Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!
The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy!
Everything is holy! everybody's holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is eternity! Everyman's an angel!

in Howl

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"Be wary of any prophetic end of days argument" I keep telling myself. Still, I end up attempting to discredit such hypothesis, as if I'm scared of the the possibility of those prophecies being right.

PIIQ range of Sony headphones

I was strolling back and forth through the web on the course of reading my emails when I found out that Sony has just released a new range of arty headphones called PIIQ "aimed at the youth market". Sony states that "[the] headphones draw from the collective experience of artists, skaters, street culture and all-around limit-pushers to create high-concept headphones with sound ready for the ride."

Basically, these are "headphones for skaters and kids who want to be skaters". "They claim they are full of “skater fashion” and “high-concept urban awareness,” which means Sony’s designers in Tokyo watched some MIA and Lady Gaga videos." (these words were in a website which has removed them (mmmm) and are now only available thanks to the time defying "google search" cache feature. Also, I have no idea what PIIQ stands for, or even if it stands for anything at all. Still, its website has won a Favourite Website Award.

Roller Radio - Moving Sound

The first image that came to my mind when I saw the models [I enjoy creating my self-conditioned mental correlations] was the one of my long gone (and missed) radio cassette recorder, a yellow Philips Roller Radio designed in 1981. My yellow Roller Radio was part of the Moving Sound range of products (1, 2, 3, 4, 5...), an extension of the original one designed in 1981 by Graham Hinde.

Robert Blaich who was once head of Philips design explains this mini boombox's "fit" design history in detail. Long story short: "The design was one of the first to come out of the Philips Youth Task Force, a group set up to address Philips' declining market share in younger age groups" who then preferred Japanese products.

Alexander Grünsteidl in his amazing tail of the rise and fall of industrial design adds that:

"One outcome of this quest [for form at consumer electronic corporations around the world] was the unexpectedly successful Philips Roller Radio, which stood out from the boxy, tech looking, metal finished appliances common amongst consumer electronic brands in those days. This radio was explicitly designed to appeal to the youth market. The loudspeakers were clearly separated from the main body holding the radio tuner and cassette player. The handle expressed portability. The back revealed bulges underneath which the batteries fitted. The bright colors and shiny plastic finish created a distinct youthful contemporary look and feel. As the story goes, the initial proposal was refused several times by top management, who couldn’t believe that such a radically different approach could sell beyond the required quantities to break even. The development team managed to secure initial orders in opposition to the opinions of management and  production began. Against all odds, sales soon exceeded the wildest expectations."

Sports series Walkmans and My First Sony range of products

He continues by telling how Philips wasn't able to pick up from "the initial momentum they had created" giving it away to its competitor Sony which quickly created the range My First Sony (1988) and the Sony Sport series (1983). Philips Moving Sound range was created as a response to these advances by Sony.

 

Black squares

These were times when an "appliance platform […] retained almost the same configuration of  internal components for a few years, whilst the outside was restyled on a regular basis like a dress following the fashion of the day", says Grünsteidl.

Now, the era of small black square boxes begs the question: "what role does industrial design retain?" [In Objectified the same issue is addressed at some point] Is the only way out to turn yourself into the hands of skater-boys and street-artists, to keep retelling the same stories? Because that happened before in 1981 and the result was a radio cassette player with neon colors, two huge speakers that looked like roller skate wheels, and a chunky handle promoting mobility - now that captured it neatly the essence of that decade.

Présentée dans la grande galerie du Centre Pompidou du 5 mai au 9 août 2010, l'exposition Dreamlands développe un propos inédit : montrer comment les modèles de foires internationales, d'expositions universelles et de parcs de loisirs ont influencé la conception de la ville et de ses usages.
Démultipliant la réalité par la pratique de la copie, jouant d'une esthétique de l'accumulation et du collage souvent proche du kitsch, ces mondes clos et parallèles ont en effet inspiré les démarches artistiques, architecturales et urbanistiques au XXe siècle, au point de s'ériger en possible norme de certaines constructions contemporaines.

Cette exposition pluridisciplinaire rassemble plus de trois cents œuvres, mêlant art moderne et contemporain, architecture, films et documents issus de nombreuses collections publiques et privées. Dans une mise en espace ludique et didactique à la fois, elle propose la première lecture d'envergure de cette question et conviera à s'interroger sur la manière dont s'élabore l'imaginaire de la ville et dont les projets urbains s'en nourrissent.

Expositions universelles, parcs d'attractions contemporains, le Las Vegas des années 1950 et 1960, le Dubaï du XXIe siècle : tous ces projets ont contribué à modifier profondément notre rapport au monde et à la géographie, au temps et à l'histoire, aux notions d'original et de copie, d'art et de non-art.

Les « dreamlands » de la société des loisirs ont façonné l'imaginaire, nourri les utopies comme les créations des artistes, mais ils sont aussi devenus réalité : le pastiche, la copie, l'artificiel et le factice ont été retournés pour engendrer à leur tour l'environnement dans lequel s'inscrit la vie réelle et s'imposer comme de nouvelles normes urbaines et sociales, brouillant les frontières de l'imaginaire et celles de la réalité. Du «Pavillon de Vénus» conçu par Salvador Dalí pour la Foire internationale de New York de 1939, au «Learning from Las Vegas» (L'enseignement de Vegas) des architectes Robert Venturi et Denise Scott Brown, et au «Delirious New York » de Rem Koolhaas (qui souligne la filiation entre Manhattan et le parc d'attractions de Dreamland), les seize sections de l'exposition retracent les étapes d'une relation complexe et problématique.

Cartography has been a part of mankind since its beginning having a history of up to 8.000 years. The debate about the first map relies upon the definition of map. Mapping became increasingly important as space grew in complexity. It culminated in the abstraction of the Transit Map. This topological map in the form of a schematic diagram, unlike conventional maps, is not geographically accurate illustrating a fixed distance between points, compressing those in the outer area of the system and expanding those close to the center. The abstraction of rout-maps for individual transit lines can be traced back as early as 1908, but it was George Dow who, for the first time, launched a diagrammatic representation of an entire rail transport network (in 1929), followed by Harry Beck's iconic London Underground Map in 1933.

With the advent of modernity things got even more complex as the concepts of time and space became intertwined. "Space-time compression" became a platitude in the debates on post-modernity and post-modernism. As space takes over place, and as both time and space get diluted into each other, one can begin to feel "lost in space", as Wigley noted. Time, not distance, has become the most importante criterion on determining the spacial organization of the various parts composing (post)urban landscape. Paul Virilio, who analyzed modernity's fascination with speed, has argued that modern transportation's speed is the most important factor in the current disurbanization process. Categories like time and speed undermine the geographical identity of a city. Koolhaas added to this discussion, when talking about Euralille in the "Beyond Delirious" article, that "[if] you imagine not distance as a crucial given but [the] time it takes to get somewhere then there is an irregular figure which represents the entire territory that is now less then one hour and thirty minutes from Lille" (Nesbitt, 1996: 334) (read here).

That must have been what Xiaoji Chen thought. She (re)searched into irregular or distorted maps of Paris as a way to depict one's mental map of the city, which she says "is not measured in miles". After abstraction comes the "baroque" (not a pejorative). Xiaoji made what she calls "isochronic maps" [sic] of Paris under different transportation modes. It can be seen in the car based map how "the city center expands from congestion, and the edge is denser". If you add eco-concerns to the equation you get yourself the basis to a whole lot of possible services. The video shows how the map transforms itself when time and carbon footprint go into play.

By suggestion of a friend driven by sheer curiosity I went to discover a small piece of software which comes with MAC OSX called Grapher (Applications \ Utiilities). Grapher is able to create 2D and 3D graphs from simple and complex equations. Going through the "Examples" provided you can find one called Toroid that results from the expression given above. It immediately brought to my mind the image of BIG's Danish Pavilion at Shanghai.

Is this another "one liner" by Ingels explained after its conception?

Of course Ingels has delved into geometry in the conception of his buildings some other times, even if quite inconsequently - geometrically and generatively, that is. More striking than the images created is the sense that some opportunities to re-explore geometry as a space generator are lost somewhere along the way.

Image sources:
domus
dezeen 

As a side note I would like to divulge a small plug-in for Rhino aptly called Math. What it does is: it calculates smooth degree 3 curves and surfaces based on parametric equations. It comes with a fairly diverse library, complete with Moebius strips and a Klein surface. The thing is, it works with cartesian, or rectangular functions. So, because I don't know how to convert polar functions like the above, I still haven't been able to construct it in Rhino.