The Future Sound of Speakers

Atkins Proposes New Prayer Halls For Mecca

Well Atkins scares the hell out of me! When you hit the profile tab on their web site a massage pops up saying "A license is required for all but personal use of this code. See Terms of Use at dyn-web.com". Easy buddy! I'm just looking at who you are as an architecture firm..

They probably jacked a code and forgot to disable the pop up :)
(You know it's not "personal use" anymore when you put it on your company web page, right?)

Anyways they as they declare are:

"We are a multinational community of 650 architects sharing a passion for excellence. Unlike many design firms, we believe that design solutions must be fitting to the time, place and culture in which they are located. We have no single “house style” – preferring instead to offer excellent, inspirational architecture and urban design that reflects our diversity and collaborative working style. In this site, you can sample our unlimited creativity."

Their unlimited creativity didn't at least help them here..
How stupid is this. What's this we have no single "house style" shit. Which architect has a single "house style"?
And why do they employ 650 architects? Why not 649 or 651? Does it sound better that way?
Design solutions must be fitting to the time, place and culture in which they are located?
Oh god I'm enlightened! This shakes the foundations of architecture as we know it today.
And the Muslimic / Religious Documentary style voice over the video puts the icing on the cake!

This is the worst "Sell Global, Pretend Local" nonsense I've ever seen!

I guess just like the code, they jacked this "who we are" from a global denim or soda company.
It could be just like this fine:

"We are a multinational community of 650 tailors sharing a passion for excellence. Unlike many denim firms, we believe that denim solutions must be fitting to the time, place and culture in which they are worn. We have no single “Jean Style” – preferring instead to offer excellent, inspirational denims that reflect our diversity and collaborative working style. In this site, you can sample our unlimited creativity."

Why do I care?
Because if no one does this kind of global blueprint sellers especially the ones that have influence over the Arab world, become so bold as to approach KAABA with a shopping mall / stadium / fancy hotel attitude!

Remove The Ottoman Arcade, bring The British Grandstand! What a nerve!!!
And when it's extended there are 48? Prayer Halls and they remove the Gateways/Minarets as well!
It's not the pointed arch that makes a building Islamic Architecture but respect, love, and praise..

atkinsdesign

Create Photorealistic 3d Models by Taking Pictures

I've first seen it at Ted Conference. They were just demonstrating it at that time. Now it's open to public for free. You can both create your own Photosynths and play around with the ones created by others.

Photosynth was born of a collaboration between Microsoft Research and the University of Washington, based on the research of Steve Seitz (UW), Noah Snavely (UW) and Richard Szeliski (MR)

Photosynth is an entirely new Visual Medium. The system analyzes each photograph for similarities in textures, and builds a model based on where the photos were taken. The program then models the environment and uses that as a canvas on which to display the photos.

This modeling behavior is what makes it superior to photo stitching which is widely used in the architecture practice.

First of all you don't have to be as precise while taking photos as you do for photo stitching.
Only this property by itself opens up a lot of new opportunities.
For example you can model places by collecting photos from the internet even without laying a foot on the site. A group/class of people can share their photos to build a model of the site..

After all raster modeling based on the point of shoot is a smart new idea and we'll be seeing a lot of smart ways to use this new medium.

Try it at Photosynth.net

Associative Design

There will be no input values but parameters in the near future.
Watch the video. It features the very interesting work of Architect Mazlin Ghazali from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

The way the video has been put together is also amazing. It's like an AI computer giving you a full report on a process in another planet.

Here's Mr. Ghazali's blog.

Amazing Fallingwater Animation

Fallingwater from Cristóbal Vila on Vimeo.

Blogger banned in Turkey

I came back from vacation and found out that they've banned
Blogger.com this time.

Taskisla.com has very little traffic generated by Serious Architecture
& Design OTAKUs.

We can't reach our control panel from Turkey so technically WE ARE
BANNED.

Writing any entry to this main streamly boring web site would be in a
sense bending or breaking the law?
No one knows...

Bad bad architectural THINKING...

An Architect Unshackled by Limits of the Real World

“Berlin Free-Zone 3-2,” a 1990 proposal by Lebbeus Woods for an abandoned government building in reunified Berlin. The structure, more theoretical than practical, has no assigned purpose.

From The New York Times' article about the architect. Lebbeus Woods.

Not so long ago many of the world’s greatest architectural talents behaved as though the actual construction of buildings was beneath them. During the 1960s firms like Superstudio in Florence, Italy, and Archigram in London were designing urban visions intended to shake up the status quo. These projects — walking, mechanized cities and mirrored megastructures that extended over mountain ranges and across deserts — were stinging attacks on a professional mainstream that avant-garde architects believed lacked imaginative energy.

.....

Mr. Woods, a large, burly man who still likes an occasional cigarette, doesn’t try to hide his disdain for this new reality. “Big corporations today want to present themselves as benefactors of the human race,” he told me recently, summing up the current state of affairs. “ExxonMobil runs ads about the ecology now. And architecture is part of this. It’s a business.”

It’s hard to disagree with the main thrust of his argument: that architecture has always needed a place that is wholly free of self-censorship, and that this place does not exist in the often-contentious exchange between architect and client. Most of us remember, for example, what happened to Mr. Koolhaas in the 1997 competition for a major expansion to the Museum of Modern Art. Choosing to ignore the museum’s internal politics, he indiscreetly highlighted the museum’s corporate agenda in his design. An enraged MoMA board instantly dropped him.

The pressure to smooth over anything in a design that might be perceived as threatening has only increased in recent years, as a lot of architecture has begun to look like a sophisticated form of marketing. Architects who once defined themselves as rebels are now designing luxury residential towers for the super-rich.

The greatest influence of this trend, however, may be on a younger generation of architects. Reared in an era when there seems to be an irresistible supply of work, these architects often seem eager to build at any cost. And their facility with computer software can make it easy to churn out seductive designs without digging deeply into hard social truths.

As Mr. Woods put it: “With the triumph of liberal democracy and laissez-faire capitalism, the conversation came to an end. Everyone wanted to build, which left less room for certain kinds of architecture.”

.....

Here's The New York Times' full article about the architect. Lebbeus Woods.