Beautiful – MADE Berlin Project “Captured: Homage to Light and Air”
A creative clash by graphic designer Sven Völker and machine artist Nils Völker.
A Cardboard Column With 16 Million Facets – Michael Hansmeyer in Berlin
(Photos Michael Hansmeyer + thisiscolossal.com)
One of Michael Hansmeyer’s cardboard column is in an exhibit right next door to my house at Smallspace Gallery, Berlin. He is a computational architect who examines the use of algorithms and computation to generate architectural forms. This project, Subdivided Columns – A New Order is a 9-foot column that weighs nearly 2,000 pounds generated by iterating a subdivision algorithm and then utilizing a laser to delicately slice each segment of cardboard. Michael Hansmeyer uses algorithms invented by Pixar.
A full-scale, 2.7-meter high variant of the columns is fabricated as a layered model using 1mm sheet. Each sheet is individually cut using a mill or laser. Sheets are stacked and held together by poles that run through a common core.
The calculation of the cutting path for each sheet takes place in several steps. First, the six million faces of the 3D model are intersected with a plane representing the sheet. This step generates a series of individual line segments that are tested for self-intersection and subsequently combined to form polygons. Next, a polygon-in-polygon test deletes interior polygons. A series of filters then ensures that convex polygons with peninsulas maintain a mininimum isthmus width. In a final step, an interior offset is calculated with the aim of hollowing out the slice to reduce weight.
See more images at artist website
Festival of Ideas for the New City, May 4-8
The Festival of Ideas for the New City, May 4-8, 2011, is a major new collaborative initiative in New York involving scores of Downtown organizations, from universities to arts institutions and community groups, working together to affect change.
Video by m ss ng p eces
Music by Hess is More (Mikkel Hess, I always wanted to work with him, great guy, great talent, hopefully one day…)
Why Amazon Keeps Spending Billions On Amazon R&D
In his annual letter to shareholders, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos explains why his company continues to re-invest in technology.
Random forests, naïve Bayesian estimators, RESTful services, gossip protocols, eventual consistency, data sharding, anti-entropy, Byzantine quorum, erasure coding, vector clocks … walk into certain Amazon meetings, and you may momentarily think you’ve stumbled into a computer science lecture.
Look inside a current textbook on software architecture, and you’ll find few patterns that we don’t apply at Amazon. We use high-performance transactions systems, complex rendering and object caching, workflow and queuing systems, business intelligence and data analytics, machine learning and pattern recognition, neural networks and probabilistic decision making, and a wide variety of other techniques. And while many of our systems are based on the latest in computer science research, this often hasn’t been sufficient: our architects and engineers have had to advance research in directions that no academic had yet taken. Many of the problems we face have no textbook solutions, and so we — happily — invent new approaches…Read full article.
All the effort we put into technology might not matter that much if we kept technology off to the side in some sort of R&D department, but we don’t take that approach. Technology infuses all of our teams, all of our processes, our decision-making, and our approach to innovation in each of our businesses. It is deeply integrated into everything we do.
Beautiful! AVEC Project by Praline Design Studio
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“Living City” How Buildings Can Talk To Each Other – Yang Soo
If you are interested in architecture and planning future city, Yang Soo’s presentation is spot on. He speech “Living City” is about buildings that can “talk” to each other. It’s about Sensors integrated into the urban fabric and how they transmit information about local conditions to a network of other buildings. Yang’s work is very interesting as it shows how the city can be seen as a research lab.
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I Wish I Had This Idea – Human Electricity Pylons (Iceland)
A great idea that could transform a liability into an asset by turning electricity pylons into pieces of art. The project comes from Choi + Shine Architects (USA) and was an entry into a contest ran by an Icelandic utility. There is no realization date set yet, but let’s hope this will take life somewhere in the world. (via liftlab).
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