Ben Kacyra, co-founder and CEO of Cyra Technologies and managing director of CyArk, discusses digital preservation of the World’s Heritage Sites through 3D laser scanning. The non-profit organization uses quick and precise 3D scanning systems to create high-resolution, digital models of historic sites through the creation of point clouds. These systems have the capability of gathering nearly 10,000 points per second, compared to a surveyor gathering only 500 points a day. With the constant threat of natural disasters and human destruction, the CyArk 500 Challenge aims to digitally preserve 500 World Heritage Sites within five years. Ben Kacyra states, “We are losing the sites and stories faster than we can physically preserve it.”

Could a digital archive of historical architecture offer some relief to the important buildings that are currently or may someday be at risk?

Reference: TED, CNN

In this July 2011 TEDGlobal talk, physicist Geoffrey West argues that mathematical laws of networks and scalability govern the properties of cities. West demonstrates how wealth, crime rate, walking speed, and other aspects of a city can be predicted  based on a city’s population–universally, and with startling accuracy.

West’s presentation is constructed through a comparison of cities’ statistical similarities with the mathematical laws of biology. Both are dominated by economies of scale, but while the pace of life decreases as biological organisms scale upwards, the pace of life in cities increases. For example, doubling the size of a city systematically increases income, wealth, number of patents, number of colleges, number of creative people, the number of police, crime rate, number of aids and flu cases, and waste by 15% per capita.

Although some might find West’s fervent empiricism tiresome, his model of urban scientific inquiry holds massive potential both as data and methodological model for theoretical inquiry autonomous from practice. As a scientist, West is free from our field’s predilection towards theory as model for practice–he can speak of his observations, but lets them remain as such. Any practical suggestion would limit the versatility of the information he and his team have produced, forever linking that new body of knowledge with a delimited body of interpretations. By way of example: West’s argument is reminiscent of Christopher Alexander’s classic essay, “A City is Not a Tree,” in which Alexander argues that cities are fundamentally social networks, and that those lattice like-networks are in opposition to the synthetic tree-like networks designed by Modernists from Tange to Hilbershimer. Alexander’s essay, organized categorically and grounded in anecdotal models, is too oppositional to have easy currency outside of its use with respect to the projects it references and criticizes. Given that, it is not surprising that Alexander’s later work in A Pattern Language is more often identified as a political statement against modern planning ideals than as the dictionary of design strategies it purported assumed itself to be. West’s argument, organized systematically rather than categorically and grounded in data rather than anecdote, operates in an epistemological universe resistant to the political and able to be understood and applied in a wide variety of contexts for numerous related and unrelated causes.

What do you think of this TED talk by Mitchell Joachim and his discussion about growing homes?  The strategy he proposes for creating “green villages”, pleaching – which is where vegetation is fused together to then create desired geometries –  makes an architecture that is the landscape.   We could potentially “pre-grow” a community, as Joachim puts it, providing homes for millions of people that instead of harming the environment, will just eliminate carbon from the air.   Things get even  more interesting when Joachim shares how his own studio is growing extracellular matrix from pigs, and can print geometries to make objects.  Check out his new wall section idea for a meat house which replaces standard wall construction with fatty cells for insulation and cilia for tackling wind loads.   Joachim is doing some interesting things in his studio and we want to know what you think of his ideas.

We love listening to TED talks as the speakers offer fresh perspectives and challenge us with thought provoking ideas.  Today, we share David Byrne’s talk about music and architecture. Byrne chronologically moves through different architectural periods, noting the difference musical composition experiences as the years progress.  For instance, the airy and flowing music that filled cathedrals became more textural with frequent changes in key as the size and shape shifted to become something like Carnegie Hall.

More about Byrne after the break.

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Quick video friday, Bjarke Ingels at TED talks. You can download an iPhone/iPod friendly version here.

Well, not exactly on TED Talks but on the DLD (Digital Design Life) Conference in Munich which is being presented at the TED site. Norman Foster discusses his work to show how computers can help architects design buildings that are green, beautiful and “basically pollution-free.”