In a very old issue of icon, there is an article about the rules of architectures and gamespace by Alex Wiltshire. Some excerpts I found relevant:

Designers consider where the start point, or tee, in a level is. They must think about all the things that the player can see from that point, decide on the view distance and which hazards to show and which to hide. The goal of the level should either be shown or hinted at
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A basic way of creating a sense of movement is with types of walls: long, linear walls encourage movement along them; tall, thin walls suggest movement up them; concave structures invite players inside; and convex structures encourage them to move around the building. Rhythm can be achieved with the repetition of certain structures, such as bulkheads along the length of a corridor on a space ship, which move or nudge the player forward with confidence and security. Tension can then be introduced with a sudden break in the pattern, like a collapsed strut in the corridor, that makes the pattern unpredictable. The designer can thus direct the player’s mood and movement.

A problem with creating richly detailed environments in games is a resulting loss of legibility, which leads to players not noticing elements that are meant to prompt specific behaviour, such as a certain action that must be performed or the direction for progression.
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Once planned, gamespaces must be given meaning and significance for the player - a sense of place and atmosphere - with a set of aesthetic choices.
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So in real terms what has the development of more complex and rich game environments done for videogames? Making them less abstract and more intuitively understood and believable, videogames are becoming more and more legible - and attractive - to people who aren’t versed in videogame conventions.

Philip Campbell feels that foreshadowing, or previewing events in a level, is an important strategy to directing gameplay. (…) He made what lay ahead highly visible and made the upcoming sequence of architecture logical - players can see the exact structure through many levels of the building, allowing them to “feel clever” by being able to make intelligent decisions about the direction they take. He also placed a large window right at the start that semi-reveals the very end of the level and the last enemy

Why do I blog this? in most of the paper about game space, the discussion always stay at the blablabla level (game space is a way to think architecture as a playground and blablabla). In this short article, there are some more interesting content, with more precise description and I am pretty sure lots of game/level designers will disregard it because they have different ideas about it.

I attended an interesting seminar today at the EPFL School of Architecture, as part of the Interactive City/Une Cité Interactive Design Studio (led by Professor Jeffrey Huang). The seminar was given by Markus Schaffer from Hosoyaschaefer. I already blogged about stuff they did here.

He presented some examples of their work, mostly about visualizations; for example a map representing the evolution of “consumer psychology” or an evolution tree of car typologies (becomes a system of differentiation), maps of ratio between McDonalds burgers prices and salaries. Their work seems to be fell directed towards representing the globalization of the world.

That one was quite evocative (representing how Guangzhou became the center of a system/web):

He then move to the topic of Switzerland with some very interesting map (see their or here): “coming back to SWitzerland was like coming back to a really small world” (Markus previously worked for AMO/Rem Koolhas before heading back to Zürich). My favorite is certainly that one, which shows the importance of emigration in Switzerland (both as population and as founders of the most important companies there):

WORKSPACE UNLIMITED is a set of projects that have a very interesting purpose:

Our projects consist of a series of networked virtual 3D environments which adapt and reconfigure multi player game technology. Each environment is designed to coexist with a city, art centre or public event to which it is both conceptually and thematically connected. The 3D virtual environments are connected together by the internet forming a new kind of enlarged public space for artistic expression and social exchange.

Why do I blog this? exploring the potentialities of both environments is important, especially if we want to go beyond current projects, creating new practices that benefit from both.

In the july issue of Metropolis, Clive Wilkinson Architects diagrammed 13 work settings for the Googleplex. These can be considered as pattern meant to afford specific behavior (nomadic work, chance encounters, focused concentration…) mixed with a certain flexibility.

WhoWhatWhenAIR is a blog that follows the development and fabrication of a 40ft interactive/kinetic tower (by Philippe Block, Axel Kilian, Peter Schmitt, John Snavely).

The project was submitted for the mini-Skyscraper competition in the Department of Architecture at MIT. As winning entry we received $7,000 to build it in a month.
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We wanted to connect the culture of the hack at MIT with a personified miniskyscraper. To bridge interactivity and personality, we created a language. You can speak to the mini skyscraper by operating a bicylce pump and it responds with movement. Coordinated efforts produce unexpected structural choreography.

Pneumatic muscles allow the structure to move in all directions. They pull the structure out of an equilibrium position, creating three-dimensional curvature in the central core. By stacking several units, the mini skyscraper can curve in several directions at once. This core acts as a spine to keep the structure upright when none of the muscles are actuated. The pneumatic movement is graceful and precise.

Also check the movie (.mov, 3.62 Mb).

Last week I went to La Grande Motte, an impressive city created in France in 1974 to be populated with tourists during the summer.

Why do I blog this? The architecture is very intriguing to me, very stylish and not passé at all; I like the shape, the colors and the global impression (it reminds a bit of UC Irvine’s computer science building); a real sci-fi place.

Archrecord has a good read about building foresight: Imagining the future: How will we make buildings in 2030? by Sara Hart.

magine thirty years from now. Will urban areas in 2030 look like Ridley Scott’s Los Angeles in the sci-fi movie Blade Runner—a prelude to Armageddon where the affluent reside in the tops of 400-story skyscrapers, and the less fortunate scratch out an unsavory existence in the seamy, polluted, and lawless regions on the surface? Or will Americans live the utopian dream in self-sufficient, fossil-fuel free communities.
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At this moment, however, the future is already taking form. On one hand, materials scientists are locked in laboratories inventing new, smart, and sustainable materials and composites, which are touted elsewhere in this issue as the beginning of a revolution in design and construction. At the same time, building materials that dominated the 20th century still dominate in the new millennium.
(…)Still, in an era of engineering virtuosity and genuine collaboration and teamwork, who will own the architecture?

The article describes the material of the future with specific case studies about new developments that concerns concrete, steel and glass.
Why do I blog this? the blade-runner like city is still the nightmare of urban planners but it does not seem to be where we are heading; I find this discussion interesting in terms of foresight research and my interest towards urban computing makes me think about these issues too.

I am really enjoying this Muscle NSA project carried out at the Hyperbody Research Group at Delft University. This is a programmable building that can reconfigure itself.

For the exhibition Non-Standard Architecture ONL and HRG realized a working prototype of the Trans-ports project, called the MUSCLE.
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Programmable buildings change shape by contracting and relaxing industrial muscles. The MUSCLE programmable building is a pressurized soft volume wrapped in a mesh of tensile muscles, which change length, height and width by varying the pressure pumped into the muscle.

Visitors of the Architectures Non Standard exhibition play a collective game to explore the different states of the MUSCLE.

The public interacts with the MUSCLE by entering the interactivated sensorial space surrounding the prototype. This invisible component of the installation is implemented as a sensor field created by a collection of sensors. The sensors create a set of distinct shapes in space that, although invisible to the human eye, can be monitored and can yield information to the building body. The body senses the activities of the people and interacts with the players in a multimodal way. The public discovers within minutes how the MUSCLE behaves on their actions, and soon after they start finding a goal in the play. The outcome of this interaction however is unpredictable, since the MUSCLE is programmed to have a will of its own. It is pro-active rather then responsive and obedient. The programmable body is played by its users.

There is also a slight connection with the blogject concept:

For the behavioral system this means that the produced sensorial data is analyzed in real-time and acts as the parameters for pre-programmed algorithms and user-driven interferences in the defined scripts. These author-defined behavioral operations are instantly computed, resulting in a diversity of e-motive behaviors that are experienced as changes in the physical shape of the active structure and the generation of an active immersive soundscape. The MUSCLE really is an interactive input-output device, a playstation augmenting itself through time.

Why do I blog this? what I like in this project is that it mixes different aspects of the HCI world: games, games software, architecture, usage of sensors. In the end, the outcome is pretty original and the visitors’ experience seem to be intriguing. I also like how it modifies the relationship of the visitors to a dynamic place.

Just found this on information aesthetics: Free Network Visible Network, a project by the Mixed Reality Lab.

Free Network Visible Network is a project that combines different tools and processes to visualize, floating in the space, the interchanged information between users of a network. The people are able to experience in a new exciting way about how colorful virtual objects, representing the digital data, are flying around. These virtual objects will change their shape, size and color in relation with the different characteristics of the information that is circulating in the network.

Why do I blog this? this is something very important to me: the possibility to visualize the dataflows, showing the overlay of information in various environments. This would nicely depicts what we were discussing yesterday at the conference: how a certain place now has different meaning: given that in one place you can be there physically and virtually meeting people on IM, MMORPG or something else, the inherent simultaneity of this situation can be visualized through this sort of project.

So let’s start a review about this kind of projects:

Related projects:

• SOUP: the Shapes Of [Un]warped Packages by Alejo Duque and his colleague Lorenz Schori
• Tunneable Cities project by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby
• Invisible topographies by Usman Haque
• The Orb by Restate Media

Any others dataflowviz?

Design is bound by constraints as we can see on this picture (seen in Greece where I’ve been last week):

The tree was there and then “they” built the wall (and the street consequently)

I live nearby this very intriguing architectural building:

A very nice remnant of the nostalgia for a future yet to come.

Via inhabitat:

Farmadeliphication (fahr’muh’deli’fi’kay’shun), n. 1. The process of turning all of Philadelphia’s vacant and abandoned lots into urban farms: The ‘Farmadeliphication’ of once decrepit buildings into farm structures advances fresh ways of seeing old structures as well as allowing for an organic transformation of history that contributes to the present day fabric. 2. What might happen if the Front Studio team’s entry to the Urban Voids competition moves beyond the conceptual stage.

Why do I blog this? I find this phenomenon interesting. It’s quite a different approach than MVRDV pig city (which consisted in raising pigs in huge skyscrapers) or Tokyo’s underground farm.

A bit different from Alain Bublex’s work, “Parasitic Architecture” is an intriguing project by David Scott Taylor:

Wasp nest building simulator by Sylvain Guérin:

A simple simulator to implement stigmergic behavior A video is also there.

More about it: Bonabeau, E., Guérin, S., Snyers, D., Kuntz, P., & Theraulaz, G. 2000. Three-dimensional architectures grown by simple “stigmergic” agents. BioSystems, 56: 13-32.

A lift control panel woody-modified so that people only access few floors (seen in Utrecht):