This book is a cover version, a recital, an echo. A guide to (modern) buildings in London: modified, amplified, rechannelled, redistributed through current modes of reproduction.

Published by Precint.

Jacques Herzog, Pierre de Meuron, and Remy Zaugg
Architectural Design v.61 n.92 1991

Justin Matherly, Discovering the Faculty of Enjoying throughout Eternity Continual Supreme Happiness, 2012
inkjet monoprint and spray paint, 37 x 35 3/4 inches

Barbara Kasten, Arts and Architecture v.4 n.2 July 1985

Rick Gooding, Subterranea S-39
Graphite on paper, 36”x48”

Fans of Batman and Delirious New York think of famed delineator Hugh Ferriss as the originator of the highly influential “Ayn Rand Paperback Cover” style of architectural illustration. What these people don’t realize is that back in the 1930s this is just how New York City actually looked.

The one thing holding up Apple’s transition from consumer products company to religion was a suitable holiest of holeys. Thousands of people in Clearwater, Florida are throwing up their hands: “E-meters! Celebrities! Why didn’t we make a goddamn iPod!”

It is crucial, as we learned in the 20th century, that the human brain is ‘two-tiered.’ It is, like all brains, comprised of neural nets that function according to principles of electromagnetism—neurons processing electrons. The nets are biological computers computing what we broadly call ‘thoughts.’ The human brain on the first tier computes ‘rules’ of behavior, and, on the second tier ‘rules of the rules’ that enable us to change our behavior as our changing circumstances require, making us ‘adaptable,’ our supremely and particularly human trait. This means that we can change ourselves as well as change our environment, say, through making buildings.

– Lebbeus Woods

Neil Spiller, Baronesses Filaments.

To create responsive, non-prescriptive designs for architectural intervention was the starting point that led to an interest in the logic of algorithms and open-ended systems. These problem-solving diagrams used by computer programmers are very useful as a way of describing fluctuating conditions in responsive environments. This led to an interest in other computing paradigms such as cellular automata, complexity and emergence. These and other ideas I attempted to bring into the arena of architectural design to help architects cope with the rapid growth of computational technology that was starting to revolutionise the way buildings were designed, drawn and built.

Antonio Gaudi, Elevation of a Pinnacle of the Church of the Sagrada Familia, Barcelona

Gordon Matta-Clark, Conical Intersect, 1975
Cibachrome, 76.2 x 101.6 inches.

Sara Roncoroni, Domus 545 Apr 1975: 36.

Nel Libano. Domus 429, August 1965

BibliOdyssey throws a lovely curveball.

Many people say my design was inspired by the sailing yachts in the harbour or by seashells. This is not the case. It is like an orange, you peel an orange and you get these segments, these similar shapes. It was like this in my models. It was not that I thought it should be like sails in the harbour. It just so happened that the white sails were similar.

Gruppo Sacripanti Nonis Decina Perucchini. April, 1969.

Alan Boutwell & Michael Mitchell. Domus 470, Jan, 1969.

From the excellent RNDRD, a treasure trove of drawings, models, and architectural ephemera of unbuilt buildings of the 20th century.

Been awhile since BLDGBLOG showed up here, and this has been on my mind for the last month or so.

McElhinney went on to build his own full-scale “switching labyrinth” near London’s Euston Station. Participants in this experiment “animated” McElhinney’s switching labyrinth by way of “a stepper motor and slide mechanism” that, together, were “able to periodically shift, ‘switching’ openings to offer alternative entrance and exit paths.”

After watching all this unfold, McElhinney suggested that further research along these lines could help to reveal architectural moments at which there is an “emergence of labyrinthine, or familiar, spatialities within an unknown or changing maze framework.”

The labyrinthine caverns of Zork and the non-visual structure of Infocom games are mentioned, and I would love to see a visualization comparing human traversals of real-world maze-like spaces and navigations of those same spaces using virtual interfaces– both text-based and those rendered with state of the art first-person-shooter engines.