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.