Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Architectural Grazing Technologies

http://www.agtglazing.com/index.php

http://www.agtglazing.com/media/agt-prod-video.mov

IAC building

http://iacbuilding.com/interactive/content.html


Cool building, Frank Gehry's first office project in New York.

wood pulp & morpho-ecologies


pulp, source of paper

Wood pulp is a dry fibrous material prepared by chemically or mechanically separating the fibers which make up wood.
Pulp can be either fluffy or formed into thick sheets. The latter form is used if the pulp must be transported from the pulp mill to a paper mill. Pulp which is shipped and sold as pulp (not processed into paper in the same facility) is referred to as market pulp. When suspended in water the fibers disperse and become more pliable. This pulp suspension can be laid down on a screen to form a sheet of paper, and this is the primary use for wood pulp. Wood pulp is the most common material used to make paper. The timber resources used to make wood pulp are referred to as pulpwood. Wood pulp comes from softwood trees such as spruce, pine, fir, larch and hemlock, and hardwoods such as eucalyptus, aspen and birch.



morpho-ecologies
Towards Heterogeneous Space in Architectural Design AA Publications

Morpho-Ecologies -- Ecology is the study of the relationship between organisms and their environment. Through their teaching at the AA, Michael Hensel and Achim Menges have shown how this definition also suits the discipline of architecture surprisingly well: one of the central tasks for architects is to provide opportunities for habitation through specific material and energetic interventions in the physical environment. Correlating morphogenesis and ecology, they have developed a new framework for architectural design that is firmly rooted within a biological paradigm, and thus concerned with issues of higher-level functionality and performance capacity. They have named this approach Morpho-Ecology.

The first part of the book introduces the theoretical and methodological framework for their approach; the second part presents 20 research projects undertaken by students in AA Diploma Unit 4. The thir part contains the proceedings of the 'Differentiated Systems in Nature and Design Symposium' held at the AA, with contributions by Mark Burry, Christopher Hight, Wolf Mangelsdorf, Peter Trummer, Julian Vincent, Michael Weinstock.