Академический Документы
Профессиональный Документы
Культура Документы
A SELECTION OF PUBLICATIONS
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ARCHITECTURAL ALCHEMY
What is architecture if it is not alchemy? Take base materials: stone, wood, sand, water, metal and, following a set of cryptic instructions, impenetrable to common folk, turn it into a dwelling. No wonder then, that masonry is not just the art of constructing buildings, both rather a guardian of arcane secrets, passed down orally from time immemorial. Still, until recently, architecture itself was but a pale shadow of the arcane sciences. Setting out to transmute base metals into gold, alchemists promised not mere buildings but boundless riches, eternal youth and a universal solvent.
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PERSONAL LUBRICANTS
Suddenly, everythings grim. In the face of the current global environmental and nancial crisis, the future no longer promises boundless economic growth and technological innovation, but resembles a strangely familiar landscape fraught with potential danger and imminent collapse. If green shoots offer hope, only the most nave proceed with the reckless abandon of previous years. Global economic crises are tied to the internal contradictions of capitalism; overinvestment and overproduction produce an unsustainable bubble that eventually bursts. After a crash, overproduction typically inspires a shift in planning from the physical to the temporal. Realizing that it did not plan ahead properly, society concerns itself not with designing and producing things but rather with drawing up plans to safeguard that such crises do not recur in the future. These images, produced using the Sim City 2000 Urban Renewal Kitrunning only on iOS classic to create familiar iconic buildings depict an example of scenario planning in which big architecture and the Bilbao effect fail.
AUDC / Network Architecture Lab with Robert Sumrell and Kazys Varnelis
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SIM CITY
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BLACKOUT!
City Edition of the New City Reader Edited by the Network Architecture Lab with Kazys Varnelis, Kyle Hovenkotter, Momo Araki, Brigette Borders, Alexis Burson, Daniel Payne, Pantea Tehrani Project Manager: Leigha Dennis
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WHEAT PASTED AT THE STOREFRONT FOR ART AND ARCHITECTURE IN NEW YORK
The Blackout Issue is an illustrated history of the 1977 power failure in New York City, telling the story of the New York Times during the blackout. When power went off, eight copies of the next days edition had rolled off the presses at 220 West 43rd Street. Being on a different grid, New Jersey had not lost power, so publication shifted to a Times plant in Carlstadt, where it
normally printed sections of the Sunday issue. Editors took these eight copies and reassembled them into a new master copy, in the process shaving off half of the newspapers customary forty pages and adding two pages on the blackout. Since the 43rd Street plant was letterpress and the Carlstadt press had new photographic offset machines the Times used a camera at the Hackensack Record to take photographs of the paste-up for printing.
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Although the kitchen occupies a central place in todays houses, ats and domestic imagination, much of what we eat is prepared and cooked elsewhere. Some tasks, such as baking your morning croissant, have been outsourced for centuries. Other services, such as pre-slicing your apple snack or ash-freezing your pre made potpie, are more recent innovations. We asked eight New Yorkers to document their diet for a week, recording both what they andmore importantlywhere it was made. The result is a map of the city as a distributed kitchen, a public food preparation network tied together by intersecting individual stomachs.
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TOP 10 FORTUNE 500 COMPANIES IN NYC WITH LOSSES DURING HOUSING CRISIS
CITIGROUP 399 PARK AVENUE Revenues (change from 2007): -29.4% Prots (change from 2007): -865.4% Total return to investors 2008: -75.6%
LEHMAN BROTHERS HOLDINGS 745 SEVENTH AVENUE Revenues (change from 2007): N/A Prots (change from 2007): N/A Total return to investors 2008: N/A note: Lehman Brothers led for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on September 15, 2008. This marks the largest bankruptcy proceeding in U.S. history.
J.P. MORGAN CHASE & CO. 270 PARK AVENUE Revenues (change from 2007): -12.8% Prots (change from 2007): -63.5% Total return to investors 2008: -25.2%
AMERICAN INTERNATIONAL GROUP 70 PINE STREET Revenues (change from 2007): -89.9% Prots (change from 2007): -1701.4% Total return to investors 2008: -97.1%
METLIFE 200 PARK AVENUE Revenues (change from 2007): 3.6% Prots (change from 2007): -25.7% Total return to investors 2008: -42.0%
GOLDMAN SACHS GROUP 85 BROAD STREET Revenues (change from 2007): -39.1% Prots (change from 2007): -80.0% Total return to investors 2008: -60.3%
TIME WARNER 1 TIME WARNER CENTER Revenues (change from 2007): 0.8% Prots (change from 2007): -405.5% Total return to investors 2008: -37.9%
MORGAN STANLEY 1585 BROADWAY Revenues (change from 2007): -29.2% Prots (change from 2007): -46.8 Total return to investors 2008: -68.8
AMERICAN EXPRESS 200 VESEY STREET Revenues (change from 2007): -1.4% Prots (change from 2007): -32.7% Total return to investors 2008: -63.6%
MERRILL LYNCH 4 WORLD FINANCIAL CENTER Revenues (change from 2007): -73.9% Prots (change from 2007): N/A Total return to investors 2008: -77.1% note: Merrill Lynch was absorbed by Bank of America in September 2008.
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environments that could exist anywhere. Unlike space capsules, however, these were green interiors, home to new, post-sustainable landscapes lled with living plants to make them more natural. Ofces became regured as ofce landscapes, bars became fern bars, and homes became colonized by spider plants, ferns, philodendrons, and avocado trees. Like the space capsules of the Apollo program, sealed interior gardens promise us an escape from the wasteland of the city, leaving it behind for either a suburban world of self-contained corporate parks or an urban renaissance in which we are ever more divorced from the urban conditions around us. Green interiors, then offered a transitional device toward completely sealed interior environments. The novelty of working among plants waned again in the 1980s as the introduction of personal computers and online messaging boards promised a radical new form of community not based on proximity, personal interactions or shared space. Once again ofce life shrank to the space of a desktop, where monotony could be successfully alleviated with potted desk plants and an occasional window box. The remnants of atrium gardens and lobby plantings remind us when there was an exteriority to modernism and a need to interact as a groupa romantic notion of pre-industrial life and a pastoral provided by some higher agency looking over us. But green interiors were more than an alibi, they were always intended to fail. Their inability to sustain themselves means that we must take care of them, providing us with a memory of our relationship to the natural world. Without a system in place to encourage propagation and free growth, all but the hardiest of plants have to be constantly replaced, either with newer versions of the same species or with articial simulations that no longer need care. In this, they reect our own lives: as astronauts aboard Spaceship Earth, traveling the cosmos in a sealed environment as our systems slowly and inevitably fail. Locked indoors sitting at the computer, we busy ourselves sustaining the system while putting off the inevitable day of reckoning.
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FERN BAR
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