Prefab or Prefad?

The always thought provoking Witold Rybczynski has compiled a short slide show essay on why the modernist prefab movement hasn't caused the architectural revolution so many are hoping for. (coughDwellcough)


The, in my opinion, superbly designed LV Home by Rocio Romero.

On why this might be so, he quotes Colin Davies’ book The Prefabricated Home:

The strength of the prefabricated house lies in its popularity, its cheapness and the industrial base from which it operates," he writes. "These are precisely the areas in which modern architecture is weakest. Modern architecture is unpopular, expensive and divorced from industrial production. That is why whenever it has tried to extend its field to include the territory of the prefabricated house it has failed and been forced to retreat.

As much as it pains me to say so - Witold, Davies, and other are right. At present date, the reality of the situation is such that the prefabricated modernist movement is not fulfilling its promise of bring good design to the masses. Homes like those pictured above will remain in the realm of second homes and "cabins" for the wealthy while those picture below will remain not only more accessible, but more desirable, to the so called masses...





That is, unless we begin to realize that the systems that make the above suburban monotony possible can also lead to other far more intriguing design outcomes.

[insert shameless plug here]

One example comes from St. Paul based Cermak Rhoades Architects (whom I do happen to work for). They've gone back to the drawing board to design a series of modern homes that utilize the same smart growth principles and well designed house plans already developed for a Greater Minnesota Housing Fund program called Building Better Neighborhoods.



Though none of these homes have yet to be built, the fact remains that good contemporary design can be affordable when you use existing construction standards. From the website:

... these affordable homes are designed in a manner that reinforces a livable and efficient community. Smaller lot sizes, welcoming front porches, and alley access garages all contribute to help make these communities walkable and inviting... clean lines, simple forms, and rich colors.

The problem now is of course that pesky little thing called the "market". It doesn't matter how affordable or well designed it is if people won't buy it.

Check out the other side of the argument, as presented by local prefab gurus, Alchemy Architects (whom again, I think do great work), recorded at Solutions Volume 1:



Brief disclaimer: The contents of this blog reflect only my opinion and not those of any other organization or business, present employer included.

Black Balloons - Making CO2 Real

The Alliance for Climate Protection has a great advert up on their site called Black Balloons - Making CO2 Real (click for video).

The piece does a great job of making something invisible and possibly hard to comprehend very real and accessible.







(Thanks Jeffrey!)

The Children & The Soldiers

Three views from Iraq:



If the clips above are extremes on a spectrum of interaction, I have a feeling the one below is more representative of day-to-day life in Iraq. They explode a can of Pepsi, exchange gifts, have a plum fight, and finally debate their views on Michael Jackson.

Pardon the colorful language; these are scenes from a war, delivered unfiltered to your desktop.

Friday Photography | The Curiously Large Animals of Florentijn Hofman

I just couldn't hold out on these so Friday Photography is early this week. Enjoy!

"A yellow spot on the horizon slowly approaches the coast. People...watch in amazement as a giant, yellow, rubber duck approaches. The spectators are greeted by the duck, which slowly nods its head. The 'Rubber Duck' knows no frontiers; it doesn't discriminate...and doesn't have a political connotation."
- From the artist's website.















The architecture beneath the surface is often equally as interesting as the final product. Florentijn documents the building process of his oversized animals at his website.



Via the SFGate. Happy... Wednesday!?!?

Mission Statement

New & improved, the Architecture for Humanity: Minnesota mission statement:

We are architects, landscape architects, contractors, and designers who volunteer our time to something we are all passionate about: working with both local and international groups to help their communities with design solutions. It is each group’s knowledge and commitment to their community that makes each project successful. AFH MN serves as their resource along the way. Our philosophy for all of our projects: We design for people, with pride not pity.

AFH MN’s commitment to our clients is grounded in the following design tenants:

Let it be local: Design is informed by what is intrinsically bound to a culture. We respond to that, respect it, and draw upon it.

Let it be sustainable: We design for the health of humanity. Sustainability is about creating a balance between what we build and what is naturally meant to be and ensuring a project’s longevity and financial integrity.

Let it be appropriate: The components of a design are made compelling by their ability to respond to a community’s needs both technically and emotionally.

Let it be collaborative: Successful projects come from the informational input from all parties involved through the dedication of passionate people.

Thanks to Cassie and Pat for all of their hard work on this.

Monday's Odds & Ends

We begin with a few new links to your right...

Atelier A+D - Almost daily notes from a Seattle based intern architect.
rolu | dsgn - "... A catalog of the things that inspire us" from Rosenlof/Lucas, a Minneapolis based landscape design and installation firm.
Where - "A blog about urban places, placemaking, and the concept of "place" written from Chicago, IL.
The Sky Blue Waters Report - "...environmental news and investigative reporting focused on Minnesota, the Upper Midwest, and the Great Lakes region."



In a bit of exciting AFH:MN news: Jeffrey, Maureen, Rich, & Cassie are set to depart to the south-western tip of Sri Lanka this Sunday. They will be representing AFH:MN at the Hikkaduwa Learning Center Dedication. The Learning Center, initially designed 2 years ago at the first official AFH:MN Design Charrette, is a multi-purpose space for the growing community. At once a Montessori style school, library, and community center, we are very excited to see it completed and functioning. The project was developed by the Minnesota Sri Lanka Friendship Foundation, who also made 100+ new homes possible in the aftermath of the 2004 South Asian Tsunami. Look forward to a full report and pictures when they get back, but for now we'll have to settle for the "near completion" shots below.

In other Architecture for Humanity news, the Venice Beach chapter of Architecture for Humanity has widened their scope to the whole of Las Angeles and have appropriately updated their website. Their current projects include "a mobile education unit made from a shipping container to educate youth about technology and design." You'll see the new Las Angeles link filed under 'Architecture for Humanity' to the right. (Thanks Elliot!)

20 Months After Katrina: Survival & Revival

At Solutions Volume 1 back in early May Andy Richter presented his work documenting the impact HIV and AIDS are having on African communities living along mainland trucking routes. At the end of his presentation he gave us a sneak peak at his latest body of work documenting the places and people of New Orleans 20 months after Hurricane Katrina struck. This Thursday he is opening a show with fellow photographer Jenny Jenkins called Survival and Revival: Photography of New Orleans at CorAzoN in Downtown Minneapolis.

EVENT DETAILS
Survival and Revival: Photography of New Orleans
Thursday, July 19th | 7pm to 9pm *refreshments and live music
CorAzoN
Minneapolis Warehouse District
Washington and 2nd Ave North

Andy's work is full of gems, both large and small, like the series of photographs below that follow the temporarily repaired London Avenue Canal floodwall.





"The London Avenue Canal Levee and floodwall was breached during or shortly after Hurricane Katrina in late August of 2005. This breach contributed to the flooding of New Orleans. Some has speculated that were it not for the breachs most of western Gentilly may have been spared from major flooding.

... Examinations have shown that high water never topped the floodwalls; the flooding was due to engineering failure of the levees and floodwalls. Allegations of design flaws, shoddy construction, and use of inferior materials are being investigated." - Wikipedia

To see the full extent of Andy's photography in New Orleans, be sure to check out both his "Urban" and his "People" galleries. Combined, these two gallery's show the enormous pride, hope, and spirit still alive in the face of complete urban destruction, even close to two years later.







Hope to see you at the show!

Making the Clean Hub a Reality

UPDATE: Inhabitat covers the clean hub, 07/13/07.

Deuce Seven & Street Art Reconsidered

After laying low and working up a local following in the Twin Cities, graffiti artist Deuce Seven (aka: Deuse Sevin, Deuce 7, or just simply 27) recently made two trips to New York City, one in January of this year and then again in March, that catapulted his work into the national spotlight in a surprising way. Unlike other recent graff-world news to draw widespread attention (see the Splasher fiasco here, here, and here), 27's work is noteworthy for its creative merit and beautiful execution - as exhibited below.




photo: Surlygrrrl

I'd like to use 27's work to air out some thoughts on how street art is changing and invite you to do the same if you're so inclined. During 27's second stay in the Big Apple The Village Voice posted a short interview with him and posed the question: "Is a guy from Minnesota the new king of New York street art?" - proving that talent will always trump gimmickry and prolific output, even in the graffiti-saturated New York streetscape.

But there are two aspects of his work that have been yet ill-commented on that interest me most. The first is 27's apparent dedication to and embracement of the temporal characteristic of his medium. Where most graffiti is driven by some combination of 1) real estate of the public realm and 2) ease of accessibility in the cover of night, 27 seems to forgo the immediate limelight in favor of encouraging those interested in his art to seek it out in the liminal and often condemned space of the city.





[Sidenote: This isn't to say he won't paint well known spots. He hit the Williamsburg Bridge (a kind of graff-world landmark in NYC) with beautiful pieces both times he was there.]


photo: GammaBlog


photo: setstatic

The second aspect of his work that interests me is the way in which it has spread. His work is so well represented online that I will go so far as to announce the emergence of a new kind of "street art paparazzi", people compelled to scour urban outer realms, find his work - and the work of others, document it, and share it online.


photo: Luna Park



In this approach, it seems that 27 has at least partially sidestepped the most common argument against graffiti. Rather then "vandalizing" the public realm, he paints in buildings destined for demolition, or in other cases simply screws art into street sign posts. The hunt for his work often takes the viewer far from every day life in the city, but through his cultivation of the street art paparazzi, more people then ever before are able to see his art. It should be said that this is not an entirely new phenomenon, but I do think that 27 is doing it better then anybody else at the moment. At the vary least, the artist's work and recent notoriety in New York City provide a good segue into a larger discussion about the changing place of street art in the city...

... and of course provide me with an opportunity to display a little MPLS pride.

[Thanks is due to the numerous photographers on Flickr and elsewhere who make this often temporary art permanently available to a global audience. Check out their photographs: dancypants, TrespassersWill's, The Curse of Brian, Luna Park, and Artistikfunk and show them some love.

UPDATE: Or you could go straight to the source: Twenty~7's Flickr account via Format.]

New Urban Cartography

We have a couple of reports from the urban cartography department today, followed by some personal thoughts about the kind of futures this new urban cartography might be pointing to.

First up is truliaHindsight, which maps the growth of cities over time through a massive online real estate database. The image below (Las Vegas, NV) is indicative of the data overlay you will see over most American cities: a massive housing boom in the 1950's that begins a trend pushing the city edge further and further away from the core. truliaHindsight is just one example of how massive information databases are being used and re-used in new and sometimes very surprising ways. Imagine combining this overlay with 200 years of census data... a thesis project on environmental racism just waiting to happen.



The truliaHindsight website was designed by Stamen Design in San Francisco. One of their more abstract pieces of urban cartography is called Cabstopping. "The patterns traced by each cab create a living and always-changing map of city life. This map hints at economic, social, and cultural trends that are otherwise invisible."



Their map is part of a bigger project that works "across the domains of art, design, cultural geography, cartography, information design, sociology, hydrology, marine sciences, and history" for The Museum of Science, Art and Human Perception (a place that I apparently need to visit). Some very cool timelapse videos of these maps can be found here.

Going from abstract and invisible to concrete and very visible, we end with a new project from granddaddies/ mommies of all things searchable. The Google Maps team recently released a new hybrid web application called Street View in which you can navigate through the Google Map as if you were a pedestrian on the street. The people/ hours that must of have gone into this thing are staggering.

It starts out looking like the familiar Google Map, but within the space of a few clicks, you are standing at the intersection of Liberty and Church Streets, looking out over void at the World Trade Center from the comfort of my tiny apartment in St. Paul, MN.



Once in Street View mode, you're free to walk up or down the streets, turn in full 360 degrees, and zoom in for a closer look. Below, I do a 180 and go into full screen mode:



How is this achieved? Let's just say keep an eye out for one of these, coming soon to reflective glass near you.

--- Begin personal thoughts on the topic here ---

What all of this brings to mind is William Gibson's early cyberpunk Sprawl trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive - all excellent novels). This body of fiction, as well as much of Gibson's other work, revolves around his extrapolation that the internet (in its infancy at the time - mid to late 80's) would move beyond information on a screen and become an inhabitable place. In fact, Gibson ended up coining the term "cyberspace" to name his then fictional invention.


Gibson's "cyberspace" literally translated in the film Hackers.

If the Google Street View is any indication of what is to come, we can begin to imagine all manner of information being mapped onto a virtually inhabitable simulacrum of our world. Unlike the cyberspace that Gibson describes in Neuromancer:

"...a graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding..." (69),

this new cyberspace will be much more familiar to us. It will look and behave in ways we understand - dangerous because the line between real and virtual will be that much more hazed. As the possibilities for exploration, learning, and knowledge building expand - so too will the potential for surveillance, misuse, and abuse.

"Emergent technology is, by its very nature, out of control, and leads to unpredictable outcomes." - William Gibson

Can Google Life really be that far off?

Chernobyl Fungi Feed on Radiation

Today we have a science fiction-esque follow up to my previous post about Chernobyl tourism in Prypiat, Ukraine. National Geographic reports that three types of fungus have been discovered to grow larger and faster when fed radiation. Scientists were inspired to further study after observing strange fungus growth on the ruins of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.

From the paper, published and available at PLoS ONE:

Melanized microorganisms inhabit some remarkably extreme environments including high altitude, Arctic and Antarctic regions. Most dramatically, melanized fungal species colonize the walls of the highly radioactive damaged reactor at Chernobyl and surrounding soils.

The melanin in the fungi apparently gives it a blackish hue. This "pigment may play a role in the fungi similar to that of chlorophyll in plants." The paper points towards further study of melanin and its future potential for energy capture and utilization. In an interview with Ira Flatow on NPR's Science Friday today, lead scientist Ekaterina Dadachova said that this could mean the farming of melanized fungus as a bio-fuel in areas too extreme for conventional farming. Possibilities include underground or even in radiation abundant outer space.

Sadly, I haven't been able to turn up any images of the Chernobyl fungus online. Anybody up for a holiday in Prypiat?

Friday Photography | Visualizing the Numbers

Photographic artist Chris Jordan is doing an interesting series called "Running the Numbers" that means to visualize the sometimes abstract statistics that define American material culture.

Depicts 1.14 million brown paper supermarket bags, the number used in the US every hour.

Partial zoom:

Detail at actual size:


Depicts 75,000 shipping containers, the number of containers processed through American ports every day.

Detail at actual size:


Depicts 426,000 cell phones, equal to the number of cell phones retired in the US every day.

Partial zoom:

Detail at actual size:


Very sobering. In any case, Happy Friday!

Darfur & the Representation of Atrocity

I conceived of and put together the images in this post almost exactly one year ago. It would have continued to collect dust in my hard drive had it not been for the latest issue of NEED magazine which also featured the artwork of war-afflicted children.



The concept began simply enough. I was researching the genocide in Darfur for a post and wanted to find the appropriate imagery. But the more and more I saw, the less and less I felt capable of coherent comment or action. To make matters worse, new death tolls were coming out almost weekly at this point, each new figure more and more humbling.

The problem I had was that none of the photographs coming out of Darfur could convey the emotion behind the circumstance. There was something missing. Then I came across a website that was publishing the drawings of child refugees in counseling. The children had reportedly not been prompted to draw images about war or strife, this was their subconscious doodling.



Having just poured through hundreds of photographs depicting the conflict, I was immediately stricken by the raw immediacy the drawings possessed. The photographs I kept seeing portrayed genocide in a past tense, but in the drawings, the atrocities being committed were happening before my eyes, as if in real time.



When I put drawing and photograph together I began to see a more complete story, both present and past, both real and imagined, and somehow so much more then the sum of their parts. And I suppose that is what led me to finally putting them up today: thinking about how we represent and relate to such atrocities when they are happening, right now - in the present tense, half way around the world.



Looking at these again, the question I asked myself was “Why did I feel so ashamed by the juxtaposition I had created, enough so to pack it away, not able to think about it again for a full year?” I think I might have an (at least partial) answer:

By making the relationship between what had happened and what was presently happening more understandable, I had subconsciously realized the difference between "I could have done something", and "I should be doing something."

The photographs in this post were all taken by Brian Steidle, the drawings are by the children of Darfur.

Odegard & AFH:MN Present an Evening with Travis Price

If you live in the Twin Cities area and are looking for something to do this Thursday evening, look no further. The environmentally and socially conscious local carpet and design firm Odegard Inc. and Architecture for Humanity Minnesota have teamed up to bring you what is sure to be an inspiring and lively evening with architect, philosopher, and author, Travis Price.

". . . pioneering architects and designers are going back to the earth with what critic Vincent Scully calls a 'reverent appreciation for the political landscape.' . . .'such a sustainable world architecture,' says Christopher Alexander , may represent the pursuit of a 'spiritual purity of maker and artifact' . . . Mr. Price designs in both the spiritual and material worlds."

Timothy Jack Ward,
The New York Times

Mr. Price's "intellectually and visually robust" presentation will be inspired by his new book The Archaeology of Tomorrow: Architecture and the Spirit of Place.

EVENT DETAILS:
Thursday, May 10th
Wine & Hor d'oeuvres at 6 pm
Presentation begins at 6:30

Odegard 210 North 2nd St
Minneapolis, MN
612.455.6100

For more information see the online flier. Hope you can make it!

MoPo 2007, Splitted

Well, about 3 weeks have passed since Eikongraphia released their take on "the twenty-five Most Popular Architecture Blogs of this moment." Titled MoPo 2007, the list was updated 5 days later and more accurately titled MoPo 2007, Splitted. It seemed there was quite a bit of confusion surrounding the first list, something the author tries to clear up in the second list:

The MoPo was actually meant as a satirical joke, as a comment to all selections, lists, awards, prizes, and medals out there. I thought the OMA-AMO reversing of PoMo (Jencks’ Post Modernism) made that clear. With 34 comments, and about the same amount of blogs republishing the list, we can clearly say I am not that good a comedian.

The list seems to have helped to bring some transparency and organization to in the small world of architectural blogging. And maybe more importantly, as others have already pointed out, the list serves to separate ourselves from the rest of the blogosphere and to hopefully give more visibility to us all.

The list is, by the authors own admission, not complete nor fully accurate. His methods for creating the list are as follows:

The mapping of popularity remains the same, with valuing the popularity of architecture blogs by linking blogs (Technorati), subscribers (Bloglines), and hits (Google, and Google Images). As a method it is still not perfect, but these parameters are objective, so it works at least partly.

Overall, I think the list was a gutsy but necessary undertaking and I commend the author for taking it on. It has turned me on to quite a few great blogs that I probably would not otherwise be reading. And likewise, I have definitely seen BLYGAD's daily hits increase since it's inception, as I'm sure many other lesser known blogs on the list have found. For those two reasons, if no others, the list has been successful. So without any further ado:

Top 25 Individual Architecture Blogs
1. BLDGBLOG
2. City of Sound
3. Pruned
4. Tropolism
5. Archidose
6. Gravestmor
7. Jetson Green
8. Eikongraphia
9. A Barriga de um Arquitecto
10. Subtopia
11. Anarchitecture
12. Mirage Studio 7
13. Life Without Buildings
14. Missrepresentation
15. Brand Avenue
16. Architecture.mnp
17. Archispass
18. Architechnophilia
19. Part IV
20. Bird to the North
21. eCar 2.0
22. Archlog
23. Progressive Reactionary
24. Blog Like You Give A Damn
25. Arkitekturbloggen

Top 25 Collaborative Architecture Blogs
1. Worldchanging
2. Inhabitat
3. Archinect
4. Things
5. Edgar Gonzalez
6. Dezeen
7. Plataforma Arquitectura
8. Dezain
9. Urbanity
10. Noticias Arquitectura
11. Death by Architecture
12. …

You'll notice the blogroll to the right has been appropriately updated. Happy reading!