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My Personal Interests within Interactive Architecture are surrounding Kinetic interaction and adaptive space so I was pleased when Janis Pönisch got in touch about his project Dynamic Terrain. Janis explains below his intentions for the installation and its relatioship with potential future forms of interactive architecture.

“Dynamic Terrain is a dynamic architectonic robotic surface. It demonstrates a possible future of an interactive system that forms our surrounding depending on the action taken by the user. It wants to be a creature that we communicate to and play with. It functions as a skin that holds the human body in a dynamic and creative way. It is an area in which to experience the mix of digital and physical space. It is a surface without a fixed form, its form is virtual, and therefore adjustable and erasable. In a utopia of this prototype we live together with architectural bodies that respond to our actions.” Janis Pönisch

Website

The shape of the surface is controlled by the users through a software interface. A three dimensional wireframe model can be distorted and its topological information is being translated in real time to the physical shape. On the surface are also touch sensors that allow the users to move the control points up and down overruling the software positioning. The surface is made of flexible rubber that is stretched by a metal construction underneath. Eight drilling machines are the powering forces directed by micro controllers that are connected to a computer.

Cabspotting, which went live on Thursday, generates a real-time map of taxi movements by displaying the last four hours of trips by GPS-equipped taxicabs in San Francisco. (For some reason this reminds me of the cell phone map of Graz I posted about last September.) Don’t miss the time-lapse animations. Via Boing Boing and Cartography.

Categories: Cities, Tracerouting | Tags: sanfrancisco | Comment on this entry

From Google’s April fool:

Advisors are ready to answer your question for as little as $2.50 (per minute), usually within 24 hours and conceivably much, much sooner, depending on your levels of personal desperation and financial werewithal and the quality of your GPS signal and mobile plan.

Relation to my thesis: Funny to think that people might need to become aware of the position they provide in order to get good services. Will people with bad positioning systems or living in urban canyons become 2nd class citizens?

Fake street features are fairly hard to find, and we really have no idea how many there are. Fake streets, purpose mis-spellings and phantom churches are all thought to exist.

OpenStreetMap: Maps that Lye

< Testgatan is ‘Test Street’ in Swedish (picture from Map24.dk via Just-blog)

Just-blog: Small area in Denmark disclosed as Swedish property

Related: Dislocation: Cut-Up Cartography

an interactive mobile prototype which examines the layering of physical space with the on & off zones of wireless networks. ‘trace’ maps the invisible quality of wireless technology in the urban landscape onto PDAs to produce a series of cartographies visualising nodes, zones, users, and routes. [tracemap.net| via prusikloop.org]

Mapping Religion in America
(via chris glass)
Originally posted by swissmiss from swissmiss

Just down the block on Hancock Street from the group of Montrose Morris buildings we looked at yesterday lie a set of four integrated houses, numbers 246, 248, 250 and 252, also designed by Morris. The bases of the houses are rock-faced limestone while the upper floors are made of Roman brick. As you can see, the line-up includes only two stoops, each of which services two houses. Across the street is number 237. We don’t know anything about its history, but it looks like it may have been built as apartments instead of as a large house. Anyone know? Still more Hancock action to come tomorrow. GMAP

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Chewy Chua posted a photo:

Our nightly view of the city from our unit. aaaaah… lovely.

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We made the trek out to Pasadena this past weekend. It’s a nice place and quite un-L.A. – 19th century urban fabric, walk-able, lots of shops & restaurants and highly urban. As you walk down the main drag, Colorado Blvd, just past two fairly un-urban highrises (set back from the street, on plinths with no ground-level retail), you come across Paseo Colorado, a 3-block, 15-acre, mega-development that, on first-glance, appears to imitate the urban character of the rest of Colorado Blvd.

In some respects, it is reasonably successful, with shops along Colorado Blvd and incorporating a 19th century building into the complex. One big positive is the incorporation of 400 units of housing into the western end of the complex. Another positive is the re-creation of the axial relationship with Pasadena’s Civic Center, just north of the site. Unfortunately, the central space that re-creates that axis is pretty dreadful (this axis – the “Garfield Promenade” – was originally slated to be just 58 feet, but the City required the developer to make it 78 feet to reflect the original Garfield Street).

Given the hype surrounding it, I had high expectations for Paseo Colorado. Unforunately, on balance, I was disappointed. Unlike The Grove, which has some pretensions of being a real public place, Paseo Colorado – which is billed as an “open-air urban village” – feels much more like a standard mall, with anchor stores on the ends, two levels of shops complete with bridges from one side to the other. The only difference is that it is outdoors – not so much new as it is retro, emulating some of the first malls ever built (except it is two levels). Its outdoor spaces are not well-designed and the whole complex uses more-or-less the same materials. It is not well scaled to human proportions, thus it feels bigger and more commercial than necessary. There is no enough variation in the materials, which also have a cheap feel to them. So, nobody will be fooled into thinking it is anything but one large mall complex.

Despite claiming to replicate the traditional fabric of the surrounding area, it still brings people off the street into a large mall-like central spine, and the impact for on-street retail is obvious – I saw few people along Colorado Blvd, despite the presence of shops. Urban design is sometimes a subtle thing – and the urban design-challenged typically heap praise upon the project. By most economic accounts, it is successful, being 96% leased, fetching $400/s.f. rents and generating a modest amount of additional tax revenue for the city. But I can’t help but think that its financial success owes more to its location next to ‘Old Pasadena’ than to its banal design.

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