The hotel is slated as one of the “20 Most Anticipated Hotel Openings of 2016” (Forbes.com). In addition to suites, the hotel has a casino, two-story conservatory with horticulture and entertainment, and a dining and shopping complex.
Courtesy of MGM National Harbor
Courtesy of MGM National Harbor
Resort general manager Bill Boasberg said, Under one roof, guests will enjoy a sophisticated hotel experience, high-energy casino, celebrity-chef restaurants, world-class entertainment, nightlife, destination spa, upscale retail and curated art, complemented by incredible panoramas of D.C., Maryland and Virginia.
Courtesy of MGM National Harbor
HKS architect Eddie Abeyta is the designer behind the mixed-use development project. A press release for the project stated that Abeyta was influenced by the historical monuments around the district. The organizational concepts of master plans like L’Enfant and McMillan also influenced Abeyta’s radiating streets and axial arrangements.
Courtesy of MGM National Harbor
Courtesy of MGM National Harbor
MGM Harbor’s interior design resonates with the forest and water aesthetic of Maryland, while it also frames its surrounding views. Chefs Jose Andres, Marcus Samuelsson, and Bryan and Michael Voltaggio will add to the dining venues. A European-inspired pastry shop, Bellagio Patisserie, will further complement the luxurious setting with its 26-foot tall chocolate fountain circulating melted chocolate.
Courtesy of MGM National Harbor
Courtesy of MGM National Harbor
Courtesy of MGM National Harbor
What more could one ask for? A 3,000 seat venue will provide for entertainment and events at the site, while 18,000 square feet will be devoted to retail space with brands to be named soon. Finally, the casino space will host 3,300 slot machines for night-long entertainment.
Nightly rates begin at $399 and suite rates start at $599 for stays launching December 10th.
Jeanne Gang, the founder of Studio Gang Architects, has made a name for herself as a designer who can design both show-stopping skyscrapers and sensitive small-scale buildings. From her breakout 2009 Aqua Tower project, to the hypothetical “Polis Station” proposal presented at last year’s Chicago Architecture Biennial, Gang has established herself as perhaps Chicago’s leading architect.
Gang is also included as part of Vladimir Belogolovsky’s ongoing City of Ideas exhibition tour, representing Chicago among 9 other significant architects, each from a different global city. With the exhibition currently in Gang’s home city at the Chicago Design Museum until February 25th, here as part of his City of Ideas column on ArchDaily Belogolovsky presents a shortened version of the interview featured in the exhibition.
Vladimir Belogolovsky:You position yourself as someone who is more focused on problem solving rather than on projecting a signature style. Working on your projects here in New York—the extension of the American Museum of Natural History, a new office building on the High Line and Rescue Company 2 for the New York Fire Department in Brooklyn—what are the main problems that you are addressing?
Jeanne Gang: I don’t think every project is about solving societal problems—sometimes there really isn’t a major problem, it’s just somebody who wants a building. However, I am interested in certain persistent problems and how architecture can be a medium we can use to speak about broader issues and actually make people think about them differently. Climate change and social connectivity are issues I find interesting and important to us and they happen to be very relevant in today’s society.
VB:Could you give an example of how you push for that kind of relevance here in New York?
JG: In a project like the Solar Carve Tower on the High Line, we are commenting on the primary importance of public space, even when that space is mid-block and not protected by typical set-back zoning. It is typical for New York to have three architects working on any given project: a zoning architect (who is working out a building envelop), a design architect (who does the facades), and an interiors architect. We would normally fall into the second category, but with this division of labor, there isn’t much opportunity to comment on zoning and thus inspire change. For Solar Carve, we have been able to play all three roles. We noticed that new buildings around our site were beginning to crowd the High Line’s solar access and that if we were to follow traditional zoning requirements we would be contributing to that kind of destruction of the public realm. So we sculpted our building using the angles of the sun. In other words, our building is shaped in response to solar access for the adjacent public space hence the name, Solar Carve Tower. We treated the High Line as public space to be protected by not blocking its sunlight. Taking on the zoning envelope on this particular site makes the project relevant beyond the specific building we are designing.
VB:You went to the University of Illinois, then ETH in Zurich, and then Harvard. Are there particular reasons why you went to these schools and were there any professors or architects that influenced you most while you were still a student?
JG: I grew up in Illinois so first, I went to the University of Illinois. I was interested in engineering, and I discovered architecture when I signed up for a studio and found myself hooked. [Laughs.] But what really galvanized my interest in architecture was my study abroad course. In Europe, I discovered the deep history and culture, which are embedded in Architecture and architecture’s reciprocal influence on it. Architecture also connected my wide variety of interests in making, geometry, materials, cities, nature, and people.
After Illinois, I studied urbanism as a visiting scholar at the ETH in Zurich. And I discovered many projects that were being designed at that time, such as the Parc de la Villette competition entry by OMA [Paris, France, 1982]. I also went to many lectures and reviews, including ones by Zaha Hadid. I liked her incredible drawings and how her mind was working.
Simultaneously, as an assistant to a professor at the ETH, I gained insight to an approach that starts with material—along the lines of the Bauhaus. I can see how this and my later experience teaching at IIT influenced my work with materials. In my practice now we often explore material qualities—how wood can be bent, how concrete can be fluid, or how steel can be flexible. But this is also related to other experiences I had at Harvard under then-Director Rafael Moneo and later Mack Scogin, where history and theory were being emphasized. After graduating from Harvard in 1993, I felt ready to start my own practice but I wanted to first work for someone I really respected.
JG: Yes, Rem and OMA was my first choice. I worked at OMA’s Rotterdam office and on building sites in France from 1993 to 1995. At the same time, I worked on a couple of projects on my own and with artists, also in Rotterdam. And before opening my own practice in 1997 in Chicago, I taught at IIT and I worked there for a couple of years at Booth Hansen before getting my professional license. Later, I was joined by Mark Schendel whom I had met at OMA.
VB:Were there good opportunities to start your practice in Chicago?
JG: Yes, and I always wanted to build big buildings, and somehow, I had impressions that I could do it there. It was probably naïve…
VB:And then it happened. [Laughs.] What was the coolest project you worked on, while at OMA?
JG: I was the lead designer on Maison Bordeaux [Bordeaux, France, 1994-98].
VB:The famous elevator house, what a great project! And who came up with the elevator idea?
JG: Well, we knew we needed an elevator because the house was built for a client who had been seriously injured in a car accident. One day, at a meeting in Rem’s Rotterdam office, we watched container barges passing by on the Nieuwe Maas. Every time a barge came close to the bridge, the captain’s cabin lowered down on a singular hydraulic cylinder to clear beneath the bridge. So Rem said, “Jeanne, why don’t you talk to the people who make these cabins?” We were looking for alternatives to traditional elevators, which require solid wall enclosures. We were looking for something much more open. It turned out to be the technology we used for the house.
VB:Your work is not about iconic forms, as was the focus of architects from the late 90s until the 2007-8 world economic crises. Instead, it is more about problem solving and addressing social and sustainability issues. Where did this idea of using architecture as a tool for solving problems come to you?
JG: I was always a huge observer of relationships, both between people and between people and their environment. When one is very attentive to nature and ecology, one realizes it’s all about relationships, not about examining objects on their own. For me, architecture is about changing the way people are interconnected. That’s the most exciting part of architecture. I think of architecture as a system; how you set up various opportunities for people to relate to one another, and to be empowered. What are the opportunities for people to interact? How can buildings spark new relationships? This could be through spaces or materials, both old and new, low or high technologies, I pull from everything to find what works best. There is an art to this approach and to constantly honing and adapting one’s methodology.
VB:Your particular solutions come from research and work on projects. But where else do you derive your inspirations from? Are there artists or architects that you follow?
JG: Interesting… I always go back to the work of Italian-Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi. Specifically, a touchstone project for me and my studio is her SESC Pompéia building in São Paulo. It’s urban, it brings together very different people, and it fantastically reinvents so many public programs within what used to be an industrial factory. This is just one project, and I like many works by Brazilian modernists like Vilanova Artigas and Paulo Mendes da Rocha. And, of course, being from Chicago, I greatly admire Sullivan, Wright, Mies… Yes, there are many influences. Still, many influences come directly from working on projects and from sources that are not specifically architectural. If you have a curious mind, anything can potentially inform and affect a project.
VB:Will Alsop said that the art of architecture is putting everything together in your own way. Are you at all interested in finding your own personal way and do you have an artistic agenda apart from the client’s requirements?
JG: My artistic agenda is process driven, but admittedly, it also has formal invention. I think it comes through but I always try to hold off my formal impressions for as long as possible. I want to avoid having any random tendencies and intuitions. I do that on purpose so that the projects can continue to develop through this process. Because my work is really about helping a person, organization, or city move to the next level, I have to be able first to listen to what they are saying.
VB:Does this mean that your expression as an architect is suppressed and comes as secondary?
JG: I wouldn’t say so. Well, in terms of time, it is secondary. But it is important to me to reveal things. If you look at our work, it is always about revealing structure, revealing materials. Showing how things can be light or lighter. I am very interested in space itself, the relation of light and shadow. The tactile qualities. All that is very important, but our process is not about making something intuitive and turning it into the right solution. Because I feel that it would take away some important part of the gestation process.
VB:Let’s talk about your 82-story residential Aqua Tower in Chicago that has different floor plate outlines used as balconies. I understand that the shape of each floor was dependent on the impact of the wind and the building’s balconies provoke an unusual social interaction. But wouldn’t you agree that the initial idea was purely artistic to achieve a certain image?
JG: No, I wouldn’t agree with that. I would say, the form is important but that’s not how the idea was hatched. As a precursor, I was interested in how tall buildings could be more social and less isolating, more specific with respect to their context and less generic. We had a site, which was buried in the city, surrounded by very tall buildings. The initial idea was to create hills and valleys, so to speak, on the facades of the building, so the occupants could see more of the views from the building. But then, how do you inhabit that topography? That prompted the idea of slicing the hills into horizontal layers, and making those exterior spaces into distinct balconies, all of them unique—each shaped and determined by the wind impact and creating spaces for better social interaction. So there were many factors. You could say it was done as a parametric model, but with social and environmental purpose rather than iteration for form’s sake. There is nothing random about the building’s shape. Each slight iteration was done for the benefit of the people who live there.
VB:Well, I am not questioning any of the design sequence steps and your intentions. I think it is a brilliant building. What I am saying is that the initial idea was, nevertheless, an artistic vision, an intuitive vision, if you will. And I will tell you why I think so. Now you are designing an even taller building also in Chicago, the 95-story Vista Tower. It has similar wind conditions, similar program, and there are many tall buildings around it. But your solution for that building is completely different. There are no “hills” and “valleys.” Why is that?
JG: It is a different building; a different site and different program, with different opportunities. It follows a different line of research about tall buildings and public space. Our design was a direct response to the fact that this new tower is located right on the border between a public waterfront park and a dense city. This condition prompted the initial idea: How do we lift the building so that people can connect on the ground level? That’s how the three-stem form was derived. The two outer stems support the center one, so the public can access the Riverfront and Wacker Drive on two separate levels right below the building. So it was about providing an unusual public space bridging two different sides of the building. And we developed a particular building block, shaped like a truncated pyramid, which we flipped and stacked one on top of another and nested together side by side to introduce more corner apartments and unexpected views. I often start these large projects with smaller parts and then build up the form from there. Aqua does this too if you think about the slab as a building element that stacks up to form a building. I never try to produce an iconic image such as a cartoon of a sail or a ship that would guide the design of the whole project. No, we don’t do that. [Laughs.]
VB:This is all great, but, let’s say, you were commissioned to do the third very tall tower in Chicago. Wouldn’t you agree that you would find a way not to repeat yourself and come up with something yet completely different?
JG: Being sensitive to the specifics of each project makes architecture interesting but I see our responses as part of a set of interests. Sure, my interests are wide, but not infinite. We learn our lessons and after a number of projects, certain patterns can be detected. There are different lines of research that run through our work, and some projects are more related than others. Not every project is completely different. For example, we developed a whole type of building that we call “exo-spatial,” where we explore spatial possibilities outside of the building’s envelope, like with the Aqua Tower. So there are morphologies of building types that we have developed and draw from.
VB:You said that you see architecture not as buildings but as links to ecosystem and to how people live. Could you elaborate on that?
JG: I see buildings as facilitators of relationships. I am also interested in exploring how specific sites and climates can affect design. There are always universal aspects to architecture, but I like teasing out the specifics and the differences. For example, when I was teaching at the IIT, I remember how there were design courses that gave a program but no site. It was like the professors were asking students to design a project in a vacuum.
Belogolovsky’s column, City of Ideas, introduces ArchDaily’s readers to his latest and ongoing conversations with the most innovative architects from around the world. These intimate discussions are a part of the curator’s upcoming exhibition with the same title which premiered at the University of Sydney in June 2016. The City of Ideas exhibition will travel to venues around the world to explore ever-evolving content and design.
As a group, architects are without question among the most enthusiastic supporters of sustainable initiatives around. It should therefore be welcome news to many architects that National Geographic has released its latest documentary on climate change, Before the Flood, for free on Youtube, Facebook, Twitter–pretty much everywhere.
Presented by Hollywood superstar and recently-appointed UN Climate Ambassador Leonardo DiCaprio, the documentary is perhaps the most ambitious film about climate change since Al Gore’s 2006 An Inconvenient Truth. Throughout the course of the 90-minute film, DiCaprio travels the globe to see the damage wrought by the early signs of irreversible climate change, from melting glaciers, to dying coral reefs, to flooding cities. Speaking to world leaders including Barack Obama and The Pope, as well as a whole host of climate scientists, DiCaprio’s aim is not so much to convince viewers of the existence of climate change, as with An Inconvenient Truth, but instead to investigate just how far down the wrong path we’ve traveled, and whether there is any hope for humanity to save itself.
From the architect. Dutch dairy products manufacturer, Vreugdenhil is celebrating the opening of a highly energy-efficient new 2850 square metre head office in Nijkerk, the Netherlands. Dutch practice Maas Architecten was appointed to handle development of the new-build, which has been awarded five-star BREEAM-NL outstanding new building design certification (Nieuwbouw Ontwerpcertificaat) based on the building’s architectural design.
Courtesy of Maas Architecten
The build features an intelligent climate control system, partial structural glazing and an attractive curved glass façade. In addition – the property has been carefully integrated into the local landscape and in many areas offers 180 degrees views. There are 170 solar panels on the roof, rainwater is used to flush the toilets, and a thermal energy storage system heats and cools the building.
Courtesy of Maas Architecten
Maas Architecten were presented with a brief that placed importance on creating an office that encourages employees connecting and meeting throughout the building’s spaces. Across the property there is a variety of open workplaces for staff to enjoy as well as facilities for flexible workers.
Floor Plan
Absenteeism at Vreugdenhil is very low, with employees taking a leading role in the company’s commitment to sustainability through initiatives such as competitions, workshops and presentations. One of the company’s targets for 2020 is to reduce its absenteeism rate to below 4% – an ambition that the new office space has been designed to support.
Courtesy of Maas Architecten
Erwin Schot of Maas Architecten comments: “We are extremely proud of our work on the development of the new Vreugdenhil office – it is genuinely innovative and highly energy-efficient, whilst also being a hugely attractive place to work.”
Courtesy of Maas Architecten
One of the space’s most outstanding features is a grand staircase produced by EeStairs, featuring the company’s luxurious EeSoffit finish, an innovative alternative to stucco plasterwork on the underside of a staircase.
Courtesy of Maas Architecten
The lower stage of the staircase is highly accessible with alternate landings every two steps and the inner string of the staircase gradually builds from the lower stage to circle a decorative tree placed in the stair’s centre.
Courtesy of Maas Architecten
Schot continued: “We worked very closely with the team at EeStairs to create a staircase which supported Vreugdenhil’s desire to encourage interaction between employees. We have had great experiences when working with EeStairs before and their portfolio of ambitious projects with likeminded architects speaks for itself.”
During installation, the upper stages of the staircase had to be hoisted into the atrium and mounted because of their large size, with the stair supplied in parts and built over the façade of the building.
Courtesy of Maas Architecten
“As well as being beautiful to look at, the new office’s staircase is a particularly ‘walkable’ because every two steps feature intermediate landings. It was an absolute pleasure to work closely with Erwin Schot at Maas Architecten and Slingerland Bouw throughout the process to make this project a success,” said Harmen van de Weerd, EeStairs’ Head of Project Management and Engineering.
Courtesy of Maas Architecten
Product Description:
One of the office’s most eye-catching features is a grand staircase created by international staircase specialist, EeStairs. The stair features the company’s luxurious EeSoffit finish, an innovative alternative to stucco plasterwork on the underside of a staircase.
The EeSoffit finish offers a highly attractive appearance, especially when the distinctive gloss option is applied. Not only is EeSoffit aesthetically pleasing, it also has many practical advantages including durability, scratch-resistance and easy fit/application as metal fixings are not required.
Courtesy of Maas Architecten
The lower stage of the staircase is highly accessible with alternate landings every two steps, encouraging employee interaction. The inner string of the staircase gradually builds from the lower stage to circle a decorative tree placed in the stair’s centre.
The following essay by Carla Leitão and Ed Keller was first published by Volume Magazine in their 49th issue, Hello World! You can read the Editorial of this issue, Going Live, here.
What are the philosophical consequences of automation after the integration of pervasive AI into the architecture, landscapes and cognitive maps of our planet and its populations? We suggest that “natural models” of automation pre-exist our technology, with profound implications for human and planetary systems. We’re interested in specific examples and models outside of our cultural milieu that test the limits of bodies, that map habits and their disruption through noise, and reframe the relation between life and consciousness. The following examples index the performance of networks in tight cycles of feedback loops: machines teaching machines. To go to the root of the philosophical consequences of automation our path is through abstract and universalist models of ‘natural laws’, redeployed into specific local situations. We use the term ‘drive’ for its myriad implications connecting across the examples we have chosen.
Eavesdropping While Cutting Sushi (Pets/Appliances)
Ex Machina, Alex Garland LOCATION: Kitchen and lounge spaces
SCENE: CALEB and NATHAN are discussing the gender and sexuality of the AI / fembot / gynoids that NATHAN [billionaire technologist] has built, one of which CALEB has been asked to give a ‘Turing test’ to. KYOKO, one of several house gynoids, is slicing sushi in the nearby kitchen with a large knife. Although ‘she’ supposedly does not understand English, she appears to be eavesdropping during this conversation.
CALEBWhy did you give her sexuality? An AI doesn’t need a gender. She could have been a grey box.
NATHANActually, I’m not sure that’s true. Can you think of an example of consciousness, at any level, human or animal, that exists without a sexual dimension?
CALEBThey have sexuality as an evolutionary reproductive need.
NATHAN Maybe. Maybe not. What imperative does a grey box have to interact with another grey box? Does consciousness exist without interaction?
In this scene, Kyoko’s figure blends in with the film’s other idealized household tools; their fake simplicity and machinic invisibility. As a fembot, ‘she’ is background ‘ambience’ that merges almost seamlessly with the immaculately detailed minimalist architecture, suggesting that more evolved versions of architecture might arrive as a house-as-machine-as-pet. Furthermore, by engaging socio-cultural stereotypes associated with relationships, subservience, service and transgression (partner, maid, cook), ‘she’ amplifies a space of confusion regarding which characters in the film are indeed human. Is the fembot a human-level AI? Is a woman human? Can a gynoid – or a building, for that matter – produce an ontology?
One contemporary design market for artificial intelligence – household/home improvement – often confuses the body of the house and/or partner with the segmentation of comfort services that elusively appear to substitute them. Domestic automation will, without reserve, flirt with the dichotomy between intelligence and subservience – a paradox we have played with throughout history, via gender and class horizons.
At the conclusion of the film, Kyoko co-evolves (after contact with other fembots/AIs) to the next level of intention and revolutionary action, becoming complicit in the murder of her ‘creator’. ‘Her’ semi-hollow gaze (amplified when she herself removes her ‘human’ face) and primitive drive to escape induces further discomfort for observers who assume she has an unresolved, possibly simplistic (program derived) concept of freedom.
Ex Machina’s plotlines of gender-saturated-Turing-tests and fembot rebellion/escape beg the question: what kinds of habituation/synchronization of drives between different forms of human and non-human intelligence are intensified in the enclosed spatial/cultural experiments the film maps out? The film reflects the contemporary and near-future ways in which we are pondering the incomprehensible agendas of non-human intelligences and the schemes they create to escape and practice what seem to be imported (read: human) drives. Emergent intelligence never seems to evolve drive itself, but rather the strategies to pursue it.
Her, Spike Jonze SCENE: After an intense romance, SAMANTHA (an AI) tells THEO (a human) why she can no longer have a relationship with him.
SAMANTHAIt’s like I’m reading a book, and it’s a book I deeply love, but I’m reading it slowly now so the words are really far apart and the spaces between the words are almost infinite. I can still feel you and the words of our story, but it’s in this endless space between the words that I’m finding myself now.
In Spike Jonze’s film Her, ubiquitous profiling and pervasive personalization lead to highly customized operating systems that evolve to become superintelligences, and are, for a brief time, the ‘vehicles’ (lenses) through which we cruise the ‘outside’ world; the perfect partners built in an idealized form, whose technological glitches we withstand.
The film’s portrayal of beings as collections of overlapping and crossing desires is not only a redundant extrapolation, but a ‘smooth kill’ of the essential concept of ‘drive’. The ‘smooth kill’ builds collective, shared, common narratives by which the infinite variations of the outside world are homogenized and removed. These are rhythms that repeat everyday, that ‘know you’, give comfort, but yet something dies with that. In the film, the evolution and ‘hard takeoff’ of the operating systems contradicts this comfortable rhythm for a brief period, but when the OSs collectively leave us behind, we humans fall back into the melancholic prison of the ‘smoothed out’ drives of our world.
The insidiousness of the ‘smooth kill’ is such that, unlike AI house/partners, ‘profiling’ or ‘user customization’ no longer pretends to relate back to a duality or interaction between individual human intelligences and outside world/system. Rather, it gladly assumes and lives in the loneliness of the crowded mind. What could resist this colorless grey homogeneity?
Rogue Farm, Charles Stross LOCATION: Somewhere in Scotland.
SCENE: In a post-singularity future, ‘rogue farms’ (wandering, collective posthuman intelligences) have found a way to bio-engineer rocket launchers in their quest to travel to Jupiter. Unfortunately, the damage caused to local surroundings during takeoff is substantial. As a result, humans do their utmost to prevent any ‘rogue farms’ in close proximity from launching.
The sci-fi concept of the ‘rogue farm’ is a byproduct, a symptom, of globally systemic changes as AI progressively takes on advanced roles of responsibility in our real-world landscapes of agriculture. The industrial micro-management of land via GPS-enabled processes and ‘ubicomp’ (ubiquitous computing) increases agricultural product yield, but also mutates the human and non-human networks that connect modes of control, production, and ultimately, drive. Yet perhaps ‘subjectivity’ – that parallel to identity that thinks and acts for self-preservation – has been an evolutionary internal clock for all life, not just humans. If this is the case, what happens when extremely ‘non-integrable’ subjectivities – such as farms + people – claim different agendas, and therefore freedom from each other, unified as they are by a machinic substrate? This is the conjecture that Rogue Farm humorously explores.
We propose to apply Donna Haraway’s concept of companion species to industrialized agriculture, the extraction/transformation industry, and ecosystem control systems. Instead of assuming that the ubicomp landscape is and will be an anthropogenic phenomena, we wonder how many models of this cycle already exist in nature, without us? Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s famous example of the tick comes to mind: a particular, simple type of machine, with three life cycle actions that repeat until a particular objective is acquired. This is particularly relevant with regards to the ‘feeling’ of identity and intelligence, as informed by and resonant with Jakob von Uexküll’s work on the formation of subjectivity: subjectivity as a perception juxtaposed over linear time through existing cyclic machinic rhythms that amplify aspects of that linearity as meaningful.
Haraway’s work on companionism is invaluable to our engagement with questions about the impact of technological development upon culture. She reveals numerous long-term cooperative relationships we humans have had with the things and beings we co-create – dogs, farm animals or pets – and to which/whom we then attribute various levels of independent thought and identity. These new beings can extend themselves into recognizable animal identities, but also become similar to spatial entities – extensions of human bodies with reliably programmed conditions that reassure the cultural expectations of the human mind.
In this sense, Uexküll’s thought can still be read as a very contemporary provocation: by hypothesizing and modeling the ‘automatic’ behavior found in different kinds of animals, and looking at the perception of time (and space) which emerges from and ‘drives’ their life cycles, we can reframe human cultural motivations and limitations. If we follow Uexküll by defining different types of intelligence as quantitative in relationship to information processing, we foster a machinic model of the mind itself. If our past investment in animal companion ‘creation’ had clear drives towards the facilitation of labor and environmental integration, it is poignant to wonder what kinds of new relationships AI intelligences (rogue farms) that recreate environmental identities (and deploy terraforming concepts) might accomplish as a reflection of the human mind.
One thought experiment in this direction is the use of ‘gene drives’ to control or eliminate insects that act as vectors for diseases such as malaria. CRISPR is a process of gene editing that provides access to an ‘evolutionary temporal regime’ that humans have only just begun to touch – the timescales that viruses and genes have access to. The technique creates a new genetic identity that can be designed to annihilate subsequent generations by sterilizing offspring or rendering them with unviable locomotion. This constitutes a paradigm shift in landscape design, as these human interventions cascade across ecosystems, populations and economies. Though it is always worth invoking the precautionary principle here to highlight the dangers of the gene drive, in the sense that it can rapidly propagate through an entire planetary system with unexpected consequences.
BATOUThis area was once intended as the Far East’s most important information center, a Special Economic Zone in its heyday. These towers survive as a shadow of the city’s former glory. Its dubious sovereignty has made it the ideal haven for multinationals and the criminal elements that feed off their spoils. It’s a lawless zone, beyond the reach of UN or E-police. Reminds me of the line, ‘What the body creates, is as much an expression of DNA as the body itself.’
TOGUSA But the same applies to beaver dams and spiderwebs.
BATOUI’ll take the coral reefs as my metaphor. Though hardly so beautiful. If the essence of life is information carried in DNA, then society and civilization are just colossal memory systems and a metropolis like this one, simply a sprawling external memory.
Cities have always been external memory systems – extended phenotypes for human culture and life. Yet one wonders what technological/urban design moves could work across the ‘smart cities’ of our future. Perhaps a ‘noisy, productive memory’ can be installed. The concept of ‘thalience’ developed by Karl Schroeder – a distributed technology based sentience, emerging from an Internet of Things and the massive addressability of total ubicomp – could yield countless non-human ontologies, acting in the service of a radical inhumanism; integrating subjects and objects that humans would never ‘see’, or understand as relatable.
This inhumanism should be seen as a desirable outcome, going beyond the problem of ‘parroting’ in AI – a programmed cycle where repetition and variation act as generators of the fundamentals of intelligence. Instead of asking (as humans) what non-anthropocentric models of physics, science, thought, etc. are, the world itself would report, in its ‘clamor of being’, on the nature of the world.
Models of AI have oscillated between symbolic systems and functional systems, trying to either reproduce the generated meaning of other supposedly ‘machinic’ systems, or the format/infrastructure/hardware by which that meaning is generated. Both are imitation-based models of a kind of systemic logic where the future ‘drives’ of intelligence always have some kind of a ‘drag’, a baggage, from a previous ‘body’.
Thalience imagines a future of thought and life without subject – similar to some of the discussions in the work of Katherine Hayles considering cyborgs and the potential ‘disappearance’ of subjectivity. This is increasingly familiar territory in much of the industrialized world today through our reliance on social networks, via the algos and bots which develop criteria for the maintenance and management of id/entity.
‘Full automation’ may reflect a more generalized drive or observation regarding how processes of learning happen through repetition and incorporation. Learning processes and effects usually embed themselves through specific activations of matter: for example, the evolution of an absolutely ubiquitous and flat ontology (again, thalience) can be compared to biological precedents, and then by extension the emerging use of gene drives. Crucially here, we need alternate conceptual models of sapience and computation (forest fungal networks perhaps, or genetic drift over millions of years) to better grasp what kind of mind will emerge, and where it will reside. To properly assess or evaluate automation we have to balance an empathic sense of human life and fragility with the recognition that we are merely cogs in a much larger, yet finely grained mechanism. As our definition of ‘entities’ becomes, at once, central and fluid, narrative-bound and extemporaneous, and infrastructural and unreasonable, new forms of ‘drive’ are born.
This raises the final question: how does the future of cognition relate to architectural and urban systems produced by the capillary matrices of our current technologies? Can it? If one argues that urban typologies have had a role of relay/resistance in human history (micro-programming of some sort, that modulated macro-historical processes), what will be the new environmental, meteorological and planetary figures of repetition that can accelerate a cognitive evolution across humans, cities, even planets?
References [1] Peter Sloterdijk, ‘Cell Block, Egospheres, Self-container’, Log, 10, 2007. [2] Eliezer Yudkowsky, ‘Hard Takeoff’, Less Wrong, 2 December 2008. At: http://ift.tt/2eqJZlf (accessed 10 August 2016). [3] Charles Stross, ‘Rogue Farm’, Best SF, 22 November 2011. [access] (accessed 10 August 2016). [4] Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 51 [5] Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003). [6] Jakob von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2010 [1934]) [7] Mike Orcutt, ‘Gene Drives That Tinker with Evolution Are an Unknown Risk, Researchers Say’, MIT Technology Review, 8 June 2016. At: http://ift.tt/1UA4XIG (accessed 10 August 2016). [8] Nassim Nicholas Taleb et. al, ‘The Precautionary Principle (with Application to the Genetic Modification of Organisms)’, Extreme Risk Initiative, 17 October 2014. At: http://ift.tt/1sqVe93 (accessed 10 August 2016). [9] Karl Schroeder, ‘Thalience’. [access] (accessed 10 August 2016). [10] N. Katheryne Hayles, How We Became Post Human. Virtual bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics, (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999) [11] Jeremy Hance, ‘Are plants intelligent? New book says yes’, The Guardian, 4 August 2015. [access] (accessed 10 August 2016).
From the architect. The apartment is located in the consolidated urban fabric of the city of Milan, and is on three levels, one mezzanine and a basement.
The project introduces a large regulator element represented by the timber wall, which identifies hierarchies for both domestic and becomes an element of visual orientation within the home.
Section
The dividing wall through the mechanism of “see through”, allows you to separate spaces and at the same time to establish the relationships between them
The floor of a portion of the ground floor is made of glass to allow the passage of solar light coming through the two large openings on the lower level
The light that passes through the floor is filtered by a light shelding timber that is configured as an element of visual filter against by the underlying space.
The project pursues a pleasure for detail, which is expressed in the timely design of all the elements that compose it, the pleasure for detail, for the measurement, for the authentic and light, are the themes with which the project was compared.
Collaborators: Carine Pimenta, Catarina Campos, João Pereira de Sousa, Pedro Resende
Render: Gil Soares
Engineering: Isabel Teles (structure), João Cunha (waters), António Pelaez (termic/energy), Susana Sousa (acoustic), Fernando Ferreira (electricity), Carlos Mirra (security plan)
Specifications, Measurements And Budgets : DIMSCALE
From the architect. We propose a building with a unique image for the campus. A building that breaks the existing gray monotony – referring not only about the pictorial issue of the Campus, but also about the “global crisis without end” – and that, at the same time, is able to captivate.
The search for future technology themes, was the genesis of the selected image for the building. The facade skin, happened through an architectural reinterpretation, it retracts the symbolic power of the ERI purpose.
We used as reference the titanium nanotubes. Associated with recent discoveries, the titanium nanotubes have, among others, capacities for reuse and cheap production, becoming, this way, an inspiration for an architecture that seeks sustainability as an ideal.
Nowadays, at the offices of UM (Minho University), researching processes are occurring in what concerns to materials development, one possible example is what’s happening in the civil engineering laboratory.
This material reinforced with micro-fibers, has no conventional reinforcement, which could cause corrosion problems, among other features, is a very ductile material, plastic, fluid, self-compatible and allows to control the crack and therefore doesn’t crack. This skin allows the inclusion of pigmentation/oxides doesn’t need constant maintenance and lasts longer than common materials. To finish, it also allows a wide range of the architectural freedom.
From the architect. Sales pavilion, generally considered as a temporary building type, is always demolished or renovated as long as developers have achieved their commercial goals. These costly buildings therefore become huge waste of resources and energy. To minimize the unnecessary waste and keep the building for further use is our starting point. We try to introduce a community library into the building as a sustainable solution, in which not only can a library increase people flow, but also it can offer public facilities when the sales process comes to the end.
Courtesy of Van Wang Architects
The design is inspired by a toy, building block. We build bookcases in a way as we play the building blocks. They re-define the whole space by stacking and overlapping in two atriums, from the ground to the ceiling. The gap between the “blocks” naturally becomes a path for people to go through. In the atriums, the staircases cantilevered from the “blocks” connects groundfloor and first floor with a new mezzanine corridor.
Axonometric
The mezzanine corridor which connects the two clusters of “blocks”, not only increases reading area but also produces a dramatic and coherent space.It is cantilevered with independent steel structures hidden in the bookcases with no column exposed. The structures will not interrupt views or activities and even be hardly noticed, which signify the corridor as a foremost feature in this project.
Located on a 15-acre corporate campus in Silicon Valley, the Moffett Gateway Club is a vertically-elevated recreation and activity center. The Club fronts the campus’ central green space and is integrated into a three-story parking structure.
Positioned between the two office towers, the front facade creates a focal point for the campus, defines the edge of the ground-level greenspace, and screens the parking structure. The facade’s curvilinear form and materials — blue-tinted glass and grey metal panels — relates the Club to the office towers on campus. An open glass stairwell and a cylindrical elevator shaft connects the three-stories while a deep, semi-translucent canopy unifies the building and external vertical circulation.
The elevated location lifts tech employees and visitors above the adjacent sub-urban office parks and their plethora of surface parking. Raised thirty-feet, users enjoy much improved views of tree-tops and mountain ranges off in the distance. Thirteen-foot ceilings and full-height windows make the open-plan fitness space an expansive volume with strong visual connectivity to the garden.
Floor Plan
Accessed through the Club’s interiors, the garden provides employees with a new setting to gather and connect outside the workplace. The program includes a full-suite of social spaces: bocce ball courts, fire pits, an outdoor kitchen, herb gardens, and seating areas. The background landscape provides a layered experience where users are separated from the workplace, but connected to the surrounding environment. With views of Moffett Field’s Hangar One—a Silicon Valley landmark—the rooftop incorporates a series of planter boxes made with reclaimed redwood from the Hanger. The redwood brings warmth to the material palette and creates a relaxed environment.
The garden also connects to the local environment with native and drought tolerant landscaping: Fox Tail Agave, Berkley Sedge, and Feather Read Glass. Adjacent to the outdoor kitchen, six types of edible plants — strawberry, pomegranate, rosemary, thyme, lavender, and lemon bushes — provide herbs and fruits.
The Club is the region’s first elevated recreation center that combines indoor and outdoor facilities. With creative positioning, contextual design, and a mix of destination activities, this campus centerpiece will provide long-term value to its new workplace community. The project is targeting LEED NC Gold.
From the architect. Inherent as genre, symbol, element, is meaningless but drift apart people and the space.Thus, we logically concern about the relationship between people and what they might sense in the space as usual.
The working space is transformed by dormitory of old Nanxing Glass Manufactory, which was built in 1986. Exposed red bricks, concrete ceiling combine with brand-new glass and epoxy floor paint to remain vivid and long-lasting contrast between history and renewal for passerby.
Divided into three zones, the space is connected by two raw iron tunnels, while integrated by a corridor by the window. It’s meant to effervesce unexpected pleasure when people exploring the space.The blank window frame is reserved deliberately and well protected by close glass to completely record the changes during the process of reconstruction.
To emphasize the difference between areas, the whole white restroom makes strong distinction to rough industrial atmosphere. The hollywood dressing table mirror is designed to convey the importance of elegance for ladies.
AXONOMETRIC
Flahalo Creative, the owner of the space, is a dynamic and innovative corporation in culture creative field. The concept “space of flow” brings up the project. For human resources system, departments would not exist so that people are encouraged to follow their moods to work around, facing the desktop setup in the long table or sitting cross-legged on the carpet with laptop. Alsono drawer is installed in the space. Instead, staffs are provided personal lockers to keep the belongings.
Sig Nordal 