Archives for the Month of July, 2014

Pietra Paesina’s Ruined Façades

Ruin MarbleRuin Marble Print – Dirk Wiersma

Pietra Paesina, (also ‘landscape stone’, ‘ruin marble’) known for its mimicry of landscape miniatures, has been collected and embellished at least since classical times and more popularly during the Italian Renaissance. The patterns of fractured light and dark within these rocks gives the impression of ruined cubist cityscapes, disjointed mountainous terrains with foliage and vividly etched tautozonal landscapes near the moment of sunset. Paesina often contain the remnants planktonic organisms and tiny fossils. Chondrites and Coccoliths form small armies in battlements to defend their limestone castles. There is one example of a ruin marble at the London History Museum, who’s landscape depicts, appropriately, the grey polluted skyline of the Victorian industrial revolution.

Ruin MarbleRuin Marble – Unknown source

Ruin MarbleRuin Marble – Unknown source

Ruin MarbleRuin Marble – Unknown source

Ruin MarbleRuin Marble – Unknown source

Ruin MarbleRuin Marble – The Writing of Stones, Roger Caillois

Ruin MarbleRuin Marble – Natural History Museum London

There is just one problem with these stones and this is that they are not large enough. If only these marbles would have scaled in their formation to the size of the landscape itself, then in the geological façades of Earth they would appear, from afar, as landscapes within landscapes, mirages of ruins etched in outcrops – true Borgesian self-similar facsimiles; as Earth takes a snapshot of itself in rock.

Ruin MarbleEpisode from Ludovico Ariostos Orlando Furioso – Museo Opificio delle Pietre Dure Florence

Related:
The Writing of Stones
The Wave – Earth Waveform Oscillations
Spreading Time Chromatographically – The Painted Hills of the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument
Prehistoric Messages of the Widmanstätten Cursive

Roid’s Roland TR Series – The Drum Machine as Space Station

roid01TR Series – Roid

Already cult objects in their own right, ‘Roid’ presents the Roland TR series of drum machines in a exosphere of frozen space-time fit for suspended micro gravitational idolatry. These graphic portraits, realised in gouache, explore geometrical spatialisation and abstraction in perfectly microtonal colours to invoke the archetypal constructivist aesthetic.

Counter to the utilitarian aim prescribed by the standard exploded view in service manuals, where the innards of mechanisms are revealed to show the relationships between constituent parts, these works celebrate drum machines as space stations and astrionic systems. Aesthetic space merges with cosmic space in the navigation portal of the Cartesian continuum.

roid01TR Series – Roid

roid01TR Series – Roid

roid01TR Series – Roid

roid01TR Series – Roid

roid01TR Series – Roid

While the term ‘exploded view drawing’ originated in the 1940s, and was subsequently defined in 1965 as a “Three-dimensional (isometric) illustration that shows the mating relationships of parts, sub-assemblies, and higher assemblies’, its history goes back much further to fifteenth century notebooks of Marino Taccola [1382–1453]. This type of technical drawing was later perfected by Leonardo da Vinci [1452–1519].

Related Posts:

The Architectural Fantasies of Iakov Chernikhov
Spatiologies – Vittorio Giorgini
Victory Over the Sun – El Lissitzky’s Drawings for Suprematist Automatons
Yuri Avvakumov – Agitarch Structures: Reconfiguring Utopia

Glen Small – Self Consuming Cities, Biospheres & Green Machine Megastructures

Green Machine - Glen SmallGreen Machine – Glen Small [1977-1980]

West Coast Architect Glen Small, an early proponent of environmentally aware architecture, has documented a large range of projects at his website including his well-known proposals Green Machine, Biomorphic Biosphere and Downtown Troposphere. Forget about clinical isometric models, here much of the documentation consist of loose organic sketches of freeform biomorphic canopies and archigram-esque modulars covered with vegetation. These eco-utopian futurologies would not seem out of place within the genre of sc-fi illustration.

Green Machine - Glen SmallGreen Machine – Glen Small [1977-1980]

Green Machine - Glen SmallGreen Machine – Glen Small [1977-1980]

Flying House - Glen SmallFlying House – Glen Small [1972]

Flying House - Glen SmallFlying House – Glen Small [1972]

Biomorphic Biosphere intended to extend the urban environment with the addition of a 8000 ft high spanned structure creating a micro climate of its own – ‘a condition where the air would rise, cool and fall and be collected in the reservoirs’. The structure would expand and retract in relation to population requirements – if the population decreased significantly the building cycle would reverse the biosphere would begin to consume itself.

Biomorphic Biosphere - Glen SmallBiomorphic Biosphere: Computerized Building Machine Extruding Compression Structure with Plant Growth – Glen Small [1972]

 BiomorphicBiosphere - Glen SmallBiomorphic Biosphere: Cross-section elevation – Glen Small [1972]

 Biomorphic Biosphere - Glen SmallBiomorphic Biosphere: Stationary Grid Growth Models – Glen Small [1972]

 Biomorphic Biosphere - Glen SmallBiomorphic Biosphere: Stationary Pattern for a City That Would Grow From a Small Grid – Glen Small [1972]

 BiomorphicBiosphere - Glen SmallBiomorphic Biosphere: Suitcase Transportation Modular – Glen Small [1972]

 VerticalCity - Glen SmallVertical City – Glen Small [1966]

In his most well-know work, Green Machine, Airstream trailer living pods were to be suspended on a crystalline lattice. Green Machine worked with the idea of restricted and compacted living space while simultaneously exploring the potential possibilities of the dynamics of modularity and expansive reconfiguration.

Related Posts:

Floraskin – Eilfried Huth & Günther Domenig

Mind Expanders – Haus-Rucker-Co

Drop City – Colonizing consciousness with abodes of Truncated Icosorhombic Dodecahedra

Selected Tweets #21: Anechoic Abstractions, Hierarchical Microarchitectures & Programmable Matter

500 Years Away - Adam Ferriss 500 Years Away – Adam Ferriss

Selected tweets from my Twitter stream: @MrPrudence

Dividierend Series – Deskriptiv. Rendered silicate-like objects with subdivided textured surfaces.

500 Years Away – Adam Ferriss. Pixel sorting algorithms create structural reconfigurations of astrophysical imagery.

Doilies – Laura Splan. Computerized machine embroidered lace doilies modeled on viruses.

Anechoic abstractions – photographs of an anechoic radio chamber in Denmark by Alastair Philip Wiper

Invasive-Species_Dillon-MarshInvasive Species – Dillon Marsh

Minimal/abstract music notation [1960’s] from composer of Chance/Fluxus music, and Cage student, Toschi Ichiyanagi.

Creating Civilizations – Robert Strati’s architectural/mathematical/notational schematic fictions.

Invasive Species – Dillon Marsh. Photographs of disguised cell phone tower encroachment.

Erosion Series – Tamsin Van Essen. Monochromatic ceramic designs simulating biological erosion and viral infection.

Narrative Cities – Thien K. Nguyen. Gridded Urban systems stretched & morphed by ‘narratives into absurdities.’

The-Grand-Canyon_3_May_1973The Grand Canyon, 3 May 1973 – Landsat

When the Earth Began Looking at Itself: the Landsat Program – cartography & Earth sciences in 1972.

Hierarchical Microarchitectures – Noorduin et al. Manipulated chemical gradients generate organic growth in crystals.

Convozine on Etienne-Louis Boullee’s Memorial to Newton. Arquitectura en Dibuixos Exemplars continues the utopian architectonic spheromania.

The Territory of the Virtually Unknown. Dpr-barcelona explores extremities of architecture in the North & South poles.

Sol LeWitt: Four Basic Kinds of Straight Lines (PDF) [1969] compositions/lines defined by mathematical permutations.

dividierend-04Dividierend – Deskriptiv

Pulse – a suspended digitally fabbed sculpture of Ursula Major and 3d printed Mobius Strips – works by Andrew F. Scott.

Proto-computing – Mitchell Whitelaw interviews Ralf Baecker on ‘programmable matter’, proto-computational materiality & universal machines.

‘Please do not wiggle its frequency control, as you might inadvertently discover a new musical vocabulary’ – Mark Fell on the epiphanies of technological constraint.