Critics Take Jabs at Zaha's Olympic Stingray (archrecord.construction.com)

Hmm

Sure looks ugly at present.

But according to the Guardian ... link here
"Then, once spectators have negotiated the crowd management arrangements, which the building accommodates somewhat clumsily, they will enter a space that can only be described as stonking, "
Qq

Critics Take Jabs at Zaha's Olympic Stingray
http://archrecord.construction.com/news/2011/07/1107298-Zaha-Hadid-Olympic-Aquatics-Centre.asp?WT.mc_id=rss_archrecord

Render:


Render:


actuality:
Dezeen has best photos...




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Tips For Improve Your Renders (aleso3d.com)

Now they are saying use real settings. Not that long ago pretty render advice was all about faking it (   http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=170065 ) 

And keeping well away from setting for real light:
http://www.amazon.com/3DS-Max-Lighting-Nicholas-Boughen/dp/155622401X

Tips For Improve Your Renders
http://www.aleso3d.com/blog/?p=353
    
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A Belgian Idea of a Sustainable kit house

I was on the http://www.designbuildsource.com.au website and thought this made interesting reading...

A cube. Lots of insulation. Smallish windows. Pallet manufacture. But cheap? Like to see proof.

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Teaching Kids About the Enviro... (carbonpig.com)

Hate the "granny" tone. Ranting on about 'in our day'. Still the real question for the New Right is, since it was 'clearly' more 'efficient' for the economy to stop doing all this recycling, to whom did these efficiency measures transfer the cost of the production, re-use, and manufacture of the packaging?

M

Teaching Kids About the Environment and Sustainability
http://carbonpig.com/article/teaching-kids-about-environment-and-sustainability

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Green energy: California poll ... (latimesblogs.latimes.com)

So, what would we find in New Zealand? 

Political gain trumps science? (check out this New Zealand political view of the science: http://www.act.org.nz/climate-change-policy - it will interest people not from New Zealand to discover the party that published this document sits at the cabinet table ...!)

Or perhaps 'New Zealanders are just gullible followers of the left wing press'? http://mediamatters.org/studios/video/201107200010. 

In checking out references to see if I could find two viewpoints on this issue I came across the main reason I thought Fox news was a brilliant satire when I first encountered it:

Headline from Fox website:

Pirates Swashbuckle Global Warming Alarmists

Original from the ABC website said this...:

Pirates disrupting climate change research

Green energy: California poll finds overwhelming support
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/greenspace/2011/07/global-warming-green-energy-california-poll.html?dlvrit=142898

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Another Website Ranking

Another Website Ranking
from Taptu's "Mixed Stream" stream

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Shared from Taptu | DJ Your News

Archidose publishes some interesting stuff. Most interesting of recent times has been their considered examination of what constitutes an interesting / useful blog / web page related to architecture, This is one.

The other is the top sites as calculated by Alexa in terms of actual links to the sites.

66 Most Popular Architecture Websites

66 Most Popular Architecture Websites
from Taptu's "Mixed Stream" stream

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As it says, the Alexa report of the architetcure web sites linked to most often - as reported by 'Archidose'.

Takasugi-an | OpenBuildings

Takasugi-an | OpenBuildings

Anyone fancy a truly sick treehouse...?

A Rapidly-Deployable Shade Structure

A Rapidly-Deployable Shade Structure

An application for Rhino/ grasshopper/generative components /design script?

Something (anything)instead of more blobitecture...

Seems to me it could be resolvable as a formula / explicit coding of constraints which is always the arcane part of parametric architecture.

Let's hope the competition attracts the explicit designer...

brute force collaborative » Elevating the Discourse: Chapels pt. 3

brute force collaborative » Elevating the Discourse: Chapels pt. 3

An essay in images - elevating concrete and light to the spiritual. Follow link and enjoy.

m

Nanjing Sifang Art Museum | OpenBuildings

Nanjing Sifang Art Museum OpenBuildings

Check out this building. If we were still doing the Digital Craft Museum modelling - I'd want to add this insane building to the list - just so we could explore the interior.

Personally, having visited the Kiasma building, I am prepared to give this folly the benefit of the doubt. Kiasma was uplifting and exciting - as well as a trick to model.

Guest Blog: Words, pictures, and the visual display of scientific information: Getting back to the basics of information design

Guest Blog: Words, pictures, and the visual display of scientific information: Getting back to the basics of information design

" Many examples come straight from Edward Tufte, the information design guru who put the serious study of infographics on the map, so to speak (the New York Times has called him the Leonardo da Vinci of Data)." - So why bother with a regurgitation of Tufte in @SCIAM?

Ghostly Developments Also Haunt Spain’s Banks - NYTimes.com

Ghostly Developments Also Haunt Spain’s Banks - NYTimes.com

Some (small) part of me wants to include this as a tourist destination... on some future visit to Spain

Buildings and Death Rays

Curved mirrors and the sun. As one newspaper noted, the old saw about what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas seems not true in this case. Love to know more detail however as stories of melted plastic bags and singed hair are quite extreme, even given the intensity of the Vegas sun.

Thanks Terri for pointing this out...

Apart from this spoof what is remarkable about this story is the lack of evidence. Youtube has a bunch of links all of which are people talking about the

issue. The melted plastic bag is the only proof offered. Not to doubt the local heating effect of the concave mirror, but singed hair and no burnt skin?

It seems the original story broke in the Las Vegas Review. Illustrated thus:

What I want to see is the video showing what happens. Not the cheap, sun glinting off the facade pic.

form beats function to a pulp: Architectural Record

Antoine Predock�s CLA Building in California May Be Demolished | News | Architectural Record

Emergent Design-Air Flow Analysis 1

I fully expected something with a title of 'Emergent design' to be at the very least Digital. It is after all spawned by studies of the digital and lead to "a theoretical framework... for investigating how choice of design methodology contributes to the success or failure of education reforms."

Instead it appears to be the use of a very large model and a cooling fan to study the potential for natural ventilation / wind driven air flow.

And so it begins?

I see on blueprint a reference to 'The World's First Printed Building'.

I'm not sure what to make of it. It seems like it is possibly just another of those 'because I can' exercises where the 'freedom' to create wildly free-form architecture is sufficient justification for the achievement that is documented.



It is - of course - a 'pavilion' so one does not have to deal with windows and other awkward questions like keeping out the rain. Still it is a major step forward from the machines that extrude concrete or that are outsize robots or that modularise everything that I have seen in past exercises of this type.

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Sound the Trumpet: Music Museum Opening in Phoenix

http://archrecord.construction.com/news/daily/archives/091230musical_instrument_museum.asp




Possibly another modelling exercise?

Could well be a basis for an acoustic model as well..

m

Inserting a Google Earth Viewer into a web page / blog

This is a trial of the Google Earth Gadget. Link in the title of this to the online gadget which generates the code that inserts this viewer.

It is a model created in Autocad and imported into 3D Studio for a walk through animation back in 1993 by Nick Warring - a student employed by me as a Research Assistant at the time.. The goal was to use the walk through during meetings with the people in the neighbourhood when Victoria University School of Architecture was looking to move into a refurbished building. The top floor and the atrium were added to the existing building.

The building was made into a Google Earth model in 2005 and uploaded to the Google Earth Community. This was during Rachel Ryan's research Masters in Building Science which explored representation of data / information within a 3D digital environment. Part of Rachel's preliminary studies was to construct a 3D Google Earth model of the Wellington CBD. Unfortunately this has not seen the light of day for 3 years because the owners of the copyright cannot agree to making the model widely available.

Here is the School of Architecture in Vivian Street (grabbed from the file uploaded to the Google Earth Community in 2005):

Gaia's evil twin: Is life its own worst enemy? - life - 17 June 2009 - New Scientist

Gaia's evil twin: Is life its own worst enemy? - life - 17 June 2009 - New Scientist

"Life seems to be pursuing its own demise, moving Earth ever closer to the day it returns to being sterile"

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