Eco Tec Architecture Of The In Between Book 3

These essays propose a fusion of technology and ecology. Contributors include Felix Guattari and Neil Denari.

A heightened perception of urban violence increasingly dominates public discourse, but, as current events seem to demonstrate, these crises continue without immanent resolution. The very definitions of the city and of violence are constantly being reevaluated: the site of the city is shifting across real and imagined space; violence has been exposed outside the traditional areas of social conflict. Mortal City, published With StoreFront for Art and Architecture, is comprised of a series of essays investigating direct and indirect forms of violence and the city. Mortal City presents several different approaches to the subject. Articles by Donald Albrecht, Diane Ghirardo, Herbert Muschamp, Richard Plunz, and Lebbeus Woods, among others, are accompanied by photo essays by Warchitecture and Camilo Vergara and an interview with Mark Wigley. "We have gone from fearing the death of the city to fearing the city of death, and this traumatic change is reflected passionately in this book". -- A.D.

Weather, Macroweather, and the Climate is an insider's attempt to explain as simply as possible how to understand the atmospheric variability that occurs over an astonishing range of scales: from millimeters to the size of the planet, from milliseconds to billions of years. The variability is so large that standard ways of dealing with it are utterly inadequate: in 2015, it was found that classical approaches had underestimated the variability by the astronomical factor of a quadrillion (a million billion). Author Shaun Lovejoy asks - and answers - many fundamental questions such as: Is the atmosphere random or deterministic? What is turbulence? How big is a cloud (what is the appropriate notion of size itself)? What is its dimension? How can we conceptualize the structures within structures within structures spanning millimeters to thousands of kilometers and milliseconds to the age of the planet? What is weather? What is climate? Lovejoy shows in simple terms why the industrial epoch warming can't be natural - much simpler than trying to show that it's anthropogenic. We will discuss in simple terms how to make the best seasonal and annual forecasts - without giant numerical models. Above all, the book offers readers a new understanding of the atmosphere.

How a built environment that is robotic and interactive becomes an apt home to our restless, dynamic, and increasingly digital society. The relationship of humans to computers can no longer be represented as one person in a chair and one computer on a desk. Today computing finds its way into our pockets, our cars, our appliances; it is ubiquitous—an inescapable part of our everyday lives. Computing is even expanding beyond our devices; sensors, microcontrollers, and actuators are increasingly embedded into the built environment. In Architectural Robotics, Keith Evan Green looks toward the next frontier in computing: interactive, partly intelligent, meticulously designed physical environments. Green examines how these “architectural robotic” systems will support and augment us at work, school, and home, as we roam, interconnect, and age. Green tells the stories of three projects from his research lab that exemplify the reconfigurable, distributed, and transfigurable environments of architectural robotics. The Animated Work Environment is a robotic work environment of shape-shifting physical space that responds dynamically to the working life of the people within it; home+ is a suite of networked, distributed “robotic furnishings” integrated into existing domestic and healthcare environments; and LIT ROOM offers a simulated environment in which the physical space of a room merges with the imaginary space of a book, becoming “a portal to elsewhere.” How far beyond workstations, furniture, and rooms can the environments of architectural robotics stretch? Green imagines scaled-up neighborhoods, villages, and metropolises composed of physical bits, digital bytes, living things, and their hybrids. Not global but local, architectural robotics grounds computing in a capacious cyber-physical home.

The Architectural Imagination at the Digital Turn asks what it means to speak of a "digital turn" in architecture. It examines how architects at the time engaged with the digital and imagined future modes of practice, and looks at the technological, conceptual and economic phenomena behind this engagement. It argues that the adoption of digital technology in architecture was far from linear but depended on complex factors, from the operative logic of the technology itself to the context in which it was used and the people who interacted with it. Creating a mosaic-like account, the book presents debates, projects and publications that changed how architecture was visualized, fabricated and experienced using digital technology. Spanning the university, new media art institutes, ecologies, architectural bodies, fabrication and the city, it re-evaluates familiar narratives that emphasized formal explorations; instead, the book aims to complicate the "myth" of the digital by presenting a nuanced analysis of the material and social context behind each case study. During the 1990s, architects repurposed software and technological concepts from other disciplines and tested them in a design environment. Some architects were fascinated by its effects, others were more critical. Through its discussion on case studies, places and themes that fundamentally influenced discourse formation in the era, this book offers scholars, researchers and students fresh insights into how architecture can engage with the digital realm today.

This book contains most of the papers presented in the Eco-Architecture 2010 conference, which was the third edition of the International Conference on Harmonisation between Architecture and Nature. Previous editions, that were very successful were held previously in the New Forest, UK, in 2006 and the Algarve, Portugal in 2008 and demonstrated the importance of a forum like this to discuss the characteristics and challenges of such architectural vision. Eco-Architecture implies a new approach to the design process intended to harmonise its products with nature. This involves ideas such as minimum use of energy at each stage of the building process, taking into account the amount required during the extraction and transportation of materials, their fabrication, assembly, building erection, maintenance and eventual future recycling. Presentations in the conference were related to topics like building technologies, design by passive systems, design with nature, ecological and cultural sensitivity, life cycle assessment, quantifying sustainability in architecture, resources and rehabilitation, and issues from education, research and practice. Case studies from different places around the world were also presented.

Contemporary architecture, and the culture it reflects dependent as it is on fossil fuels, has contributed to the cause and necessity of a burgeoning green process that emerged over the past half century. This text is the first to offer a comprehensive critical history and analysis of the greening of architecture through accumulative reduction of negative environmental effects caused by buildings, urban designs and settlements. Describing the progressive development of green architecture from 1960 to 2010, it illustrates how it is ever evolving and ameliorated through alterations in form, technology, materials and use and it examines different places worldwide that represent a diversity of cultural and climatic contexts. The book is divided into seven chapters: with an overview of the environmental issues and the nature of green architecture in response to them, followed by an historic perspective of the pioneering evolution of green technology and architectural integration over the past five decades, and finally, providing the intransigent and culturally pervasive current examples within a wide range of geographic territories. The greening of architecture is seen as an evolutionary process that is informed by significant world events, climate change, environmental theories, movements in architecture, technological innovations, and seminal works in architecture and planning throughout each decade over the past fifty years. This time period is bounded on one end by the awareness of environmental problems beginning in the 1960's, the influential texts by Rachel Carson, E.F. Schumacher, Buckminster Fuller and Steward Brand, and the impact of the OPEC Oil Embargo of 1973, and on the other end the pervasiveness of the necessary greening of architecture that includes, systemic reforms in architectural and urban design, land use planning, transportation, agriculture, and energy production found in the 2000's. The greening process moves from remediation to holistic models of architecture. Geographical landscapes give a global account of the greening process where some examples are parallel and sympathetic, and others are in clear contrast to one another with very individuated approaches. Certain events, like the Rio Summit in 1992 and Kyoto Protocol in 1997, and themes, such as the Hannover Principles in 2000, provide a dynamic ideological critique as well as a formal and technical discussion of the embodied and accumulative content of greening principles in architecture.