Bruce Nauman: Can You Hear the Space?

A review in the NY Times of the Bruce Nauman exhibit at the Philly art museum recalls the light transformer, artist research, and musuem projects, architecture as experience, museums…

Happy Holidays! – Kai

Quick Reading

Breaking the two-week hiatus with a short recommendation…

Two recent blog-posts (of blogs we follow) worth reading as we start finalizing the design of our light museum:

Lebbeus Woods’s “The Light, The Dark”
Geoff Manaugh’s “Editing the Shadow Volume”

Voronoi and Kinetic Touch

http://www.dezeen.com/2009/09/26/bombay-sapphire-at-the-london-design-festival-seeper-at-tent-digital/

Check out the video on dezeen. Interactive digital light art.

Lucept–luminous concepts from arround the world

So, this isn’t specifically related to our current attempts to understand museums, museum annexes, and relationships with site, but seeing as Kai has declared this semester’s theme to be light I thought I’d share this.

http://lucept.com/

The whole blog is (surprise) dedicated to light. What I light most about it though, is that it doesn’t limit itself to dealing with light in only one way, but looks at it architecturally, sculpturally, and even highlights technological aspects of working with light, such as the most recent post about OLEDs.

MF Sounds

I just uploaded an audio sketch of the Mattress Factory on the old Tumblr account (because WordPress won’t let me post the audio file).

Check it out HERE.

Patches of audio taken from Liza’s movies.

The Invisible Man

i stumbled upon this artist this afternoon and thought that it was really interested and figured id share it. Take a gander.

Here’s a link to the site http://www.stumbleupon.com/s/#1ltPoj/v1kram.posterous.com/liu-bolinthe-invisible-man/

– Joe Colarusso

Latitude Specific house

I’ve had this project on my mind throughout the semester.   After considering the  description of Project 2:  use 40 degrees latitude as the main site constraint, this house is worth a look.

The project is sited to take advantage of the sun’s angle, and specifically how this angle changes throughout the year.  The southern wall is composed of a plate glass sandwich with green parafin (wax) cubes inside.  On the exterior, a layer of prismatic glass is added.  This glass was custom made with 2 angles that correspond to the summer sun angle range of 40 degrees or greater, and the winter sun angle range of 35 degrees and lower.

The hot summer sun is bounced away from the building, and therefore the parafin remains in a solid state and retains its dark color.  This keeps the interior cool and shaded.  Conversely, the winter sun at a lower angle is allowed to enter, melting the parafin into a transparent liquid.  This lets much-needed light and heat into the house during cold Swiss winters.

The concept would work in other latitudes, however the prismatic glass would have to be recalibrated to site-specific sun angles.

The house in Ebnat-Kappel, Switzerland is by architect Dietrich Schwarz.

For more info, check out:  Detail vol.6 (2002) pp 736-737.

and: Facade Construction Manual, p. 297

Parish Church of Santa Monica

This was the church I was talking about earlier last week and today. Just another example of architecture that incorporates light modulators into its design.

by Vicens and Ramos

-Johnson Pun

Glass and Color

Here’s the collection of images on glass and color from studio on Friday.

The pictures display (clockwise from top left):

– The ‘kaleidolight’, a device used to bring colored light from a brighter area into a more interior space (http://gizmodo.com/302850/kaleidolight-gives-your-wall-ringworm)

– Stephen Knapp’s ‘light paintings’, produced by shining intense light on precisely cut reflective prisms (http://www.stephenknapp.com/)

– An addition to Le Congrès de Montréal, which features a colored glass lobby and hallways (http://www.congresmtl.com/en/index.aspx?lg=en) < check out the 3D plans on the left banner

– A view of an ice crystal through polarized glass

– A space in the Bloomberg Offices in Manhattan which features dichroic glass

Hope this gets you thinking about color!

Tom

Nomiya Temporary Restaurant by Pascal Grasso

Hey guys, I just saw this on Dezeen.com and thought that it kind of has to do with our next project. It’s a temporary restauraunt by Pascal Grasso. It consists of a glass cabin with a metal screen covering the center. There are also colored LED lights between the glass and the metal shell.

http://www.dezeen.com/2009/09/11/nomiya-temporary-restaurant-by-pascal-grasso/

Enjoy!

Anna

Shutter House

I came across this on archdaily just now and decided to post it because we’re all workin on the light modulator project. Its a shutter house designed by Shigeru Ban. Thought it would be interesting to show some examples of light modulators in current architecture. anyone know of other buildings that incorporate light modulators?

On this building, Shigeru Ban once again innovates on the material use by incorporating motorized perforated metal shutters on its -dynamic- facade, which act as light-modulating privacy screen at the outer edge of each residence’s terrace adjacent to the double-height living rooms.

http://www.archdaily.com/3102/metal-shutter-houses-shigeru-ban/

-Johnson

LDPE LOOP REVIEW

I’ll start by saying: the LDPE LOOP instillation is open at the Future Tenant Gallery until Sunday, September 6 until 5:00 pm – GET OVER THERE!

LDPE is an installation by four architecture students that explores the interactions and reactions that occur between art, space and audience through a sublime array of mundane material Low-Density PolyEthylene

Diagram it!

What is a diagram?       A symbolic representation of information.

A diagram is a distilled drawing of your idea.  Only information that is essential to understanding  the concept should be included.  Everything else is edited out.

So how can we show ideas, actions, and processes 2-dimensionally?  Check out these successful images, and consider how to diagram your Modulator and its effects on light and space:

For more info on how to create a successful diagram, look up Edward Tufte’s series of books:  ‘Envisioning Information,’  ‘The Visual Display of Quantitative Information,’  and ‘Visual Explainations.’   http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/

Moholy Nagy Light-Space Modulator

Here a project related to your Light Transformer by the Bauhaus master László Moholy-Nagy, his “Light-Space Modulator,” designed over many years from 1923-1932.  Also called Light Prop for an Electric Stage, this kinetic sculpture that Moholy-Nagy designed and photographed was intended to create light displays for theater, dance, or other performance spaces. With its gleaming glass and metal surfaces of mobile perforated disks, a rotating glass spiral, and a sliding ball, the Light-Space Modulator created the effect of photograms in motion.

Here is a link to the Bauhaus page on this artwork: http://www.bauhaus.de/english/bauhaus1919/kunst/kunst_modulator.htm

Here is a video clip of the Light-Space Modulator in Action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVnF9A3azSA

Got cut short last post…

For some reason, I couldn’t write anymore on the last post so i’ll continue it here.

I continued my adventures in The Netherland’s most architecturally advanced city, Rotterdam. Also home of our favorite, Rem Koolhaas. After WWII left the area in chaos, there was plenty of opportunity for architecture to thrive and flourish.

Light, air and space became the motto after the war.

Today’s Rotterdam is an ode to modern architecture, where home-grown and foreign architects are given all the space they need, both literally and figuratively.

Here are several photos of incredible buildings that I don’t know the name of or the architect behind it. If you do know, please help!

One of my favorite places in all of Rotterdam was the Kubuswoning, the Cube Houses. Designed by Piet Blom in 1984, the traditional cube is tilted 45 degrees and set on a hexagonal shaped pylon. This popular attraction holds 38 houses all attached to one another along some where some of the space between each pylon is utilized as stores and such. Luckily, one house was turned into a “show cube” where tourists like me got to experience the cube home in person.

These following photos are of inside the “show house.” The first floor consists of a lounge, bathroom and an open kitchen. The second floor holds the a bedroom, desk/office area and another bathroom. The third floor can be used as either a garden or a sun room-like lounge. The visit was a great experience with some rather unique spaces and circulation paths. One of the most impressive features of the house was the placement of windows and the manipulation of natural lighting.Here’s a walkthrough!

Continuing my journey with the 7 senses in mind, i noticed several more buildings that i thought integrated the consideration of sight effectively into its facade.

I threw in the beautiful Erasmus Bridge by UN Studio for fun :)

That’s it for now, I think the other subjects deserve a post of their own.

LOOK! Rasterbation!