MachineMachine /stream - tagged with architecture http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron therourke@gmail.com The First Zombie-Proof House http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/5477247486 The First Zombie-Proof House:

via: all-thats-interesting:

Somehow, ritual drunk-conversation concerning team captains for the apocalypse has become a major part of the lives of 20-somethings. Having been matured in the Grandaddy-crowned masterpiece film (put “A.M. 180” on and forget that you have a job) 28 Days Later and the best-selling Zombie Survival Guide, we’re all a little too ready to deal with the 2012 of our dreams.

]]> Sat, 14 May 2011 04:48:33 -0700 http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/5477247486 Of Other Spaces: Heterotopias http://foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.html (Michel Foucault, 1967)

The great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history: with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis, and cycle, themes of the ever-accumulating past, with its great preponderance of dead men and the menacing glaciation of the world. The nineteenth century found its essential mythological resources in the second principle of thermaldynamics- The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of… ]]> Wed, 19 Jan 2011 05:32:41 -0700 http://foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.html Big Ball of Mud http://www.laputan.org/mud/mud.html#ShearingLayers The notion of SHEARING LAYERS is one of the centerpieces of Brand's How Buildings Learn [Brand 1994]. Brand, in turn synthesized his ideas from a variety of sources, including British designer Frank Duffy, and ecologist R. V. O'Neill.
Brand, Page 13

Brand quotes Duffy as saying: "Our basic argument is that there isn't any such thing as a building. A building properly conceived is several layers of longevity of built components".

Brand distilled Duffy's proposed layers into these six: Site, Structure, Skin, Services, Space Plan, and Stuff. Site is geographical setting. Structure is… ]]> Sun, 18 Jul 2010 06:09:00 -0700 http://www.laputan.org/mud/mud.html#ShearingLayers Analogue Inception http://adactio.com/journal/1680/ The structure of the film is that of a heist movie, but if the film were to be slotted into a genre, that genre would have to be science fiction. Personally, I would say it’s cyberpunk. But it’s a strange kind of cyberpunk where the emphasis is less on technology and more on the film-noir mood and transcendental possibilities of the genre.

In fact, technology in Inception is notable by its absence. There is a piece of hardware to enable the central premise of the film, but it’s of no more importance than the hardware used in… ]]> Sun, 18 Jul 2010 06:07:00 -0700 http://adactio.com/journal/1680/ Michelangelo's secret message in the Sistine Chapel http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=michelangelos-secret-message-in-the-2010-05-26 At the age of 17 he began dissecting corpses from the church graveyard. Between the years 1508 and 1512 he painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Michelangelo Buonarroti—known by his first name the world over as the singular artistic genius, sculptor and architect—was also an anatomist, a secret he concealed by destroying almost all of his anatomical sketches and notes. Now, 500 years after he drew them, his hidden anatomical illustrations have been found—painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, cleverly concealed from the eyes of Pope Julius II and countless religious worshipers, historians, and art… ]]> Tue, 01 Jun 2010 02:44:00 -0700 http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=michelangelos-secret-message-in-the-2010-05-26 A Provisional Theory of Non-Sites: Robert Smithson http://www.robertsmithson.com/essays/provisional.htm By drawing a diagram, a ground plan of a house, a street plan to the location of a site, or a topographic map, one draws a "logical two dimensional picture." A "logical picture" differs from a natural or realistic picture in that it rarely looks like the thing it stands for. It is a two dimensional analogy or metaphor - A is Z.

The Non-Site (an indoor earthwork)* is a three dimensional logical picture that is abstract, yet it represents an actual site in N.J. (The Pine Barrens Plains). It is by this dimensional metaphor that one… ]]> Sun, 07 Mar 2010 16:53:00 -0700 http://www.robertsmithson.com/essays/provisional.htm Divine Wilderness http://canopycanopycanopy.com/7/divine_wilderness PLANNING IS SOMETHING that people learned from God. The lesson might be said to have begun with the prescriptions God laid out for His earthly habitation among the Israelites: the Tabernacle that housed Him in the desert, and then the Temple that was His residence in Jerusalem. The dimensions of these structures were dictated by a divine blueprint. The Temple gave birth to a city, and from it emerged a civilization. We are descendants of this tradition, irrespective of such trivialities as whether one identifies as a “believer.” ]]> Fri, 08 Jan 2010 10:02:00 -0700 http://canopycanopycanopy.com/7/divine_wilderness Kurt Andersen on the Large Hadron Collider http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2010/01/hadron-collider-201001?printable=true ]]> Fri, 25 Dec 2009 19:54:00 -0700 http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2010/01/hadron-collider-201001?printable=true Adorno on Mimesis in Aesthetic Theory http://www.wbenjamin.org/mimesis.html Art is imitation only to the extent to which it is objective expression, far removed from psychology. There may have been a time long ago when this expressive quality of the objective world generally was perceived by the human sensory apparatus. It no longer is. Expression nowadays lives on only in art. Through expression art can keep at a distance the moment of being-for-other which is always threatening to engulf it. Art is thus able to speak in itself. This is the realization through mimesis. Art's expression is the antithesis of 'expressing something.' Mimesis is the ideal of art, not… ]]> Mon, 13 Jul 2009 07:19:00 -0700 http://www.wbenjamin.org/mimesis.html The Gallery as Brain http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/31597/the-gallery-as-brain/ At first glance, the central premise of the Hayward’s summer show seems to court too eagerly the tedious controversy around neuroaesthetics. "Walking in My Mind" aims to "transform the gallery’s unique spaces into a giant brain by bringing together large-scale installations that explore the workings of the mind in different ways ... while at the same time inviting visitors to explore their own thought processes." It’s potentially a clunky conceit, and it risks the sort of interdisciplinary pratfalls that have made for such bathetic reading in recent attempts to bring together art and brain science. It’s as yet unclear exactly… ]]> Wed, 17 Jun 2009 08:30:00 -0700 http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/31597/the-gallery-as-brain/ Atlas Obscura http://atlasobscura.com/ Welcome to the Atlas Obscura, a compendium of this age's wonders, curiosities, and esoterica. The Atlas Obscura is a collaborative project with the goal of cataloguing all of the singular, eccentric, bizarre, fantastical, and strange out-of-the-way places that get left out of traditional travel guidebooks and are ignored by the average tourist. If you're looking for miniature cities, glass flowers, books bound in human skin, gigantic flaming holes in the ground, phallological museums, bone churches, balancing pagodas, or homes built entirely out of paper, the Atlas Obscura is where you'll find them. ]]> Tue, 16 Jun 2009 15:14:00 -0700 http://atlasobscura.com/ Way more about paths at UC Berkeley than you'd ever want to read http://www.peterme.com/archives/000073.html How architectural and design choices are mediated and ultimately over-ruled by user choice, reflexion, repetition and desire. ]]> Mon, 25 May 2009 12:21:00 -0700 http://www.peterme.com/archives/000073.html Evil Lair: On the Architecture of the Enemy in Videogame Worlds http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/evil-lair-on-architecture-of-enemy-in.html Game developers are unconstrained in their designs for the enemy. Such designers will be punished with poor sales, not death in the gulag, if their designs for the overlord are unpopular. They could go anywhere with the homes of evildoers: halls of electric fluorescence, palaces carved from corduroy, suburban back yards. And yet, in spite of this freedom, most videogame designers choose to make a definite connection to familiar – or real-world – architecture. Perhaps they think that the evil lair must emanate evil. There's surely no room for ambiguity with videogame evildoers: the gamer needs to know that it's… ]]> Sun, 17 May 2009 03:23:00 -0700 http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/evil-lair-on-architecture-of-enemy-in.html