Architecture + Urbanism Blog
Concept Mapping Inspirations…
Ray and Charles Eames Solar Toy 1957 for Alcoa
This toy was one of the first sun powered appliances ever built, is has no use other than to power itself.
Precise Images of Buildings That 3D Scanning Enables by Scott Page Design
3D scanning—though it’s been around since the 1960s—has been in the news of late, with Harvard using the technology to recreate ancient statues and MakerBot announcing a desktop scanner last month. But cheaper, faster, and more accessible 3D scanners aren’t just revolutionizing how we print terrifying models of our own faces. They’re also changing how we understand the city.
A fascinating story about urban-scale 3D scanning published on the Atlantic Cities this week explores how a Bay Area architect named Scott Page is using a 3D scanner to generate super-accurate models of historic and dilapidated buildings.
Page’s system takes a series of photographs and patches them together based on how light bounces off each surface. Rather than taking weeks to survey an old building, architects can now generate precise dimensions in just a few hours. Because the scanner uses color photographs, the models are also incredibly beautiful, expressive documents—Page compares them to the first photographs ever made. “There is a magical quality to point cloud imagery, similar to the earliest photos that froze time onto small metallic plates,” he writes on his website.
EUROPA by Ada and Adam Donen
We’re five architectural designers, members of a newly formed collaborative group called Ada, working with a composer Adam Donen, and we’ve been given a major square in the middle of London for a day. We are going to fuse architecture with music and performance, and create the first ever dramatic piece with a stage as the lead actor.
The Bloomsbury Fete will be filled with pieces of interactive architecture - there will be see-saws, slides and tables all of which will be used by around 3000 people that will be drawn to the festival. They will all be beautiful and functional, but also built very cunningly so that at lunchtime they can take part in the main performance of Europa. These apparently separate pieces will ‘subsume’ Europa as it happens.
Hugh McEwen, Catrina Stewart, Freddy Tuppen, Kevin Green and Omar Ghazal are founding members of Ada, a Bloomsbury-based collective of professional artists and architectural designers who work together to create spectacles of forward-looking architecture. Ada believe that by combining individuals who are the best in their field from different disciplines, the most aesthetic and intellectually stimulating results can be achieved. Since early 2012 the collective has been working closely with local organisations to produce interactive architectural pieces.
This is a crowd funded event so please do help this happen if you can, there are lots of great thing on offer for the donations! http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/europa/x/2545657
If you’re in London, come along, play with the architecture, and watch the show - it’s free. 14 June. 1pm.
