The architecture of density

Michael Wolf’s incredible photos of density, from the outside, in Hong Kong.

Living Architecture

Somewhat reminiscent of the remarkable set of houses being built in the Lower 9th Ward by the Make It Right Foundation is the recently announced Living Architecture development in the UK.

Living Architecture has asked a series of established and emerging world-class architects to build houses around the UK. The houses will be available to rent for holidays by the general public. Some will be in difficult or remote sites. The business model: People will pay a premium to spend a few days in a home designed by cutting-edge architects.

Art in a Box

I decided to make something for the upcoming “Art in a Box” show at RHINO Gallery. It is a cube with a removable top.

Lattice Field Theory

The material is recycled lattice strips salvaged from a building renovation. Left unpainted, cut to size, assembled with small nails and glue.

I didn’t know what I would do with the interior until I finished the box itself. Install a statue? Hang works of art on the walls? (Art in a box?) Finally settled on 2 mirrors set across from one another, angled up at the viewer.  Added a golden frame midway between the mirrors. When the viewer look in sees self reflected back, in a frame-art in a box.

Lattice Field Theory interior

The silver things are painted pine needles. It seemed like the interior needed more texture. I haven’t settled on how these will be arranged.

The title is taken from physics, where lattice field theory is the study of lattice models of quantum field theory.

Right.

I don’t pretend to understand this stuff but in general, I think, a lattice model is a way of reducing a continuum to a form that can be analyzed. What is life but a continuum? What is a painting, photo or reflection but a point in this continuum?

Rice paddy art in Japan

Fictional warrior Naoe Kanetsugu and his wife Osen appear in fields in the town of Yonezawa , Japan.

Closer to the image, the careful placement of thousands of rice plants in the paddy fields can be seen.

Here’s a link to a story about this in The Japan Times.

Word associations

I find word associations to be fascinating.  As a phenomenon and as a tool for brainstorming ideas.

The Edinburgh Associative Thesaurus (EAT) is a very easy to use interactive word association database derived from counts of associations given by test subjects.  The sample base is not large.  And the whole enterprise is based in the United Kingdom, so there is a cultural bias.

Nevertheless you might find it to be fun and even useful.

Some of the results are quite interesting.  For example, using “me” as the stimulus word yielded the expected responses such as “you”, “us” and “them” and also many negative associations, including:

• alone
• bad
• confused
• fat
• lost
• mad
• no
• ugh

…and Derek.

Scale

Jellyfish in Little Lagoon

Originally uploaded by nola-shiva.

Sitting in the garden in the sun on a clear February day with a chilly air temperature. The radiant heat from the sun, some 290 million miles away, is palpable. You can feel it pressing on the bare skin. And you think about how hot the sun must be, how large it must be and about the distance and you realize that we and the sun exist and have being on incomparably different scales.

Life on earth appears to exist within a very narrow temperature range, from about -30 C to about 120 C. The known temperature range in the universe is from -269 C to about 40 million C (interior of a star). Our little biological range here on earth represents only 0.0004% of the known range. And it is at the very cold end of the known range.

On the universal temperature scale with units of say 500,000 C the earth’s bio-range is completely invisible.

What’s amazing is the sheer complexity of material life within out infinitesimal temperature range, such as the behavior of water. Water is liquid at such a micro range that it is incredible that life seems to depend almost entirely upon that property of the molecule.

New Year’s day

We took a walk on the abandoned golf course in City Park.  Overcast sky, not cold.  Lots of birds.  I went with Cathy and Dorree.  

They had recently mown the fairways.  I like them better when they are left alone, wild.  Let it go wild.  

 

We saw pelicans. Egrets.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fire-breathing green dragons.

SNOLA: 2 Mexicans and a snowman

SNOLA: 2 Mexicans and a snowman

Originally uploaded by nola-shiva.

I snowed in New Orleans last Thursday, Dec. 11. A very rare event–especially if there is enough snow for accumulation. In this case we got about an inch in a couple of hours. Enough to jazz everyone up. I went out as it was ending to a couple of parks. Here, on the Audubon Park golf course, I ran into two Mexican guys who were also out enjoying the event. I took their picture with their disposable camera, and then one with mine. View my Flickr page to see more SNOLA pics.

Bubbles are a natural aspect of capitalism

Speculative bubbles have been around as long as capitalism has existed.  We look back at things like Tulip Mania of the 17th century with wonder.  But bubbles have continued to emerge in diferent forms ever since.  Each tie the prevailing feeling among speculators is, “this time it’s diferent”.

Two recent articles in The Atlantic explore the reasons for bubbles in some detail.   Exercises in “experimental economics” have shown that even under carefully controlled conditions, traders will behave in a way that creates speculative bubbles.  It rather comes down to a game in which the players place bets based on what they know and what they think the others in the game know (or don’t know).  It seems a little like poker.  See Virginia Postrel in the December 2008 issue.

In the same issue Henry Blodget discusses how the financial bubble grew and what lessons can be learned from it.  He feels that bubbles are to be expected as a natural partof a system as dynamic as capitalism.  A web of relationships, fears and expectations connecting Wall Street banks and you and me created and fed the financial bubble.  Although bubbles destroy a lot of wealth they also create it, and allow for the financing of new technological innovations, such as the rapid growth of the Internet.

New Japanese tea house imaginings

The image shows three examples from the “Nirvana Mini” show recently at the Japanese Embassy in Washington DC.  Each is new version of the Japanese tea house by a contemporary Japanese architect.  The one on the left is a model made from a single sheet of paper by  Kiyoshi Sey Takeyama.  The one on the right is also a model, this time of a tea house made entirely of glass and intended for a garden or forest setting.  It is by Norihiko Dan.  The center image is a full-sized “structureless” tea house by Kengo Kuma named “fu-an”, which translates as “floating hermitage”.  The gossamer “walls” of super-organdy (an exceptionally light cloth weighing only 11grams/square meter) are held up by a large helium-filled balloon.

The Nirvana Mini concept has been developed by Japanese author Masahiko Shimada, who has written stories, essays, poems and opera librettos.  (The English translation of one called Junior Butterfly can be found on his website.  It is a sequel to Madame Butterfly.)  I haven’t found a translation of the Nirvana Mini writings yet.

According to Susan Laszewski, writing on the Japanese Embassy’s newsletter Japan Now,

“Nirvana Mini” is a concept of design built upon the idea that all human habitats are fundamentally alike and can be extracted to an ideal space. As Mr. Shimada writes, this is because the basic structure of our homes is “prescribed beforehand by the structure of the human brain and body.”