Allowing for strangers on the web to come together and build architecture.
In a world where communication in all forms is becoming more and more prevalent, company transparency is turning into a mandate. How a firm operates can no longer stay mysterious.
This architecture firm has taken this transparency a step further and actually has a company twitter account for clients and others to read into their daily activities and events.
A fun way to tease simplicity versus functionality …
for all you Apple folks out there!
The ‘American Idol’ phenomenon has hit the whole world. Talent has a new avenue to rise to stardom.
The latest Youtube hit - A young taiwanese boy sings Whitney Houston’s “I will always love you” … this will blow you away.
It is becoming increasingly popular for people in our day and age to reach out to the escapist avenues technology has brought to our society within the last twenty years. In Japan there is a culture of people called “otaku” who are characterized by their extreme passion for anime. This culture is unique in that the people who make up this otaku population actually rarely ever see each other. This population gathers together at most a few times year (in contrast to a church group, for example) to dress up as their favorite anime characters. They spend the rest of the year engaged in an ironically isolationist hobby that is the reason for the community’s existence - watching anime.
—
“Community” is no longer a constricting entity that prescribes how one lives one’s life. Rather the opposite has come to fruition; it is the individuals that prescribe the existence of the community. Community has become a looser organization that simply gathers people who have lives that already have overlapping similarities. Because of this decreased commitment to modern communities, people have tended to associate themselves with more communities than ever before. Rather than one’s identity being a one-word catch phrase, people can describe themselves through a complex and rich diversity of phrases. ROCK ON!
It used to be that most information would pour out from a small elite, and trickle its way down to the masses. Examples of some members of the elite include Britannica, professors, news anchors, etc… For the common man, acquiring facts about the world was rather difficult since information was not readily accessible.
Now the world has changed. Phenomena such as wikipedia, forums, blogs, and other media allow people aggregate and refine their knowledge on a single platform. Because of this, knowledge is now transferred from the masses to the masses, which is very exciting! This means that on the whole, our society is being more and more informed, and that information can be verified by millions, rather than just a select few.
There was an announcement made last year saying that for scientific facts, wikipedia is just as or more accurate than the Britannica’s.
The only thing about aggregating facts via web is that information is only reliable when it can be accessed and edited by a critical number of participants. Topics that attract more participants are much more well documented and accurate than less popular topics.
Isn’t it crazy how identity is so linked to responsibility? In a virtual world where identities can be concealed, warped, or fabricated, things can happen to extremes that would never happen in the real world. People can be loud, opinionated, bad, crazy, or curious without any inhibition.
So a question to ask is, is this then some odd manifestation of utopia?
If you could choose between designing an object versus designing the effects an object has on its user, which would choose? Which is more important in the first place? Which should have a stronger influence on the other? Which, the object or its effects, is the chicken and which is the egg?
These are issues that architects have always been grappling with. I would like to argue that we are now in a transition from focusing on the object to focusing on its effects. Starchitects such as Zaha Hadid and Frank Gehry are perhaps some of the most extreme examples of object-oriented designers. How does this building feel apart from a bird’s eye view? How does this building effect the planet’s heath? How does this building respond to changing program uses and user types? Answer - N/A (not applicable.)
However, younger generations are starting to realize that the effects of architecture are of utmost importance to consider at the birth of architecture’s conceptualization. Herzog + de Meuron and Jean Nouvel are great at designing the sensual experience one feels as one moves through a building. That is one type of effect. Others are more concerned with the environment and how their architecture can live and breathe organically within it (Kieran Timberlake.) And others care most about how their designs can effect production (SHOP Architects.)
Effects matter. (funny sentence ^_^)
Since the ambiguous transition from post-modernism to post-post-modernism (we have yet to find new names for ourselves!) architectural theory has been divided and subdivided many times over into many different avenues of thought. There are the green practitioners, the couture designers, the pre-fab teams, the scripters…the list goes on and on. Because of this, our generation of architects has been urged to specialize to push each of these architectures forward. Although this means that each architect individually does not have the complex understanding of how architecture is evolving as a whole, it means that collectively architecture is breaking new ground on many more fronts than ever before. Architecture now has its chance more than ever to be defined and redefined by these varying tracks of design. Many people each ‘mastering one trade’ creates more than many ‘jacks of all trades.’
Link with 1 note
This store is a great example of urbanists chasing after the long tail. People don’t want what everyone else already has!
When you first walk into this store, it appears to be a simple bodega store, selling sodas, snacks, gum, etc. However, if you ask the cashier to “let you through the soda machine,” you will be surprised to find that the soda machine on the back wall is actually a door to a secret store behind the bodega! This hidden store sells specialty hiphop shoes and apparel at very high prices. Only a select few in Boston know to come to this part of the store, and hence they will be the select few who look cooler than everyone else in town.
Page 1 of 2
