SurfaceCities is a research and teaching initiative, established to study our changing images of cities in the context of a new visual culture developing around information technologies. The website hosts a range of projects and papers developed by faculty and students in the Department of Architecture at Cornell University. They are using information technologies to explore new ways of reading and handling cities for a variety of purposes, from environmental activism to extreme commuting.

Their approach is to create dynamic, graphic and situated projects that extend or challenge established theories of urbanism. This work cuts across numerous fields (architecture, information science, and urban studies) in order to challenge traditional conceptions of the city that are static, depersonalized, and focused primarily on built form. In addition, it suggests new configurations of people, computers and cities that shift the discourse on human-computer interaction towards human-computer-environment interaction.

The Attractive City Generator was conceived and developed as a part of a research project at the ETH in Zurich, at the chair of Computer Aided Architectural Design. It is a tool to educate people how cities could be created in many ways and different settings in a very playful way.

The goal is to make people aware of social conditions in an urban network and encourage them to take part in decisions – involve people into the process of urban planning . The urban planners are only setting the basic rules for the city as a basic framework. Instead of using a mouse or a keyboard, the application is designed much more intuitively and contextually for the user.

You probably heard of la Tomatina, the tomato fight, in Spain, where each year some 50.000 visitors get together to throw 100.000 kilos of tomatoes at each other. And then there are water fights, pillow fights, foam fights, and so on, all of which are a lot of fun but also quite a waste of resources. Not so the Green Battle, or Batalla Verde. This way of fighting could be classified under guerrilla gardening and aims to green the battlefield, often an abandoned construction site or grey parking lot.

During the fight, the combatants throw balls of green mud at each other in order to cover themselves and the battlefield in this mix. The green mud actually contains seeds so that in no less than 2 to 3 weeks the battlefield becomes a garden, flourishing with resistant plants that don’t need much water

Read the full story on Treehugger.

Syn Emergence is a project which examines Rich Bevan’s own associative relationships between sound, form and space.

The project is constructed according to a range of specific sonic and spatial scale rule sets (micro, component, meso and macro) which he designed as part of a cross-disciplinary notation/cartographic system.

The film was conceived as part of Rich’s Masters at the Bartlett School of Architecture (Unit 15).

THE MEETING PLACE by ASPECT Studio, is part architectural installation/ sculpture and social experiment. It is a playful installation which encourages participation and interaction whilst heightening the experience of moving through the urban space of Little Hunter Street. The concept is to create a space within the existing the lane way – by creating two 4m high curtain walls of elastic fabric. The material has an opacity to it which allows for views through and when lit at night becomes a canvas for revealing movement of people through the space.

People have to negotiate their way through the laneway by communication and contact with other people like themselves that are moving in the opposite direction. This social aspect of watching, communicating and negotiating with people will increase positive human contact with a sense of play.

In an effort to establish new platforms for public art and performance, the multimedia duo SWEATSHOPPE has developed a new interactive technology that enables them to explore the relationship between video, mark making and architecture.

Dubbed “video painting”, this technology allows them to essentially “paint” video onto any surface. Shooting in Queens, Brooklyn, and Manhattan, the duo spent weeks documenting their work in urban settings to create “The Landing” the first in a series of episodes that showcases their work as artist, technologist and performers.

ResilientCity.org is a not-for-profit website focused on developing creative, practical, and implementable urban planning and building design strategies that address the combined problems of climate change, global population growth, and peak oil with the purpose of creating more resilient cities.

There is an important discourse emerging among social scientists, environmentalists, architects, and urban planners about how our cities should deal with the looming and linked threats of climate changes and energy decent as a result of peak oil in the context of continued global population growth. This website was created to facilitate and further this discourse.

A couple of months ago they launched their first Design Ideas Competition to both encourage exploration of ResilientCity planning and design, as well as to generate useful exemplars for the Resources section of the website. The  competition resulted in more than 50 registrations and 22 formal entries received from around the globe, including proposals centered on cities in India, Mexico, Israel, Tibet, Germany, as well as the USA and Canada.  Visit the website to view the winning entries.

Wieden + Kennedy Amsterdam teamed up with video artist Theo Watson to create an  interactive sand sculpture.

“We used the only material on the site (sand) and the core of a film museum projection to introduce the new building to the world. After days of building and nights of testing the minister of culture ignited this augmented sand sculpture. Above is the test version.”

With “World at Work“, Theo Deutinger and his team project the amount of inhabitants per time-zone onto the earth as ‘Time Machine’. By assuming that the average working day around the world is from 9.00am to 5.00 pm, they came to the conclusion that there is a strong imbalance in the distribution of workforce. One can almost talk about a day and night on earth. The world as ‘Time Machine’ is visualized by its course around the sun (together with its three neighbour planets) and its spinning around its own axis. On top of its self-rotation a graph with the amount of inhabitants is projected.

The third element of the visualisation is the addition of all the working population of one global working day and shows how many people are working, relaxing or sleeping. This visualisation is shown either in real time, or can be released and speeded up at the users will. All three parts of the visualisation are interconnected as programmed clockwork that shows time by mimicking reality.

Results Under Actions is a text-based project and is designed with mobility and adaptation in mind. Transportable wall structures are used to display narrative footnotes or historical slogans that embody the stories of our built environment. Each is a graphic source with minimal text,  presented to encourage many, varied and unique interpretations.

At the center of this project is a system of display panels that are connected into thin, long wall structures.  These are displayed in pre-determined public places and is being documented from varied perspectives. The documentation preserves not only the wall as it is presented, but also the reaction and responses of the public.

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