Digital technology touches nearly everyone’s life. Be it delivered through cell phones, home entertainment devices, ATMs, storefronts or countless other means, digital design is big business and Robert Miles Kemp is at the forefront of that exploding movement.

The son of a carpenter and general contractor, Kemp visited job sites from the time he was small. At nine years old, his father gave him the challenge of designing a structure for a neighbor, which was subsequently built. Kemp loved both the process and the end product. Thus began a career in architecture. More after the break.

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Courtesy of HKS Architects

This unique landscape and future landmark for the city of Qingdao, China is a first place project, submitted by the Los Angeles office of HKS Architects, for the design of the Conservatory by the Office of 2014 Qingdao World Horticultural Expo Executive Committee. The winning proposal was selected from an international selection of projects and was shared with us by HKS. Read on for more after the break.

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You may remember our coverage on the Flight Assembled Architecture exhibit by Gramazio & Kohler and Raffaello D’Andrea, in collaboration with ETH Zurich, that featured a team of flying drones constructing an architectural structure at the scale of a 600m high “vertical village” out of foam blocks. Well, check this out! Roboticists at the University of Pennsylvania’s GRASP Lab, along with developer Kmel Robotics, have created these autonomous Nano Quadrotors capable of flying in formation and flawlessly performing complex maneuvers. Imagine the possibilities!

Reference: Wired, GRASP Lab at the University of Pennsylvania

In this TEDx sponsored talk, Rachel Armstrong - co-director of AVATAR (Advanced Virtual and Technological Architectural Research) in Architecture and Synthetic Biology at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London (UCL) – speaks about the dangerous relationship that we have developed with machines since the industrial revolution and ways we can break that habit. Along with her research on “living materials” and “synthetic biology”, Armstrong is looking for ways to rebuild the relationship between our reliance on machines and the systems of nature and our ecologies that are often neglected.

More on this talk after the break. read more »

At first glance, Dr. Behrokh Khoshnevis’ Contour Crafting (CC) seems both fascinating and unreal – a fabrication machine that has the potential to construct entire structures in a single run.   Supported by the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research, CC’s combination of conventional robotics and “age-old tools” creates a layered fabrication process where large-scale parts can be fabricated at remarkable speeds.  On his blog,  Khoshnevis, a professor in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, explains that the system is a scale-up of the rapid prototyping machines now widely used in industry to “print out” three-dimensional objects designed with CAD/CAM software, usually by building up successive layers of plastic. ”Instead of plastic, Contour Crafting will use concrete,” explained Khoshnevis.

More about Contour Crafting after the break. read more »

Copyright Cornell University

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is set to announce Cornell University and its partner, the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, winner of the intense, yearlong competition to build a New York City Tech Campus on Roosevelt Island. The announcement follows Stanford University’s unexpected withdraw from the competition after tense negotiations with the Bloomberg administration. Meanwhile, last Friday Cornell received a $350 million donation in support of their proposal, being the largest gift the University has ever received. read more »

© Maribel Ruiz de Erenchun

Food is as much about architecture as it is the concept of taste. With food comes the sum of its parts to create the whole, the great attention to detail and the emotion of first bite like that of entering a memorable space for the first time.

Jorge Louis Borges says, “The taste of the apple lies in the contact of the fruit with the palate, in the fruit itself, in a similar way poetry lies in the meaning of the poem and the reader, not in the lines of symbols printed on the pages of a book. What is essential is the aesthetic act, the thrill, the almost physical emotion that comes with each reading.”

Ferran Adria, the master chef of elBulli, which has religiously been called the Best Restaurant in the World, has a heideggerian approach to food, cooking, and the physical act of eating. Similar to that as architects with the same heideggerian approach and the concepts of material, making, and the experiencing of space. Like Jorge Louis Borges and heideggerian architects, Ferran Adria crosses the realm of cooking and enters the presence of wholeness of experience. Transforming the traditional means of eating and elevating them to a memorable moment where memory, experience and taste meet.

Continue reading for more in-depth information.

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© Markus Kayser

The future potential to build and realize the concepts of the human mind lie just there, within the potential of the human mind. For years the architectural world has been struggling to keep up with the ability of pen-to-paper and the recent advents in NURB surface computer modeling, algorithmic and parametric architecture. This in-return has led to the  building and technology industry playing catch-up with the recent advances in 3D architectural visualizations. In fact, as computer-aided design invaded these practices in the 1980s, radically transforming their generative foundations and productive capacities, architecture found itself most out-of-step and least alert, immersed in ideological and tautological debates and adrift in a realm of referents severed from material production.

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Open Source Ecology is a network of farmers, engineers, and supporters working to complete a DIY Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) – “a modular, DIY, low-cost, open source, high-performance platform that allows for the easy fabrication of the 50 different industrial machines that it takes to build a small, sustainable civilization with modern comforts.”

Continue reading for more information and videos. read more »

Courtesy of Cornell University

Cornell University and Stanford University are competing for the environmental affections of New York City’s public officials as part of a contest for the design of a school of applied sciences. The Bloomberg-supported competition will end on October 28th and it promises to dole out $400 million in land and infrastructure improvements to the winning school. Each school is running an impressive campaign with a well developed infrastructure of “green technology”.   Read on for more about the proposals. read more »

© Bernhard Leitner

“I can hear with my knee better than with my calves.” This statement made by Bernhard Leitner, which initially seems absurd, can be explained in light of an interest that he still pursues today with unbroken passion and meticulousness: the study of the relationship between sound, space, and body. Since the late 1960s, Bernhard Leitner has been working in the realm between architecture, sculpture, and music, conceiving of sounds as constructive material, as architectural elements that allow a space to emerge. Sounds move with various speeds through a space, they rise and fall, resonate back and forth, and bridge dynamic, constantly changing spatial bodies within the static limits of the architectural framework. Idiosyncratic spaces emerge that cannot be fixed visually and are impossible to survey from the outside, audible spaces that can be felt with the entire body. Leitner speaks of “corporeal” hearing, whereby acoustic perception not only takes place by way of the ears, but through the entire body, and each part of the body can hear differently.

- George Kargl, Fine Arts Vienna

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Wacom’s new Inkling Digital Pen is bridging the gap between sketching by hand and drawing on the computer.  The technology allows you to sketch anywhere on paper with a pressure sensitive pens, that can pick up 1024 levels of sensitivity and an electronic receiver that clips onto the drawing medium.  The information is stored onto the device, which has room for up to 50 projects and can then be transferred via a USB connection as digital media to a computer.

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