ecopolis

A mobile opera house that can be pulled apart and fit into a shipping container was unveiled by the Bavarian State Opera. The €2.1 million Pavillion 21 - designed by architect Wolf Prix of the firm Coop Himmelb(l)au – seats 300 people and it will host its first performances during the Munich Opera Festival in the summer of 2010.

COOP HIMMELB(L)AU was founded by Wolf D. Prix, Helmut Swiczinsky and Michael Holzer in Vienna, Austria in 1968, and is active in architecture, urban planning, design, and art.

The Pavillon 21 building has perforated, sloping aluminium walls with a “crystalline outer skin” ; gleaming spikes on the outside the opera house were based on a computer space modelling of sound frequencies from Jimi Hendrix’s Purple Haze and Mozart’s opera “Don Giovanni”, overlayed and parametrically transferred into the pyramidal forms.

The inside is similarly angular and includes a lobby and a large stage. The main auditorium is free of clutter to house experimental performances. It is being built in collapsible modules that can be dismantled and fit in a shipping container: the philosophy behind the portable building is staging travelling shows. It will then return “home” every summer for the festival, but the rest of the year it will travel the world and can be hired out to other opera and theatre companies.

Visual Foreign Correspondents is a platform for international video artists to reflect on recent events and to take the role of correspondent through their work. Die ZEIT online will provide additional background information and interviews to the invited artists and projects, and invites for critical discourse about the work.

Coinciding with the 20th commemoration of the fall of the Berlin wall, WL Project Berlin | Hong Kong together with Visual Foreign Correspondents Foundation, invited seven international artists to develop work relating to borders and boundaries and to take different positions relating to the nature of virtual or physical boundaries, walls or barriers as well as reflecting on the current state of the world. In times of a global economic crisis and international acts of terrorism, there is a clear tendency to re-erect or strengthen existing barriers; just as the European Union is strengthening its exterior borders.

A project of Visual Foreign Correspondents, Amsterdam, and WL Project Berlin | Hong Kong in collaboration with ZEIT Online.

SCREENINGS IN BERLIN:
- U Bahnhof Kochstraße/Checkpoint Charlie, Berlin-Mitte
(21 September – 9 November 2009, 7 – 21 hrs, Sat & Sun 11:30 – 20 hrs)

- Media facade of Collegium Hungaricum,
Dorotheenstraße 12, 10117 Berlin (9 November 2009)

SCREENINGS IN AMSTERDAM:
- Melkweg, Die Wende Festival, 1-30 November 2009 http://www.die-wende.nl/

- CASz in Amsterdam (December 2009)
(more information to follow)

ARTISTS:
Giselle Beiguelman (Brazil), Simon Faithfull (Great Britain), Mariam Ghani (US, Afghanistan), Han Hoogerbrugge (Netherlands), Little Warsaw (András Gálik & Bálint Havas, Hungary), Lena Merhej (Lebanon), Berit Zemke (Germany)

http://www.visualcorrespondents.com
http://www.wl-project.org
http://www.zeit.de/kultur

Arcology, from the words “ecology” and “architecture”, is a set of architectural design principles aimed toward the design of enormous habitats (hyperstructures) of extremely high human population density. These largely hypothetical structures, called “arcologies,” would contain a variety of residential and commercial facilities and minimize individual human environmental impact. They are often portrayed as self-contained or economically self-sufficient.
The concept has been primarily popularized by architect Paolo Soleri, and appears commonly in science fiction.

via Wikipedia.

Renzo Piano’s new green museum, the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco is almost finished. Located in famous Golden Gate Park, and housing an aquarium, planetarium, and natural-history museum under two “hills” which are really a two-and-a-half-acre “living roof”, the building looks like a part of the park from some views.

As Piano says: “The building had to be green and sustainable to go with its purpose—study of the earth and science. It is also in a very unusual place, the middle of one of the most beautiful parks in the world. You almost never get a chance to build something in the middle of a great park, so it needed to be transparent. You needed to see where you are. Normally, a museum of natural science is created like a theater, so that you can have the exhibits inside. All museums normally are opaque; they are closed, like a kingdom of darkness, and you are trapped inside. But here you need to know about the connection with nature, so almost anywhere you are in this building you can see through to the outside.”

Linea 1 Metropolitana di Torino
13 giugno – 27 luglio 2008

La mostra AFTERVILLE. THE UNDERGROUND EXHIBITION rappresenta il momento culminante del cartellone di eventi di AfterVille. Tomorrow Comes Today. La rassegna è iniziata a ottobre 2007 con il take off di AfterVille. Astronave Torino al MIAAO, è proseguita a marzo con il successo di AfterVille. The Show il videoconcerto inedito dei Larsen alla Mole Antonelliana, ad aprile con il “tutto esaurito” della grande anteprima al Cinema Massimo del cortometraggio AfterVille. The Movie, a maggio con gli incontri di AfterVille. The Reading che hanno messo faccia a faccia al Circolo dei Lettori architetti, registi e autori di fumetti e ora con la mostra nella metropolitana di Torino.

AFTERVILLE. THE UNDERGROUND EXHIBITION – visitabile con un semplice biglietto della metro – presenta nelle dieci stazioni più frequentate della linea 1 (più una stazione di “introduzione”, quella di Porta Nuova) altrettante postazioni multimediali, dedicate ognuna a una tipologia di città del futuro. Dieci metropoli che non esistono, se non come riflesso degli sterminati immaginari generati nell’ultimo secolo dai mass media. Vista nel suo insieme, la mostra presenta un’esauriente storia della fanta-urbanistica, così come è stata raccontata da un secolo di fantascienza.

La mostra – ideata, progettata e curata da quattro giovani professionisti di comunicazione (Michele Bortolami e Tommaso Delmastro di Undesign), cinema (Fabrizio Accatino) e architettura (Massimo Teghille) – rivela in maniera affascinante come e quanto l’immaginario della fantascienza abbia condizionato l’idea di futuro. E anche – in un processo di interscambio continuo tra reale e immaginario – in quale misura le utopie future si siano realizzate nelle città del presente.

Prendendo in considerazione i media toccati dalla science fiction (cinema, fumetti, pubblicità, videoclip, videogame, design, architettura) e analizzandone prodotti e portati culturali, la mostra delinea 10 immaginari ben precisi, 10 mondi alternativi coerentemente costruiti: appunto, le 10 città ripercorse nelle stazioni della metro. Indicatori di queste dieci società del futuro sono le evoluzioni storiche, gli equilibri politici, il rapporto con l’ambiente, le architetture, l’urbanistica, il design, la moda. AFTERVILLE. THE UNDERGROUND EXHIBITION porta il visitatore dentro queste dieci realtà in maniera divertente e realistica, per una visita guidata, un percorso dettagliato fra le dieci “afterville”, città del dopo, luoghi di domani.

La metropolitana di Torino, sede della mostra, si presta ad accogliere il mondo di AfterVille come nessuna sede istituzionale avrebbe saputo fare. Sotto terra, senza luce naturale, flussi di visitatori viaggiano nel tempo a bordo di una “navetta spaziale”: una location perfetta, messa a disposizione da GTT, il Gruppo Trasporti Torinesi.

Re Umberto | TOTALVILLE
Assolutismo decorativo
TotalVille è la città espressione del potere assoluto, che attraverso la sua estetica impone la figura dell’imperatore e del suo pensiero unilaterale.

Vinzaglio | BETTERVILLE
Democrazia scientifica
BetterVille è la città positivista e fiduciosa nel futuro, sorretta da scienza e tecnologia, lanciata alla conquista dello spazio.

XVIII dicembre | JOYVILLE
Anarchia lisergica
JoyVille è la città del grande sogno, libera e piena di fermenti, dove le idee circolano in libertà e i giovani hanno nelle mani il loro futuro.

Principi d’Acaja | NETVILLE
Tecnocrazia digitale
NetVille è la città virtuale, costruita su codici di programmazione, in cui lo spazio è digitale e l’unica architettura è quella creata da 0 e 1.

Bernini | TRADEVILLE
Capitalismo estetico
TradeVille è la città-vetrina, dove tutto è in vendita, in cui le autorità politiche sono le multinazionali e la finanza è l’unico motore.

Rivoli | FADEVILLE
Cleptocrazia suburbana
FadeVille è la città diffusa, che si polverizza in un’unica, grande periferia ripetitiva e priva di qualità, dove il governo centrale ha perso ogni controllo sul territorio.

Montegrappa | HYPERVILLE
Plutocrazia noir
HyperVille è la città stratificata e ipertrofica, sovraffollata, in una costante espansione verticale che asseconda le linee della piramide sociale.

Massaua | iVILLE
Oligarchia minimale
iVille è la città monobrand, eterea, dominata dal bianco: la migliore società che i cittadini possono desiderare, l’unica esistente.

Marche | POSTVILLE
Tribalismo atomico
PostVille è la città postatomica, apocalittica, dove la civiltà – cancellata da un evento catastrofico – è regredita a un livello di vita primordiale.

Paradiso | SHIPVILLE
Autarchia spaziale
ShipVille è la città semovente, autogestita, chiusa a un numero definito di abitanti, impegnata in un viaggio nello spazio che ne garantisca la sopravvivenza e il futuro.

Have you ever wondered what’s behind a perfect Tetris-wall?
Have you ever freed a 3D world from terrorists?
Have you ever made polygon friends in networked fantasy realms?
And do you know what happens when these games never end?

The richly illustrated texts in “Space Time Play” cover a wide range of gamespaces: from milestone video and computer games to virtual metropolises to digitally-overlaid physical spaces. As a comprehensive and interdisciplinary compendium, “Space Time Play” explores the architectural history of computer games and the future of ludic space. More than 140 experts from game studies and the game industry, from architecture and urban planning, have contributed essays, game reviews and interviews. The games examined range from commercial products to artistic projects and from scientific experiments to spatial design and planning tools.

“Space Time Play” is not just meant for architects, designers and gamers, but for all those who take an interest in the culture of digital games and the spaces within and modeled after them. Let’s play!

Look at video of this great conference with Marcos Novak and Bruce Sterling. It was organized by Share Festival on the 16th of march 2008.

Here you can read the text printed in the catalogue of the Share Festival:
“Canonical works were once heretical. Established species were once mutant. There is a deep relationship between how the new is conceived, produced, introduced, and established in nature and how the new emerges in culture. While evidences of this can be traced throughout the centuries, it is just now, in this nascent century, that we have finally developed tools powerful enough not only to represent or describe the processes of development and speciation by which the new enters the world, but to simulate them, and then, beyond that, to actually embody them. We will not stop at simulating the evolution and mechanisms of life, we aim to manufacture new species of life itself.

Our operations are strange and growing stranger: once we have grasped the principles of nature’s operation, we create simulations, and once our simulations satisfy us, we quickly fictionalize them and extrapolate from them new rungs for the ladder we are building in our effort to leave this little planet and cast ourselves across the universe. It is this last step that is the most powerful: the rendering of science at the service of a fiction of transport to a more ample habitat, that is to say, of drifting horizons, shifting cultures, and ever-expanding desires, moving us from the understanding of the biology of evolution to the building of the allobiology of innovation, by which I mean the technological leveraging of the mechanisms of biology for the evolution of thought itself.

What is this “allo~,” then? The idea of the “allo~” stands for “the other of another kind,” in contrast to the more conventional “other of the same kind.” It is the root of otherness: “alien,” “else,” “alternative” all stem from it. This distinction among othernesses characterizes our time. The “allo~” is the filter our ideas must now pass through to warrant attention and investment.

In slower times, the past informed the future: mimetic Beauty was our guide to developments that unfolded at a more leisurely pace. We could see the future coming. Now we rush into futures for which we have no eyes and no models. Mimesis, looking to the past, is of little use when we face forward unto the oncoming Alien of our own making. The “allo~” is the filter, and yet, we still need a criterion: not all that the future brings is to our liking: among an infinity of alien options we still seek the few, the rare, the beautiful.

Our science and epistemology have undermined all certainty. Between relativity, quantum mechanics, and m-brane theory, between Heisenberg and Gödel, between Duchamp and Cage, between Deleuze and Badiou, old stable modalities have collapsed but have neither been replaced by new stable ones, nor are they likely to. Rather, we find that space and time (indeed, “spime”), mass and energy, biology and information, organism and mechanism, are ever more deeply entangled. Not only are they not the polar opposites they once were held to be, they are actually intricately implicated in one another. Everything points to a transmodal universe that is inherently metamorphic and vibratory, but that is always characterized by ecologically complex balances and counterbalances and richly immanent order.

In this context where admixture rules, taxonomies fail, architectures become liquid, expand into transarchitectures, converge with spatialized music and navigable music into the spacetime “spime” amalgam archimusic, conjoin with numerous other strange combinatorial monsters, burst open into transvergence and speciation, exceed and fuse all modalities into a new transformational continuum, and strive for a perpetually self-renewing allo~.

At the basis of all this change is the shift from the ancient atomic understanding of the world to a present alloAtomic worldview, in which the atomic itself is recuperated into rigorously defined but ever-shifting and constantly re-embodied fictions. Via immersion, we went from atoms to bits. Then, those bits informed our desires, and changed forever what we expected of atoms. Now, via eversion, we are virtualizing the material world itself even as we materialize virtuality. We invent atoms, alloAtoms, cast them free, and watch the worlds they make.

The focus of our imagination has shifted to the engineering of these fictive atoms. We start reading a book that is constantly rewriting itself in response to our gaze because every letter in it is a living organism that is watching us, then suddenly realize that we, the readers, are ourselves potentially alloAtomic, made of “atoms” that can be equally fictive and availing themselves to radical reconfigurations, equally open to being used to rewrite us into new, automutant, Alloselves.”
2008 Marcos Novak

Designer and architect Ettore Sottsass, the figurehead of 20th-century Italian design died on Monday aged 90, the ANSA news agency reported.

His rich longevity and sensitive soul brought him to cross many designs periods. In 1958 Sottsass worked as an industrial designer for ‘Olivetti’. He designed a variety of products such as calculators and typewriters. Some of these products, such as the Logos 27 calculator and the Valentine typewriter were very well known products at the time. His greatest accomplishment whilst at ‘Olivetti’ was the design of the mainframe computer ‘Elea 9003′ for which he given the coveted Compasso d’Oro award. Sottsass’s influential designs helped launch Olivetti into the world of Italian industrial design.

In 1972 Sottsass created a ”House Environment” for the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The room consisted of a series of grey fibreglass containers comprising of such things as cookers, sinks, dishwashers, showers, toilets, storage, seating, beds and wardrobes.

Ettore Sottsass was one of the leading members of the Memphis Group founded in 1981 to revive Radical Design. The products created by the Memphis group included limited production creations of unusual objects and functional designs to break down the barriers between high class and low class.

A retrospective of the designer’s work was opened in northeastern Trieste in early December marking his 90th birthday on September 14.

The exhibition, titled “I Want to Know Why,” includes 130 of Sottsass’s creations and runs until March 2.

“I would like the visitors to leave crying — that is, with emotion,” he said at the time of the opening. And he left left us to look at objects with wise words.