Screw Asylum is a prime example of the internet I fear might evaporate at any moment, the fragile tiny nooks and societies that Ben Katchor invents/documents in his Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer series.

Also, the fine people over at SA pointed me to this fantastic Soviet ATV:

If one was to make a nerdy blog-post chart, cute pictures of pets would be only slightly above posts about people playing video games. This I realize. But when our dog Rita falls asleep on her back, her little front-paw hooks are just about right shape for wii-mote storage.

After my recent post where I blamed William Gibson on my mild obsession with post-industrial products, I feel the need to qualify this blame.

If being a futurist means condensing the present, extrapolating the result and then projecting the resulting mess outwards, Gibson did such a good job that, almost 25 years after Neuromancer, we’re still relying on his idea of the future to explain the present. And part of the reason he had so much success was that, despite being one of the founding fathers of the concept of cyberspace, he spends the majority of the time writing about physical reality. He created a world where digital imagery sits as a thin coating over a substructure cobbled together with epoxy, wire and department-of-defense seconds. He spent most of his time examining what kind of people might live inside of this sub-structure.

Inherent to all of this is the idea that obsolete industrial equipment is the new raw material. What is lost in craft and detail is made up for in scale, complexity, and sheer power. This kind of junkyard, collage ideology appears again and again in his written work. In the short story Johnny Mnemonic, there is a shantytown cobbled together in the attic of a domed city, inhabited by people that call them selves “Lo-Tek.” This phrase was undoubtedly borrowed by the architecture firm “Lot-ek“, who have likewise absorbed the entire post-industrial aesthetic, down to the central irony that such raw solutions require, at times, very high technology.

Other examples in Gibson’s work abound. In “Count Zero,” you not only have high-rise housing projects with water-jet cutters, hydroponic agriculture and rooftop wind turbines, colonized and cut off from the grid, but also an assembly-line robot hacked and distorted into an automated artist, producing Cornell boxes from floating detritus. In the (horrifically named) Mona Lisa Overdrive there is a reclusive artist living in a Superfund site in the rust belt, creating robotic junkyard sculpture in an old warehouse (a reference to Survival Research Labs). His “Bridge Trilogy” centers around San Francisco’s Bay Bride, taken over by the homeless as a suspended shantytown after a 9.0 earthquake. And, finally in Pattern Recognition, he has yet another techno-autistic artist, creating collaged videos with material dredged from the Internet.

These somewhat romantic junkyard notions of ad-hoc technology cut through a lot of the current obsessions of popular culture at an oblique angle, from “Loft-Style” suburban homes to mashups to laser-projected graffiti. A lot of this is simply styling even marketing created by and appealing to the generation that grew up with ubiquitous Japanese cartoon robots and misused corporate laser pointers. But it’s also, in my opinion, the leading indicator of a general tendency in manufacturing; as production becomes more and more micro-scaled, cleaner, light-weight and rapid, we are beginning to treat steelyards and coal factories the way we used to treat the Parthenon and Stonehenge, as decaying, monolithic antiquities from a simpler and more powerful time. Even as the things around us are becoming polymers, carbon fibers, nanotubes, aerogels, we long for a nice hefty brick to throw through a plate glass window.

From the Danny Elfman-scored “Forbidden Zone”. This may be the highlight. Made all the more amusing by the fact that there is nothing but a lumber warehouse, donut store, and government offices at that corner. And maybe a discount golf store. Still, were one getting directions to that location (for an unknown reason), I can see how repeating it ad infinitum would lead to exactly this.

Walter Benjamin wrote a lot about the concept of the “aura” in art. Photography, and mechanical reproduction in general, he argued, destroyed the history and singularity and sheer object-ness of a work of art, a quality he deemed to be a kind of aura surrounding the work, giving it mystery and a kind of emotional Velcro that can be found most strongly in catholic relics and old baby clothes.

Well, folks, technology has come one hundred and eighty degrees. Have your images lost that aura that once suffused them? Are you tired of the neo-modernist emphasis on clarity and calm?

Meet Jesh DeRox, the proprietor of the reconstituted aura. Through the magic of Photoshop “textures,” your special event can have nostalgia applied, long before it has naturally accumulated! You don’t have to be eighty to have precious things. Finally, welcome to the photographic equivalent of pre-distressed jeans.

Anyone seen the article about space gloves in the NYT magazine? Someone finally won one of NASA’s open competitions for new technology– a former sailmaker invented a superior astronaut handcovering on his 30 year old Singer and won $200,000, plus a valuable patent.

This adds a whole new twist to a good new article by David Celento in Harvard Design Magazine. In between making fairly accurate assessments of contemporary practice, prefabrication, rapid prototyping and fabrication, and BIM, he makes this point:

Architects are among the very few providing custom design services in a product-infatuated society. this presents a profound problem, especially since few clients possess an understanding of the efforts necessary to create custom, products, and even fewer are willing to adequately finance them

And this one (about the current state of government projects):

An imperfect but illustrative parallel in manufacturing would be if Boeing were contacted to digitally design and construct a one-of-a-kind “blue-sky” airplane. The client is interested in exclusive rights to Boeing’s five years worth of design data, prohibits Boeing from making more than one plane, will only pay for error-free parts, and expects to pay little (or no) more than the cost of a standard plane of similar size. Boeing wouldn’t even bother to return the call, yet architects are competing for design opportunities where the conditions aren’t that much different.

Somewhere between space gloves and t-shirts we have a new solution. Art museums and megamansions can still be made painstakingly bespoke, but perhaps what we should really be competing for and slaving over are systems: structural furniture, cladding signage, countertop/lighting, or even just a better way of doing ceilings. Once the production of an object goes beyond a few dozen, the cost of designing that object becomes only a tiny part of the process, instead of fifteen percent, giving the designer a lot more leeway, and a lot less breathing down the neck.

This has been said before (and more eloquently). But I am not going to take the next step in exhorting all young practitioners to take up the mantle of rapid fabrication and systems design, claiming that if we don’t do it, someone else will, relegating architects to mere decorators. That’s Arup’s line, and I don’t buy it. No matter how monolithic the pieces of a building get, you will still need someone to negotiate between all of the internal and external pressures. Someone to dance around keeping the water out and holding it up, while keeping their eyes focused on something more distant. If anything, industrial designers might take this place, and if they do a better job, maybe they deserve it. Maybe we will see a collapse of building, furniture, and device, and we’ll all live like Dave in 2001. But if the future is all about products and consumption, why the hell would people choose to buy one thing when they can buy hundreds? And hasn’t the last half-century taught us that monocultures are weak and potentially hazardous?

I think that the near future will be just as haphazard, heterogeneous, and multilayered as the present. And we should be here to reap the chaos, and nudge things towards a slightly more ordered state.

Today, two different ghosts of Houston’s automotive past, both sent to me some time ago by Jean:

The first, a planned expansion in 1946 (pulled from a newspaper article) that shows how freeways (or “urban expressways”) used to get planned… a gradual slowing of traffic through an intensification of on andofframps (incidentally beautiful from above), until it spreads out into a downtown “delta”, which reconnects at the other end of the city into tributaries. Note the striking similarity in image and concept to the human circulatory system, albeit one that does not circulate. An oscillatory system, I guess. Nevertheless, it does show that as they were originally conceived and constructed, freeways did not strangle or bypass cities any more than a half-dozen railway stations strangle or bypass Paris. Here is symbiosis, not separation.

A mere fifteen years later, demolition had already begun to run an elevated expressway directly south of downtown, directly through a busy and successful commercial street (Pierce). The property values on this right-of-way were so high they could only purchase one-half the requested width, and Pierce elevated remains narrow today. This diagram was lifted from a detailed (if not terribly critical) history of Houston’s transportation systems, commissioned by TXDOT . Look at the 45/59 interchange in the lower right–did you know that it took up more than six city blocks? According to the last census, 43% of land in downtown Houston is taken up by right-of-ways. 2.4% of this same area is public open space. Perhaps some of this transportation space could serve a second use…

When I am overcome by the desire to own something, it is almost always an industrial, not a consumer product. I think this may be the product of too many William Gibson novels in my youth– the idea that sparsely designed, no-frills tools are superior to the chaff sprinkled on the common people. So, when we were talking about kitchens, I got excited by the 300,000 BTU 10-burner superranges at Surfas. I can spend hours looking at foam rubber and vapor-tight light fixtures at McMaster-Carr. It’s even influenced my choice of offices– I am thrilled that I get to work with a factory every day.

My latest obsession is from ISO. Yes, the International Standards Organization. Yes, the people that brought you such blockbusters as “ISO 22000: Food Safety Management Systems” and “ISO 14000: GHG emissions accounting and verification.” What has me all hot and bothered, however, is ISO 7000: graphical symbols.

For a little over $200 (paid in Swiss Francs, natch), you can get over 2,400 fantastic standard icons, from the seat belt symbol, to low tire pressure, to the ever-popular “lightning-bolt” danger triangle, in several formats! Think of all of the uses– someone at my office already suggested a machine that prints a different icon-based t-shirt every day, for six and a half years.

I’m saving up.

I’ve mentioned before that it often seems like the future is already here, it’s just looks to boring to be noticed. Seabox is a custom container company that makes the current mobile-design architects look like kids in a sandbox.

This may not look like much, but here’s the description:

In the closed configuration, the structure meets all the ISO requirements for transportation on a container ship. Once on site, the Folding House can be set up in about one day. Custom designs and materials are also available.

For those of you that are a little more impatient, there’s a version that involves a tentlike configuration that can be unfolded in under 20 minutes. Or if you desire the bad-ass over the expedient, go with one of these:

Here we have an open-frame, stackable “ratpac” system with reconfigurable exterior and interior partition walls, capable of pretty daring cantilevers. It was designed as a system for SWAT urban warfare training. Check out the shiny interiors:

Sinister and kick ass.
For something more heartwarming, try this:

Oh, just a portable standing wave generator. Shippable, of course. There are also portable workshops:

And, of course, you could just hire them to make impromptu ziggurats and 100 foot walls, on demand–here’s a temporary outdoor movie screen in Central Park:

And, of course, the requisite art opening monoliths:

These guys will design for you a 40′ container with integral generator and A/C unit, built-in furniture and even a little plumbing. And since everything still meets ISO code for international shipping, you can ship your house at the going rates (currently, about anywhere in the world for $3000 or under. And China is especially cheap). For a harder sell, check out this video.

I’m going to petition Seabox to change their motto to “Up Yours, Lo-tek.”

[All images taken from the reference library blog. While I’m not sure the “quality” the writer is searching for is quite as ineffable as he makes it out to be, the site has a fantastically even feel.]

There is an often unacknowledged side to biomimicry that I feel might be as interesting a consequence as the possible responsive and regenerative aspects that are much talked about. These buildings will age.

Your house could get hot flashes and headaches. Your school would slowly weather into a softer, less resiliant, slower form. The subway station would forget things. With the modernist concept of a priori materiality repaced with mutable,ageable substances, one’s relationship with buildings would transition from detached viewer to constant caregiver and maintainer. If we build like trees, we must prepare to be the gardeners of our structures.

I’m just hoping that my house doesn’t get chronic headaches or a predisposition to the yearly flu.