core.form-ula

A great exhibition on R. Buckminster Fuller is currently on view June 26 - September 21, 2008 @ the Whitney. There is a great collection of videos on the site and some basic background info that would bring you up to speed if you knew very little about Fuller. We will have some tricks & treats  dealing with Buckminster’s work later in the week, for now have a look at the video below. read more

I came across some beautiful maps/diagrams/graphic design from degregorio’s photostream on flickr.

The following text was translated from what I think is his site letritas:

Corporate Typography: Beauchef
Working on a project where you open the door to propose the best of your design, an agency that you feel so avant-garde design with sticks and stones, is a unique opportunity to showcase and strive to experiment with concrete elements. Thus, the Centre for Mathematical Modeling at the University of Chile contact Thesis DG, to make a paper which seeks to explain how advanced mathematics can explain from the simplest problem, until the trend of expansion and more complex organic growth. read more

Stunning image taken from Mason White’s flickr page. He is an editor @ Archinect and part of lateral architecture in Toronto, On, Canada

During spring in Denmark, at approximately one half an hour before sunset, flocks of more than a million European starlings (sturnus vulgaris) gather from all corners to join in the incredible formations shown above. This phenomenon is called Black Sun (in Denmark), and can be witnessed in early spring throughout the marshlands of western Denmark, from March through to the middle of April. The starlings migrate from the south and spend the day in the meadows gathering food, sleeping in the reeds during the night. The best place to view this amazing aerial dance is in the place called “Tøndermarsken,” where these pictures were taken (on April 5 from 19.30 to 20.30 local time).

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There is a great video coming from Andrew Payne over @ liftarchitects that begins to explain Theo Jansen’s kinetic sculptures. He goes into a much deeper description on his site and has the file available for download. >enjoy

So our midterm is coming up a week from monday, and I justwrote a cool script to grow a differntiated set of apartment typologies, programmed solely on localized neighborhood conditions. This couples with the other research my partner, oliver, and I have been working on with Cellular Automata as a computational tool for organization of dwellings.

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I have mapped the image above w/ a checkerboard set of coordinates so that it is easier to read. Imagine that each box is a cell in your tiled field. The length and width is a ratio of the overall SurfaceLength & SurfaceWidth. It is not that the units length is 20 and by arraying (10) units together you will get a surface of 200. It should be understood that the unit is (.1)SurfaceLength. This will mean no matter what the length of the surface is, you will be guaranteed (10) (if this is your desired number) units in the 1 given direction. These types of relationships will have to be in your recipe.

No one keeps track of time better than Ferenc Krausz. In his lab at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, he has clocked the shortest time intervals ever observed. Krausz uses ultraviolet laser pulses to track the absurdly brief quantum leaps of electrons within atoms. The events he probes last for about 100 attoseconds, or 100 quintillionths of a second. For a little perspective, 100 attoseconds is to one second as a second is to 300 million years. read more

A tower study done by scripting spirals and applying a surface mesh that connects to the ’structural’ spiraling columns. This image is a clip of the lower part of the elevation.

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Seventy feet beneath the Las Vegas strip, in a construction pit that will become the Cosmopolitan Resort and Casino, Bill Baker is looking for local talent. Baker is the head structural engineer at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, the famed building design firm responsible for the Sears Tower in Chicago, the Time Warner Center in New York, and scores of other colossal glass boxes across the globe.
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We don’t get very many opportunities to pull examples of math and its integration into a sneaker. Here is the 1st where adidas designers have applied a voronoi pattern over some hot hypercolor.

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