layout inspired by recent theories of workplace productivity."
 [Image: Red Bull New York offices by INABA; photo by Naho Kubota].
"Instead," he continues, "the design is simple and without the pretense of being on the cutting edge of cool tech office design. It responds to the quick cycling of trends in workplace interiors by steering clear of large-scale gestures, playful lounge zones, or urban-inspired ad hoc décor."
 [Image: Red Bull New York offices by INABA; photo by Greg Irikura].
From the architect: If the new standard for corporate offices is to create a physical experience that builds on the brand qualities the company has successfully established in digital media, then Red Bull’s New York space is the antithesis of this best practice. There isn’t a reliance on storytelling or graphic imagery; the space is dialed back to reset the focus of the experience on the basic architectural qualities of scale and light.
Acknowledging that offices and technology are evolving quickly and the future functions of the work environment are unpredictable, the architects composed a layout of spaces with distinct, fixed features. The three types of spaces are large open zones, medium-sized enclosed areas, and small rooms. They are used now as open office seating, conference areas, and small meeting/workrooms, respectively. Designed to be unique in size and day lighting and not to any particular functions invites people to invent new uses for them in the future.
All the shots seen here were taken by Greg Irikura and Naho Kubota, as noted.
 [Image: Red Bull New York offices by INABA; photo by Greg Irikura].
In Kubota's case, she shot both digitally and on film, with the latter shots taking on a hazy, almost noir quality, like the set of a 21st-century Mad Men caught on a Sunday break.
 [Images: Red Bull New York offices by INABA; photos by Naho Kubota].
Here are a final few shots—but click through to see the project on INABA's own site.
    [Images: Red Bull New York offices by INABA; photos by Naho Kubota].
Meanwhile, check out BLDGBLOG's two interviews with Jeffrey Inaba—from 2007 and 2010, respectively—and congrats to INABA's Darien Williams for appearing on Curbed's list of Young Guns finalists for 2014!
 [Image: Comet 67P, via ESA].
In the story of how European Space Agency researchers are scrambling to locate—and possibly move—the Philae probe, which they successfully landed on Comet 67P two days ago, there's an interesting comment about computer vision and the perception of exotic landscapes.
 [Image: Comet 67P, via New Scientist].
"We're working our eyes off," one of the scientists says to New Scientist, describing how they are personally and individually poring over photographs of the comet.
"It's an entirely manual process," New Scientist continues, "because the complex and bizarre landscape of comet 67P defies any kind of automated search. 'We don't have an algorithm for this,' he says."
We don't have an algorithm for this.
 [Image: The irregular terrain of Comet 67P, via ESA].
It would be interesting to develop a taxonomy of landscapes based on their recognizability to algorithms. This would tell you as much about how computers see the world as it would about the aesthetic assumptions—even the geological biases—of the people who programmed those computers.
Think, for example, of Adam Harvey's work, asking When Is An Apple No Longer An Apple? That project explored the point at which machine-learning algorithms could no longer distinguish the iconic fruit from a jumble of colorful objects.
Or take Harvey's more recent CV Dazzle experiment, which looked at how to prevent facial recognition software from identifying a face at all through the clever use of cosmetic camouflage.
However, in the case of Comet 67P and other extreme topographic environments, we would be looking at when a landscape is no longer a landscape, so to speak, at least in terms of the computer-vision algorithms programmed to analyze it.
 [Image: Comet 67P, via ESA].
What other landscapes fall within this category—of spatial environments unrecognizable to machines—and what do those spaces reveal about the dimensional prejudices of the algorithm? Light and shadow; depth and range; foreground and background; geometry and complexity.
Bump Adam Harvey's investigations up to the scale of a landscape, and a million potential design projects beckon. Learning from Comet 67P.
(Earlier on BLDGBLOG: The Comet as Landscape Art).
 [Image: David Gissen, "Cross-Bronx Expressway," with Victor Hadjikyriacou; from Landscape Futures].
In case you're reading this near Ithaca, New York, I thought I'd mention that I'll be speaking at a conference this weekend at Cornell, called Spolia: Histories, Spaces, and Processes of Adaptive Reuse. Things kick off this evening with a lecture by Kate Orff.
What are spolia? From the conference brief: Spolia refers to using scavenged materials for new (and often originally unintended) purposes in constructed environment[s]. This practice is millennia old, dating back to Ancient Egypt and perhaps beyond. Both extremely pragmatic and symbolically charged, spolia is a complex phenomenon; beyond mere recycling, it also has social, cultural, and even political dimensions. Many sites, buildings, structures of antiquity were repurposed into newer edifices, not only to facilitate the production of new form, but also to claim the cultural and political heritage of the donor structures.
I'll be speaking on a panel tomorrow morning with two people I'm very excited to meet: art historian Dale Kinney from Bryn Mawr College and co-editor of Reuse Value, and Abraham Thomas, the newly appointed director of the Sir John Soane Museum in London.
 [Image: David Gissen, "Florence, Italy," with Victor Hadjikyriacou; from Landscape Futures].
Here's an excerpt from my abstract, in case you're interested:
As the curator of a 2011 exhibition called Landscape Futures, I was able to commission new visual work from historian David Gissen. In the resulting project—called “Museums of the City”—Gissen explored what it would mean to foreground the apparatus of historical preservation in an urban environment. This meant populating downtown Florence, Italy, for example, with oversized lighting, display, and HVAC rigs, transforming the city’s center into an outdoor display; and doing the same in Central Park, such that carefully planted groves of trees and well-maintained lawns could be revealed for what they really are: an artificial landscape exhibition from the 19th century now hiding in plain sight as a recreational topography for present-day residents and tourists.
But it was Gissen’s look at what it would take to preserve the Cross-Bronx Expressway—a justifiably maligned urban megastructure—as a kind of stabilized ruin that seems most relevant here. Is the Cross-Bronx Expressway an example of spolia? More abstractly, to what extent can using a city's transportation infrastructure become a museological experience?
Briefly, I'll also discuss a half-serious proposal to preserve a freeway interchange in Baltimore, Maryland—not for reasons of aesthetics or historical significance, but, oddly enough, for reasons of topology. The interchange was due to be renovated, destroying its unique geometric arrangement, and a mathematician was thus calling for it to be saved. But are dysfunctional chunks of the city to be preserved even at the detriment of their intended use? How does infrastructure become museological?
Finally, I want to change topic altogether in order to look very briefly at one of the most remarkable private collections I have visited in recent years: a forensic collection of safes, vault doors, and entire sections of bank walls stored in a warehouse in New Jersey by a private security firm. Like something straight out of the work of artist Gordon Matta Clark—or perhaps a bizarre new version of the Sir John Soane Museum as rebuilt by the FBI—these broken doors, burnt safes, and heavily damaged architectural fragments are spolia under a different name.
I’ll use this example to discuss how architectural ruins and other spolia are used and reused in forensic analysis, exploring where forensics and archaeology become functionally indistinguishable.
 [Image: From a private collection of failed safes, vault walls, and other crime scene evidence; photo by Nicola Twilley].
In any case, it should be a fun discussion and a great conference overall. Read more at the official website, and stop by if you are near Cornell's OMA-designed Milstein Hall, where the conference takes place.
 [Image: From Science Daily/University of Oslo].
Robots emitting robots emitting robots: this is one way that machines will learn to navigate extreme spatial environments.
"In the future," we read in a press release courtesy of Science Daily, "robots must be able to solve tasks in deep mines on distant planets, in radioactive disaster areas, in hazardous landslip areas and on the sea bed beneath the Antarctic"—as well as in the cracks of otherwise inaccessible archaeological sites.
Researchers at the University of Oslo think we need to send machines capable of not exactly of replication, but something more like budding or fruiting, using 3D printers.
Kyrre Glette, one of the researchers behind the press release, imagines a robot being sent into "the wreckage of a nuclear power plant," for example, where it encounters a stairway it had not been anticipating needing to climb. For the moment, it's stuck. So what does it do? "The robot takes a picture. The picture is analysed. The arms of one of the robots is fitted with a printer. This produces a new robot, or a new part for the existing robot, which enables it to negotiate the stairs."
The original robot—which was thus not single but a crowd waiting to happen—moves forward through the landscape by sending detached variations of itself further ahead. You could think of it as Goldberg robotics: advancing through variation.
This is obviously not a new vision—the idea of 3D printers printing 3D printers that can 3D-print further 3D-printer-printing 3D printers, for example, is a long-running staple of stoner sci-fi. Nonetheless, it's interesting to see this specifically discussed in terms of navigating spatial environments, be they mines, caves, or architecture, explored and mapped by an instant machine-ancestry self-produced specifically for the task at hand.
 [Image: Outside the Tesla factory; Instagram by BLDGBLOG].
The coolest thing about a tour of the Tesla factory out in Fremont, California, is the huge metal-stamping machine—a behemoth piece of equipment that applies more than five thousand tons of pressure in order to mold metal parts in an instant. In fact, it was not even the company's largest stamping machine, which was offline the afternoon I went through.
You hear this thing long before you see it: a thundering and resonant split-second blast that sounds more like a minor-key chord being sledgehammered out into the cavernous factory. Then the machine cycle repeats itself: parts are removed, dragged, and rattled into place, followed by the preliminary crash of a new metal sheet being lowered into the bay. Then bam, that weird sound again, equal parts dark ambient soundscape and sci-fi howl.
Strangely, though, there is an air of melancholy to the sound—a kind of unexpected pathos—as if the machine had accidentally been tuned to some minor and wistful harmonic. The instantaneous hydraulic detonation of what sounds like an organ chord thus rings out, augmented by the foot-shuddering bass of the stamp itself, which sends small earthquakes rolling through the floor. (In fact, this reminded me that the factory is more or less directly above the Hayward Fault and I began to wonder what seismic effects such a colossal machine might actually be having.)
The machine only got louder and louder as we wound our way through a complicated back-turning maze of welding walls and robot arms. Finally visible, it seemed to be made entirely of gates: a giant red portal through which shaped metal could pass.
 [Image: The red gates of metal-stamping machine; photo courtesy of Tesla].
As we stopped to watch, the slow rhythm of its sounds matched up with processional movements now visible deep inside the cathedral-sized device, and the overall process began to make more sense.
Two men in full ear protection stood there, silhouetted against the mouth of the machine, presumably hypnotized by its otherworldly, repetitive soundtrack—or maybe that was just me, perhaps overly willing to hear, in the looped noise of this exotic machine, music that wasn't really there.
In any case, I was on the tour as part of a workshop run last week at the UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design, with students from Nicholas de Monchaux's course at Berkeley and a small group visiting from Smout Allen's & Kyle Buchanan's Unit 11 over at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London.
 [Image: Photo courtesy of Tesla].
The idea behind the tour was not only to see robots at work but to experience the spatial logic of a factory, its interior the size of 80 football fields broken down into sequential functions and clusters, with color-coded circulation diagrams painted directly onto the concrete floor.
At least those were the paths meant for humans. For self-driving robots, long curving whirls of magnetic tape had been applied to the floor, forming cursive, counter-directional arabesques that only made sense when you considered the aggressive turning radii of those bulky machines.
It was the robot-readable world firsthand, or an indoor landscape architecture for machines.
There is a strict no-photo policy in place, unfortunately, and you are obliged to sign a non-disclosure agreement prior to entering the facility, so the only interior photos I have to show are from Wikipedia and Tesla's own press page.
 [Image: Photo by Steve Jurvetson, via Wikipedia].
The actual tour is very much in the vein of a corporate sales pitch, and it is delivered with true American gusto (and at very high volume), but it's worth taking. Technically, by entering the factory you step into a foreign free-trade zone, which, for anyone else reading Keller Easterling's new book, is an interesting thing to do in person, like entering a corporate eruv.
Once inside, you see things like aluminum rapid-injection molds, laser-cutting stations, and emergency "light curtains" dividing humans from the machines they steward. You see "laser-calibration trees," or knobby poles branching with small geometric ornaments; they are used by laser-scanners for re-booting themselves after measuring the frames of new cars.
At the very end of the process, you see massive, Japanese-made robots lifting entire finished Teslas overhead as if they're feathers. Each machine has been named by Elon Musk after X-Men characters: there is Thunderbird and Cyclops, Storm and Colossus, Xavier, Changeling, Ice Man, Wolverine, and Angel.
 [Image: Photo courtesy of Tesla].
And, perhaps best of all, you might be lucky enough to see engineers training new robots for eventual roles in the assembly process.
Our tram slowed down for just a few seconds so we could watch a woman, less than two-thirds the size of the mechanical arm lurching back and forth in front of her, patiently coding new movements into the gyroscopes and actuators inside the machine.
Uncertain of what we were seeing, we tried to make sense of the drunken movements on display, which looked more like a snake hypnotized by its master, swaying side to side like a cobra being woken up from a dream.
At one point, our tour guide gestured out at literally dozens—perhaps hundreds—of new robots still under plastic wrap, all awaiting training and installation. The factory is expanding dramatically as Tesla gears up for the release of their new SUV.
We have "an army of robots under plastic," the guide said enthusiastically, and he laughed. If there's ever a robot uprising, he joked, this is probably not the best place to be.
 [Image: Photo courtesy of Tesla].
It seems that our group's educational affiliation made getting a tour much easier, but you can try your own luck using Tesla's Contact page.
 [Image: "Fantasy House 10" by Charley Harper].
These aren't the best-quality scans in the world, but I just rediscovered these on my computer and thought I'd post them. These are so-called "fantasy houses" by artist Charley Harper, originally published in, as far as I can tell, the November 1959 issue of Ford Times, exactly 55 years ago.
To use an ungainly compound analogy, these look like what might have happened if Syd Mead had studied with Frank Lloyd Wright, or as if we're glimpsing a kind of prairie modernism timidly trying on the garb of science fiction.
 [Image: "Fantasy House 2" by Charley Harper].
Minimalist cubes are suspended on cables from vast geological forms and glass houses pop up unexpectedly in the deepest recesses of American show caves.
 [Image: "Fantasy House 3" by Charley Harper].
Elsewhere, extraordinary cantilevers stretch like the prows of exotic ships over postcard-ready landmarks, and the whole series has the feel of a rather wholesome advertising campaign for the National Park service—complete with conspicuously well-placed Ford automobiles reminding you that the future is only one or two rest stops away.
 [Image: "Fantasy House 10" by Charley Harper].
I don't have much further information about these images, to be honest—other than to point out that they fulfilled the role of a kind of pop-speculative domestic architecture from the near-future for an earlier generation of media consumers—but click through to the Charley Harper website to see more of his work, or consider picking up a copy of the Charley Harper coffee table book for the holidays.
 [Image: "Fantasy House 7" by Charley Harper].
Harper—who sadly passed away back in 2007—remains more widely known for his stylized animals and landscape scenes, but these uncharacteristic stabs at architectural futurism are worth a passing glance in any survey of 20th-century speculative work.
 [Image: Photo by Dmitry Kostyukov, courtesy of The New York Times].
The New York Times has the strange story of an abandoned and overgrown military base near Paris where "scientists blew up more than half a ton of uranium in 2,000 explosions... often outdoors, just 14 miles from the Eiffel Tower."
The site is now being considered for demolition, the ground beneath it to be excavated as part of a new gypsum mine—however, all that construction work risks stirring up clouds of "toxic uranium dust" from an earlier generation's detonations.
Today, the old fort is part picturesque ruin, part Tarkovsky film: These days curtains flap from rows of overgrown buildings; radiation symbols and other graffiti cover the security post, which is filled, weirdly, with women’s shoes. The empty housing of a vast supercomputer sits in gloom; vines spill into laboratories. The ruins recall the post-apocalypse landscape of Pripyat, the Ukrainian town evacuated after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. For all the controversy and narrative suspense, however, there are surprisingly few sites of detectable radioactivity. "In 2011," we read, for example, "Christophe Nedelec, a local environmentalist, broke into the fort and, using an amateur Geiger counter, found three spots with elevated levels of radiation." Three spots—considering that no fewer than an astonishing 150 kilograms—or roughly 330 pounds—of uranium are estimated to have blown around the grounds of the fort, that's a seemingly reassuring find.
Yet the less optimistic view is that the uranium dust has already been and gone, lost and dissipated over decades into the surroundings neighborhoods, that are only "about nine miles from central Paris," perhaps even blowing back into the city itself on windy days over a timespan of decades—uranium dust swirling down onto the streets and sidewalks, landing on the shoes, coats, and coffee cups of everyday Parisians who would otherwise have no real reason to worry about what appeared to be ordinary soot.
So, in a sense, the site has already depleted itself. This, certainly, resembles the view of the mining company that now wants to tear down the old fort and rip the landscape into a gypsum mine.
In any case, the site—and the people now guerrilla-gardening there—is worth a quick look over at the New York Times.
(The title of this post is borrowed from a pamphlet by Eugene Thacker, which has surreally and hilariously been in the news this past month after popping up on Glenn Beck's show as an example of the threat of nihilism in U.S. popular culture; there is otherwise no connection between this post and the book—just toxic uranium dust...).
 [Image: Screen grab via military.com].
This new, partly digital sand table interface developed for military planning would seem to have some pretty awesome uses in an architecture or landscape design studio.
Using 3D terrain data—in the military's case, gathered in real-time from its planetary network of satellites—and a repurposed Kinect sensor, the system can adapt to hand-sculpted transformations in the sand by projecting new landforms and elevations down onto those newly molded forms.
You can thus carve a river in real-time through the center of the sandbox, and watch as projected water flows in—
   [Image: Screen grabs via military.com].
—or you can simply squeeze sand together into new hills, and even make a volcanic crater.
   [Image: Screen grabs via military.com].
The idea of projecting adaptive landscape imagery down onto a sandbox is brilliant; being able to interact with both the imagery and the sand itself by way of a Kinect sensor is simply awesome.
Imagine scaling this thing up to the size of a children's playground, and you'd never see your kids again, lost in a hypnotic topography of Minecraft-like possibilities, or just donate some of these things to a landscape design department and lose several hours (weeks?) of your life, staring ahead in a state of geomorphic Zen at this touchscreen landscape of rolling hills and valleys, with its readymade rivers and a thousand on-demand plateaus.
The military, of course, uses it to track and kill people, filling their sandbox with projections of targeting coordinates and geometric representations of tanks.
  [Image: Screen grabs via military.com].
But there's no reason those coordinates couldn't instead be the outlines of a chosen site for your proposed architecture project, or why those little clusters of trucks and hidden snipers couldn't instead be models of new buildings or parks you're hoping will be constructed.
Watch the original video for more.
(Spotted via the Quartz Daily Brief).
 [Image: From Gravesend—The Death of Community by Chris Clarke].
Gravesend is a suburb east of London, hosting on its own eastern edge something of a secondary suburb: a mysterious town on the edge of town that turns out not to be a town at all.
It is a simulated English village built in 2003 by the Metropolitan Police working with Equion Facilities Management and a firm called Advanced Interactive Systems (AIS).
The barren streets and hollow buildings of this militarized non-place were designed for use as an immersive staging ground for police-training exercises, fighting staged riots, burglaries, bank robberies, and other crimes.
 [Image: From Gravesend—The Death of Community by Chris Clarke].
Facades with no buildings behind them line the empty streets; in some cases, it is only through the aerial views afforded by a service like Google Maps that this reality is made clear.
Imitation bus stops, make-believe banks, and an oddly whimsical Pizzaland—like an end-times chain restaurant from Shaun of the Dead—sustain the illusion on the ground.
 [Image: From Gravesend—The Death of Community by Chris Clarke].
Somewhat incongruously, an airplane fuselage also now rests beside a chainlink fence near the roadway, giving officers an opportunity to prepare for airplane hijackings.
There are even empty Tube carriages parked outside town for improvisatory police raids.
 [Image: From Gravesend—The Death of Community by Chris Clarke].
According to AIS, their consultant-designers kitted out the site's "live-fire ranges with internal ballistic and anti-ricochet finishes, simulation and targetry equipment, and range sound systems," a complete multimedia package that would soon also include HD video projectors and even "laser-based 3D virtual training environments."
Architectural simulations embedded with high-tech, upgradeable media technology thus supply the necessary level of detail for repeating crimes, on demand, like strange social rituals.
 [Image: From Gravesend—The Death of Community by Chris Clarke].
The photos seen here were all take by designer and photographer Chris Clarke, whose Flickr set of the series, including a dozen or so further images, is worth a look.
 [Image: From Gravesend—The Death of Community by Chris Clarke].
For Clarke, the "facsimile" urbanism of this site at the end of Gravesend is actually something of "a warning—a prophecy of society's potential to alienate itself from itself." He suggests that these surreal scenes threaten to become indistinguishable from everyday life, our cities and streets stripped down to the civic minimum, used as nothing more than bleak stomping grounds for futuristic security forces armed with military-grade tools.
"We have estates, parks, nightclubs, tube stations," Clarke writes, "but is the community missing from Gravesend significantly more present in our inhabited cities and towns?" His own answer remains unspoken but obvious.
 [Images: From Gravesend—The Death of Community by Chris Clarke].
Writing about this same site back in 2008, Brian Finoki of Subtopia called it a " new theater of the absurd."
It is, he wrote, "a city standing on the planet for one purpose: to be rioted, hijacked, trashed, held hostage, sacked, and overrun by thousands of chaotic scenarios, only so that it can be reclaimed, retaken, re-propped in circuitous loops of more dazzling proto-militant exercise, stormed by a thousand coordinated boots for eternity, targeted by hundreds of synchronized crosshairs of both lethal and non-lethal weapons."
 [Image: From Gravesend—The Death of Community by Chris Clarke].
Check out more photos at Chris Clarke's Flickr page.
(Related: In the Box: A Tour Through the Simulated Battlefields of the U.S. National Training Center).
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