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.
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
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
"Life seems to be pursuing its own demise, moving Earth ever closer to the day it returns to being sterile"
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An estatic review of yet another Piano building. Or is that - yet another ecstatic view of a Piano building...
Theme for the session: learning to relax ... and solve the problem.
We spent a good chunk of the lecture reviewing the structure of a good web site that responded to the brief for the web project. The key was that the navigation should be simple, clear and focus on issues to do with making the model of the museum, not on the "assignments" or "tutorials" completed.
3dsmax mental ray Setup Workflow (similar workflow lightstudio, different daylight systems and materials)
1) Setup your units. Make sure you are working in real world units.
2) Import your model (via FBX for Revit). Check the units (Measure tool under the tools tab)
3) Create a Arch & Design (mi) 'matte' material (from the template), 50% grey. Apply to the entire scene.
4) Hide the glazing in your windows, or create a Arch & Design (mi) 'Glass: Thin Geometry' material (from the template)
5) Create a Daylight system. Say yes to both questions when asked.
6) Make sure the Compass Rose is not too big, and do not drag the daylight system out too far from the scene. Keep it small,just twice as high as your buildling.
7) Setup the correct location for the daylight system. Change the day and time to something suitable.
8) Set up your camera views.
9) Go to Exposure settings and change exposure pre-sets to 'Physically Based Lighting, Indoor Daylight'
10) Bring up the render dialog box. Set render size to 320 x 240. Turn on finalrender and set to Draft. Set image anti-aliasing to Draft (Min 1/64, Max 1/4).
11) Render.
12) Adjust the sun position. Change the time in the daylight system until the sun is in the correct position. Re-render and repeat until satisfied.
13) Adjust your exposure. Go to Exposure settings and again and change the exposure setting (Exposure Value (EV)) and click Render Preview. Adjust the exposure setting until satisfied.
14) Create your materials for your walls and floor.
For gib painted walls create an Arch & Design (mi) 'matte' material (from the template) with 80% white. This is the reflectance value real white walls.
For a wooden varnished wall, use Arch & Design (mi) 'Satin Varnished Wood' material (from the template)
15) For the rest of the scene, use ony Arch & Design (mi) or ProMaterials. There are ProMaterial libraries you can load with a wider range of pre-defined realistic materials
16) When doing final renders, increase the render size, anti-aliasing the final render quality.
Useful Keyboard Shortcuts
F10 Render Dialog
F9 Re-render last
F12 Transform Type-in Dialog (move, rotate, scale)
M Material Editor
H Object Selection
Q Select
W Move
E Rotate
R Scale
Alt-Q Isolate Current Object
Shift-W Turn off navigation wheel
Ctrl-D De-select current selection
Space Lock selection
One of the charms of living in Berkeley for 8-9 months in 2008 was to discover all that "lovely Berkeleyness" as one resident described it during a sustainable neighbourhoods workshop that I attended. This news item refers to a scheme that was proposed to the Berkeley City Council way back in October 2007. To quote the SF Chronicle of the time: "plan for the city to finance the cost of solar panels for property owners who agree to pay it back with a 20-year assessment on their property. Over two decades, the taxes would be the same or less than what property owners would save on their electric bills, officials say."
Apparently the inspiration was the financing that cities across the USA already undertake for undergrounding cables in a nighbourhood: the city brings together a neighbourhood and brokers the deal with a finance company to pay for this neighbourhood improvement programme. The idea is that the individual house owner cannot afford the individual cost of undergrounding. The Council is needed as the property tax collector to ensure payment over time. Neighbourhood improvements help the house owners, so brokering the deals is not too difficult. Some people in Berkeley thought why not expand this to solar electricity?
I encountered this idea in an East Bay Express article in November 2008: "Will Berkeley's Solar Plan Go Viral?". That article notes: "If Berkeley's plan goes viral and spreads nationwide, it could have a significant impact on greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. According to a yet-to-be released paper from researchers at UC Berkeley, a nationwide program could eliminate a gigaton of carbon dioxide emissions throughout the country. "This would conservatively contribute 4 percent of the savings needed for the US to reach 1990 emission levels by 2020, with very significant additional savings if the program expands to commercial buildings," the report concludes."
On April 19 2009, the Augusta 'Metro Spirit' carried an article by Erica Gies - a freelance reporter - in which she notes:
"In February 2009, Aaron Mann became the first person to benefit from Berkeley FIRST, installing 32 solar panels on his 2,800-square-foot home. Mann estimates that the new system, which generates 25 to 30 kilowatts on a sunny day, will provide 90 percent of his family’s needs. Functionally the electricity works exactly as it did before. Whether the house runs entirely off solar, pulls power from the local utility at night or on cloudy days, or uses a blend, “I don’t know the difference,” he said.
Ths scheme does not come cheap - because PV is not yet cheap. Apparently Aaron Mann got a rebate from Pacific Gas and Electric - his utility company - of US$6,000, cutting the total bill from US$41,000 to only US$35,000! "To repay that $35,000 loan [from Berkeley FIRST] , Mann’s property taxes increased $3,300 a year, which sounds like a lot of money until you realize that his annual pre-solar energy bills with PG&E totaled $4,200. So solar nets Mann an energy savings of $900 a year!"
The most significant part of the Metro Spirit article though is Gies' following two paragraphs which suggest that Berkeley who claim to have lead the world in kerbside recycling may be providing a lead in this solar scheme also 'going viral':
"In coming months, similar solar pay-as-you-go programs will begin in Boulder County and Denver, Colo.; Flagstaff and Tucson, Ariz.; Albuquerque and Las Cruces, N.M.; Austin, Texas; Portland, Ore.; Burlington, Vt.; Belmar, N.J.; and San Diego, Solana Beach, Santa Monica, Sonoma County, and San Francisco, Calif." Apparently several other states are amending their laws to make the scheme possible.
Procedural issue covered (from Light Studio / Advanced / Materials tutorial online at the course info web site):
Lecture April 1
Topics covered:
Set up a consistent underlying structure for the collaboration:
This article ("The Power of Green", Thomas L Friedman, NYT, April 15, 2007 - and the associated videos - is why the New York Times is such a pleasure to read. Pity their scummy marketing people are trying to sting me for a continuation of my subscription at about NZ$500 for a year, when I am no longer in the country!
Friedman's basic thesis is identified in the byline from the NYT:
What does America need to regain its global stature?
Environmental leadership.
He argues that persuading Brazil/China/India etc to grow clean when the Western world has benefitted from growing dirty (=CO2 and other environmental costs), is futile. His alternative would be for the USA to lead the world with clean alternatives that fuel their growth faster till and thus attract others to the green path...
This is the sort of thinking that is behind the smart grid, the electric car as a storage device for the smart grid, PV on every roof etc... Its fatal flaw seems to be that it ignores the individual people in the equation. How to persuade people to alter wasteful behaviour - to use their share and not keep their buildings (for example) too hot in winter and too cold in ummer. There is clear evidence in the international work on 'Adaptive comfort' that mechanical control of temperature changes our expectation: when people have to open windows for cooling they have very different definitions of what is acceptable than when they push a button on an air conditioner. The Friedman future is more likely to occur if we can change general expectations.
I was reminded of this in a community workshop in the US recently. Some people attending who were significantly altering their behaviour to conserve water (collecting bath water for flushing toilets etc) could not contemplate turning their thermostats down below 20C - overnight, when they went to sleep! And these were so called greenies!
At this address: http://www.neoformix.com/Projects/TwitterSpectrum/TwitterSpectrum.html there is a great toy. It lists two interlocking tag spectra if given two words. This example shows the tag spectrum for the two words 'architecture' and 'window'.
The overlap area is for 'architecture' OR 'window' AND 'tag keyword'... not quite what I expected to be the content out. I had hoped assumed that it was showing overall keyword + tag on the left and right and in the middle both keywords + tag...
Still - a search engine for twitter based upon content not person's name is great.
2009 Open Architecture Challenge: Classroom | Open Architecture Network
Now this looks like an interesting project.
Let's hope they get beyond the knee-jerk more daylight is good design reactions we have had of late to the work of Heschong Mahone Group.
There has also been some work done in New Zealand on this topic by Quentin Jackson - essentially testing whether the methodology of HMG could be replicated in a very different environment. Quentin concluded that the methodology was sound, but had insufficient number of students to suggest that his conclusions applied to the broad New Zealand population.
What seems to be clear from both the HMG work and from Quentin's work is that the differences in performance between students when grouped according to the differences in the physical environment were about the same order of magnitude as the differences in performance when grouped by teacher. The quality of the physical is surprisingly as important as the teacher if one looks at measurable performance in standardised tests...!
Can't find the times on the Paramount web site, but according to Wotzon, on Fri 10 Apr 11.00am and Sun 12 Apr 1.00pm at the Paramount in Courtenay Place a documentary will screen about the former film director, author of Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan and architect of what to me embodies in one building the best and worst of auteur architecture: the Casa da Musica in Porto:
The Washington Post writes (28 March 2009): "The future National Museum of African American History and Culture -- as envisioned by competing teams of architects -- will most likely include water features and music halls, evocations of slave ships and the African past, and vistas acknowledging its important, monumental neighbors.
Perhaps not enough information to make a model - yet...?
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