Tuesday Teaser 7th Feb
This week’s teaser is a geography one.. Which state of the USA is the most: i) Northerly ii) Easterly iii) Westerly iv) Southerly. Feel free to post your solutions at…
Continue reading »The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
This week’s teaser is a geography one.. Which state of the USA is the most: i) Northerly ii) Easterly iii) Westerly iv) Southerly. Feel free to post your solutions at…
Continue reading »The UCL Urban Laboratory brings out a publication under the title Urban Constellations, summarising five years of work since the LAB was established in 2005. The LAB was set up as an interdisciplinary work group within UCL bringing together architecture, engineering, anthropology and film studies with a focus on urban. With urban Mattheew Gandy the Director of the urbanLAB and also editor of the publication sees encompassed far more than in the bounded term city. This is then also what the publications aims to achieve, drawing out and identifying critical themes and opening a discussion around them.
The collection explores themes such as new forms of political mobilisation, the effects of economic instability, the political ecology of urban nature and the presence of collective memory. The section Excursions documents artistic interventions in the urban context by 5 artists.
Image taken from othersights / Installation The Games are Open, with materials recycled from the 2010 Olympic & Paralympic Winter Games Athletes’ Village, by Köbberling & Kaltwasser, 2010.
The other four parts of the publication are Urban Lexicon outlining popular topics in the urban discurse, Crisis and Perturbations depicting strong influential shaping process, Places and Spaces as a showcase of concrete examples of urban studies and Projections linking the theoretical discussion to other fields such as art. A preview of sample page can be found on the publisher JOVIS website as a HERE.
Each essay, of which there area total of 42, is intentionally short. As Gandy outlines in his introduction, the aim was to create little vignettes of aspects. With this linking it to Sigfrid Kracauer’s work and use of the term urban vignettes. Similarly is the link established to Walter Benjamin via the book title Urban Constellations which link to the use of constellations by Benjamin. With this Gandy aims to underpin a close attention to detail of everyday life.
The essays are written by a selection of mostly well known scholars. In most cases they are related to the context of UCL with for examples Jane Rendell and Ian Borden form the Bartlett School of Architecture.
The essays are of very good quality and interesting to read although as mentioned very short, at most four pages. However, the main aspect of the publication is how it highlights the current state of the urban discussion. And this is if there is one, but more likely there are many. As Gandy himself already summarises in the introduction the essays draw form the remains of the modernist planning umbrella to examine how the urban context managed to cope, both with the domination of a religious planning doctrine based on technology and the decline thereof.
Further more it highlights the shift in approaches with the disappearance of bullet-point lists and the replacement of solutions with possibilities. The field seems all very vague and there are very few topics or even cornerstones the community can take for granted.
This is a very tricky position for the professionals to be in as with a lack of operational directions of development other disciplines are threatening to take over urban planning. Of course it is once more technology and the quantitative sciences promising anything they can even think of under a new umbrella of Smart Cities. It is of course no coincidence that here again the terms city is pushed as it represents exactly what Gandy described as too restrictive.
Qualitative research into urban environments in general is currently mainly exploring the boundaries of structuring aspects of dogmas and predefinitions. This is of course essential to understand more about the nature and the complexity of the urban context. On the other hand it would be healthy to start directing these efforts towards a more applied and pragmatic practice. As such the publications makes an effort to actually apply such a practice and combine the dismantling of modernist’s remains with a application of findings. Things can be taken from there.
Image taken from amazon / Urban Constellations book cover.
Gandy, M. ed., 2011. Urban Constellations, Berlin: JOVIS Verlag.
Continue reading »The UCL Urban Laboratory brings out a publication under the title Urban Constellations, summarising five years of work since the LAB was established in 2005. The LAB was set up as an interdisciplinary work group within UCL bringing together architecture, engineering, anthropology and film studies with a focus on urban. With urban Mattheew Gandy the Director of the urbanLAB and also editor of the publication sees encompassed far more than in the bounded term city. This is then also what the publications aims to achieve, drawing out and identifying critical themes and opening a discussion around them.
The collection explores themes such as new forms of political mobilisation, the effects of economic instability, the political ecology of urban nature and the presence of collective memory. The section Excursions documents artistic interventions in the urban context by 5 artists.
Image taken from othersights / Installation The Games are Open, with materials recycled from the 2010 Olympic & Paralympic Winter Games Athletes’ Village, by Köbberling & Kaltwasser, 2010.
The other four parts of the publication are Urban Lexicon outlining popular topics in the urban discurse, Crisis and Perturbations depicting strong influential shaping process, Places and Spaces as a showcase of concrete examples of urban studies and Projections linking the theoretical discussion to other fields such as art. A preview of sample page can be found on the publisher JOVIS website as a HERE.
Each essay, of which there area total of 42, is intentionally short. As Gandy outlines in his introduction, the aim was to create little vignettes of aspects. With this linking it to Sigfrid Kracauer’s work and use of the term urban vignettes. Similarly is the link established to Walter Benjamin via the book title Urban Constellations which link to the use of constellations by Benjamin. With this Gandy aims to underpin a close attention to detail of everyday life.
The essays are written by a selection of mostly well known scholars. In most cases they are related to the context of UCL with for examples Jane Rendell and Ian Borden form the Bartlett School of Architecture.
The essays are of very good quality and interesting to read although as mentioned very short, at most four pages. However, the main aspect of the publication is how it highlights the current state of the urban discussion. And this is if there is one, but more likely there are many. As Gandy himself already summarises in the introduction the essays draw form the remains of the modernist planning umbrella to examine how the urban context managed to cope, both with the domination of a religious planning doctrine based on technology and the decline thereof.
Further more it highlights the shift in approaches with the disappearance of bullet-point lists and the replacement of solutions with possibilities. The field seems all very vague and there are very few topics or even cornerstones the community can take for granted.
This is a very tricky position for the professionals to be in as with a lack of operational directions of development other disciplines are threatening to take over urban planning. Of course it is once more technology and the quantitative sciences promising anything they can even think of under a new umbrella of Smart Cities. It is of course no coincidence that here again the terms city is pushed as it represents exactly what Gandy described as too restrictive.
Qualitative research into urban environments in general is currently mainly exploring the boundaries of structuring aspects of dogmas and predefinitions. This is of course essential to understand more about the nature and the complexity of the urban context. On the other hand it would be healthy to start directing these efforts towards a more applied and pragmatic practice. As such the publications makes an effort to actually apply such a practice and combine the dismantling of modernist’s remains with a application of findings. Things can be taken from there.
Image taken from amazon / Urban Constellations book cover.
Gandy, M. ed., 2011. Urban Constellations, Berlin: JOVIS Verlag.
Continue reading »Today, I attended the excellent Windows Phone Bootcamp in London where we learnt all about the Windows Mobile 7 framework (a great write up of the day here from Gary Ewan Park – @grep13). Previously, during my MSc in Computing Science at University of Strathclyde, I encountered the old Windows Mobile framework which was quite challenging as none of […]
Continue reading »Update, 10 February: Sorry for some serious reliability issues over the last few days. The streaming server is now hosted in-house at CASA, which should be a lot more robust. At CASA we’ve been looking at using a Kinect or three in our forthcoming ANALOGIES (Analogues of Cities) conference + exhibition. We’ve been inspired in […]
Continue reading »This term we’ve been running our Visualisation module as part of the CASA MRes in Advanced Spatial Analysis and Visualisation. The flavour of this module is what you’d expect – finding interesting ways to communicate complex spatio-temporal data through static, … Continue reading →
Martin was an RA in CASA and then lecturer from 1996 to 2004. He is now Senior Lecturer in Geography at the University of Manchester. He coauthored the book with another friend of CASA, ROb Kitchin of NUI. Here is …
Continue reading »Satellite Meeting: Complexity in Spatial Dynamics (COSMIC) Location: Brussels, 5th of September 2012 Organizers: Peter Nijkamp, Michael Batty, Stewart Fotheringham, and Emmanouil Tranos Background New bottom up, digital data collected for entire populations, has started being utilised in urban science …
Continue reading »The developing agenda for retailing research.
Keith Dugmore, Demographic Decisions Ltd.
To download a PDF of the seminar please click here.
Abstract.
This presentation sets out the ways in which the retail industry makes use of GIS as a tool for op…
Over the past few weeks we have been exploring exploring new methods and techniques for visualising data. Developed as part our Masters course in Advanced Spatial Analysis and Visualisation we are now looking into issues of scale, realtime renderi…
Continue reading »Over the past few weeks we have been exploring exploring new methods and techniques for visualising data. Developed as part our Masters course in Advanced Spatial Analysis and Visualisation we are now looking into issues of scale, realtime renderi…
Continue reading »As a cyclist in London you can do your best to avoid left turning buses and dozy pedestrians. One thing you can’t really avoid though is pollution (although I accept cyclists probably aren’t much worse off than pedestrians and drivers in this respect). To illustrate this I have taken data for 3.2 million journeys from …
Continue reading »The above map (and this one) was produced using R and ggplot2 and serve to demonstrate just how sophisticated R visualisations can be. We are used to seeing similar maps produced with conventional GIS platforms or software such as Processing but I hadn’t yet seen one from the R community (feel free to suggest some …
Continue reading »James previously featured a tube map made up of just na […]
Continue reading »Gone are the land use transportation models of the last three weeks and now come cellular automata models (lecture 7), fractal models and morphologies (lecture 8) and next week we will broach agent-based models. Click to get these two lectures. … Continue reading →
Continue reading »For the past 8 years or so, I’ve been a member of a pub quiz team with some good friends of mine from my undergraduate days. We’ve had differing degrees…
Continue reading »This code reads in a .csv file called LatLon, expecting two columns with headers – Latitude and Longitude (in WGS84, decimal form). If the script is run in the same […]
Continue reading »A few months ago, I wrote a python script to convert British National grid coordinates (OSGB36) to latitude and longitude (WGS84). A fellow blogger Andrzej Bieniek very kindly pointed out that the algorithm […]
Continue reading »Transport for London (TfL) take their colours extremely seriously – the London Underground, in particularly, uses colour extensively to brand each line, and the maps and liveries are very well known. The organisation has a colour guide to ensure that, … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Networking City!
Continue reading »Networking City!
Continue reading »TweetThe Population Geography Research Group of the RGS-IBG is pleased to announce the inauguration of the Bob Woods Postgraduate Dissertation Prize. The prize is named in honour of Professor Bob Woods, who passed away in 2011. Bob was an esteemed population geographer, with interests across the sub-discipline. He made an invaluable contribution to population geography for […]
Continue reading »TweetGeographical, social and area type mobility: trajectories of selective sorting over time by health status and ethnic group ESRC White Rose DTC Network Studentship – University of Leeds, School of Geography Session 2012-2013 – Closing Date 17 February 2012 Principal Supervisior: Dr Paul Norman, University of Leeds Co-Supervisor: Dr Dimitris Ballas, University of Sheffield […]
Continue reading »A publication is no longer just a publication. It can be many things and what we see is only the beginning. A book can be a magazine, an ebook a website or a comic. Different medias are being mixed to play with ways of presentation. New technology plays here are good part and enables some very new concepts to be tested.
The eReader platforms and especially the iPad promise new ways of publishing. Only last week Apple has announced, as part of the app ibooks 2, the publication of text books. Here they put the emphasis more than before on the integration of additional media like video for tutorials and explanations, interactive graphics (like the newly released E. O. Wilson’s Life on Earth) and of course web links and so on. The animated and augmented book is only catching on a the moment. If you’re looking to purchase an iPad try out these Promotional Codes and save some money on this expensive technology!
Image taken from earchitect / Yes is More on the iPad.
The architectural monagraphy is a rather unlikely candidate to put forward such an interactive publication. One would expect it to be a heavy piece with nicely photoshopped images and and a thick cover. This is however a way of presentation for the old garde and if BIG represents the new generation of architects such an interactive option of presentation is the way to go. BIG has always been very much about telling a good story and producing a good show. The show of course is very subjective and this subject is two fold its the facts about the design and Bjarke Ingels the head of the Bjarke Ingels Group (This is what BIG stands for).
Their Yes is More: An archicomic on architectural evolution was originally published back in 2009 by Taschen and as such already wasn’t the architectural monograph one might buy if it was Norman Foster or Richard Meier. BIG presented their work in a sort of comic they branded archicomic. It was however mostly well received even though few probably understood what Bjarke actually meant by Yes is more.
The one architectural monography ambitious architecture practices have to top if they really want to set a mark and the book that has dominated the style of architecture book for the last decades is S,M,L,XL by Rem Koolhass’s OMA and AMO’s Bruce Mau. It was published in 1995 by Monacelli Press.
BIG had a go at this with the comic. It was well received, but not quite enough to land in the hall of fame. It certainly did stir things a little and it fitted well with the self image Bjarke is building around his practice and the delivered projects. The advancing technology however meant new opportunities are opening up. BIG has been working more and more with new media, testing animation, 3d as well as augmented reality.
Now in 2011 the original book has been transformed into an app for the iPad as Yes is more! An Archicomic on Architectural Evolution by BIG. It is published by Taschen again and available on itunes. It is not exactly an ebook since it is as a comic mainly imagery based and now also integrated animations and movies. The comic comes to live with clips that play within the grid of images or in full screen mode. It’s clear from the start that this format fits the stile. The publication really thrives with the media in this case.
Image taken from the app / Page spread 218-219 in landscape mode and page 219 in portrait mode. Both show at the bottom the navigation bar.
The app works both in portrait and in landscape mode. With the swipe of a finger one browses through the sequence of images learning about reasons and effects, but also a lot about Bjarke. Where he lives and what the view of his balcony looks like. Details can be zoomed in on, just like you are getting used to on your touch screen. A youtube like triangle symbolises clips and a click opens these additional medias in a small window or plays them at full screen at rather good resolution. Quality is ver good through out even if zoomed in on details.
Navigation is organised in a bar at the bottom that appears with a tab. To choose or jump to a new topic one can either use a slider of miniature pages or a selector roll. Of course individual pages can also be found by page number. However, the layout does not show any page numbers. They have been removed. In this sense the app is not at all a pure digital version of the paper based publication.
The app also offers a search box for key word search or a separate listing of all the clips if only moving images are of interest. The app offers the option to put bookmarks. There is no note option though, something a lot of ebook users probably have come to like from other platforms.
The experience the app offers is very good even though they have chosen not to the mimicked turn the page effect. It runs smooth the displayed material is qualitative very good with nice colours and sharp contours. Its what you get from other ebooks.
THe feel of the app has very little to do with a book any longer. The turn the page effect is missing, which to be fair, is a stupid thing, an purely visual imitation, but it comes the closest to turning a page and with it imitating the book. Then also the page numbers are missing, a very distinct design element of a paper based publication. This is not so much about the actual number but about orientation and progress. How far have I read and how many pages ago did the lead character last smile? Here we have no page numbers unless we choose to look at it in the bottom bar by tapping to activate it every time. There is however, a tiny bar appearing with each swipe of the page at the bottom indicating the position in the book, assuming the whole length of the screen is the entire book. This is very neat and practical. It would be nice if this little feature could also be draged and enable a sort of quick flip.
Currently there is no way to quickly flip through the book. the swipe response is quite slow and three quick swipes result in only one page shift. Similar the page numbers don’t move you through the pages that quickly. If now this little bar could do such a thing, maybe even in combination with the thumbnail page preview it would make for a great navigation.
The sequence of pages are presented in linear fashion. There are for example no links within the book. The last chapter BIG City provides an overview of the BIG project grouping similar projects together to city districts. It would be nice if clickable and acting as hyperlinks to jump to the details. Or maybe select one of the groups and look at all these projects together. It being programmed as an independent app such options would be possible enabling more browser like handling with back and forth or even history options, where the linearity of the paper based publication would be unlocked. With out this and it feels a bit like a slide presentation and in terms of the linearity would represent a power point against a prezi.
Image taken from klatmagazine / Yes is More on the iPad.
To sum it up, navigation and experience are working fine. Every function you would need is there. Its just that most things have the feel of a computer based click with your mouse here sort of solution. At the same time the app designer have not really let go of the book and present it in a purely linear fashion. It remins a hybrid, and is as sort of ebook with its own app not quite defining a new category of interactive, reader driven, content platforms.
As it being an independent app there are is the downside that it does not link up with other publications. The thing about ebooks is that they still, at least in the term, link up and the same software is playing for all of them. Notes are taken across books, so are markings. This publication is a standalone thing and plays at most with the collection of apps, but not necessarily the books or ebooks in this case. This is more from a collectors perspective a point, but then if you are into architecture you want a whole bunch of similar publications to cover your entire field of interest. One single item doesn’t really satisfy this and remains the odd one out. Bjarke doesn’t mind to be the odd one out as long as he’s being talked about.
Nevertheless its an interesting publication and an impressive one. Its not just a few swipes long, something you have swiped through in under five minutes. This is your proper comic you can read on the tube and the bus for an entire week of commuting. It comes along happily on you iPad and pops upen where you left it. It is currently priced at £6.99 which is nearly the price of the actual print, on amazon for £11.66 (on the Taschen website it is priced at £ 17.99, here the app a bit less than half). You can buy the app from HERE on itunes and the book from Taschen or amazon.
Image taken from the Yes is More app / Spread showing the project with the very poignant title Swept under the carpet. It is not a particularly famous BIG project, but it is one that summarises a lot about the approach. (click image to read the details) The introduction of the publication shows Bjarke with his feet on the table proclaiming his architecture paradigme is to say YES to everything. He claims that architecture can incorporate everything and still be progressive. In this very particular project, Swept under the carpet, he literally sweeps the pollution, this very project is built on a piece of land with polluted soil and the competition asked for solutions to deal with this fact, under the carpet with the argument: “Instead of cleaning up the mess we just cover it. We can spend the money required for cleaning the soil on my project and cover up.” He in fact says NO, in this case to the environment and a longterm solution. Much rather, he lets the polluted soil continue to contamine the water around the community and sailing centre and lets the kids swim in the dirty waters, but everything is nicely covered up. Even though BIG claims for their working attitude to be about process the reflection stage is missing in their project. No critical questions are asked, there is often little attitude or actual opinion on things. Even though BIG is subjectivated and purely focused on the person of Bjarke Ingels it is a brand and not a person.
The comic style fits well with the experiment of a ebook hybrid. There isn’t much to loose by putting it in an rather experimental form and it thrives on it. However the comic style dose not add anything to the content. It is however playful option to publish a book base don figure notes. Yes is More is a graphic novel taking the communication of architecture in visual terms to the extreme by not even attempting to talk about architecture in text form. The comic here is interpreted as annotated pictures and this fits perfectly with the way BIG explain projects, in simple steps explaining what is happening as if it were a DiY manual.
For BIG it’s all about the presentation. They way the projects are presented makes the projects directly ind simply accessible, see video below. The media used are engaging, playful and fitting. The explanations are very simple making every move easily understandable even for a layperson. Interesting however is more how arguments are made and here BIG’s background shines through. Everything is very much the famous and with this publication very much targeted form follows function. Following this paradigma the entire project is presented, throwing in here and there a few clever references and options, but essentially argumentation is very much founded on functionality.
Ingels, B., 2010. Yes is More: An Archicomic on Architectural Evolution, iPad App., Cologne: Taschen GmbH.
Continue reading »A publication is no longer just a publication. It can be many things and what we see is only the beginning. A book can be a magazine, an ebook a website or a comic. Different medias are being mixed to play with ways of presentation. New technology plays here are good part and enables some very new concepts to be tested.
The eReader platforms and especially the iPad promise new ways of publishing. Only last week Apple has announced, as part of the app ibooks 2, the publication of text books. Here they put the emphasis more than before on the integration of additional media like video for tutorials and explanations, interactive graphics (like the newly released E. O. Wilson’s Life on Earth) and of course web links and so on. The animated and augmented book is only catching on a the moment. If you’re looking to purchase an iPad try out these Promotional Codes and save some money on this expensive technology!
Image taken from earchitect / Yes is More on the iPad.
The architectural monagraphy is a rather unlikely candidate to put forward such an interactive publication. One would expect it to be a heavy piece with nicely photoshopped images and and a thick cover. This is however a way of presentation for the old garde and if BIG represents the new generation of architects such an interactive option of presentation is the way to go. BIG has always been very much about telling a good story and producing a good show. The show of course is very subjective and this subject is two fold its the facts about the design and Bjarke Ingels the head of the Bjarke Ingels Group (This is what BIG stands for).
Their Yes is More: An archicomic on architectural evolution was originally published back in 2009 by Taschen and as such already wasn’t the architectural monograph one might buy if it was Norman Foster or Richard Meier. BIG presented their work in a sort of comic they branded archicomic. It was however mostly well received even though few probably understood what Bjarke actually meant by Yes is more.
The one architectural monography ambitious architecture practices have to top if they really want to set a mark and the book that has dominated the style of architecture book for the last decades is S,M,L,XL by Rem Koolhass’s OMA and AMO’s Bruce Mau. It was published in 1995 by Monacelli Press.
BIG had a go at this with the comic. It was well received, but not quite enough to land in the hall of fame. It certainly did stir things a little and it fitted well with the self image Bjarke is building around his practice and the delivered projects. The advancing technology however meant new opportunities are opening up. BIG has been working more and more with new media, testing animation, 3d as well as augmented reality.
Now in 2011 the original book has been transformed into an app for the iPad as Yes is more! An Archicomic on Architectural Evolution by BIG. It is published by Taschen again and available on itunes. It is not exactly an ebook since it is as a comic mainly imagery based and now also integrated animations and movies. The comic comes to live with clips that play within the grid of images or in full screen mode. It’s clear from the start that this format fits the stile. The publication really thrives with the media in this case.
Image taken from the app / Page spread 218-219 in landscape mode and page 219 in portrait mode. Both show at the bottom the navigation bar.
The app works both in portrait and in landscape mode. With the swipe of a finger one browses through the sequence of images learning about reasons and effects, but also a lot about Bjarke. Where he lives and what the view of his balcony looks like. Details can be zoomed in on, just like you are getting used to on your touch screen. A youtube like triangle symbolises clips and a click opens these additional medias in a small window or plays them at full screen at rather good resolution. Quality is ver good through out even if zoomed in on details.
Navigation is organised in a bar at the bottom that appears with a tab. To choose or jump to a new topic one can either use a slider of miniature pages or a selector roll. Of course individual pages can also be found by page number. However, the layout does not show any page numbers. They have been removed. In this sense the app is not at all a pure digital version of the paper based publication.
The app also offers a search box for key word search or a separate listing of all the clips if only moving images are of interest. The app offers the option to put bookmarks. There is no note option though, something a lot of ebook users probably have come to like from other platforms.
The experience the app offers is very good even though they have chosen not to the mimicked turn the page effect. It runs smooth the displayed material is qualitative very good with nice colours and sharp contours. Its what you get from other ebooks.
THe feel of the app has very little to do with a book any longer. The turn the page effect is missing, which to be fair, is a stupid thing, an purely visual imitation, but it comes the closest to turning a page and with it imitating the book. Then also the page numbers are missing, a very distinct design element of a paper based publication. This is not so much about the actual number but about orientation and progress. How far have I read and how many pages ago did the lead character last smile? Here we have no page numbers unless we choose to look at it in the bottom bar by tapping to activate it every time. There is however, a tiny bar appearing with each swipe of the page at the bottom indicating the position in the book, assuming the whole length of the screen is the entire book. This is very neat and practical. It would be nice if this little feature could also be draged and enable a sort of quick flip.
Currently there is no way to quickly flip through the book. the swipe response is quite slow and three quick swipes result in only one page shift. Similar the page numbers don’t move you through the pages that quickly. If now this little bar could do such a thing, maybe even in combination with the thumbnail page preview it would make for a great navigation.
The sequence of pages are presented in linear fashion. There are for example no links within the book. The last chapter BIG City provides an overview of the BIG project grouping similar projects together to city districts. It would be nice if clickable and acting as hyperlinks to jump to the details. Or maybe select one of the groups and look at all these projects together. It being programmed as an independent app such options would be possible enabling more browser like handling with back and forth or even history options, where the linearity of the paper based publication would be unlocked. With out this and it feels a bit like a slide presentation and in terms of the linearity would represent a power point against a prezi.
Image taken from klatmagazine / Yes is More on the iPad.
To sum it up, navigation and experience are working fine. Every function you would need is there. Its just that most things have the feel of a computer based click with your mouse here sort of solution. At the same time the app designer have not really let go of the book and present it in a purely linear fashion. It remins a hybrid, and is as sort of ebook with its own app not quite defining a new category of interactive, reader driven, content platforms.
As it being an independent app there are is the downside that it does not link up with other publications. The thing about ebooks is that they still, at least in the term, link up and the same software is playing for all of them. Notes are taken across books, so are markings. This publication is a standalone thing and plays at most with the collection of apps, but not necessarily the books or ebooks in this case. This is more from a collectors perspective a point, but then if you are into architecture you want a whole bunch of similar publications to cover your entire field of interest. One single item doesn’t really satisfy this and remains the odd one out. Bjarke doesn’t mind to be the odd one out as long as he’s being talked about.
Nevertheless its an interesting publication and an impressive one. Its not just a few swipes long, something you have swiped through in under five minutes. This is your proper comic you can read on the tube and the bus for an entire week of commuting. It comes along happily on you iPad and pops upen where you left it. It is currently priced at £6.99 which is nearly the price of the actual print, on amazon for £11.66 (on the Taschen website it is priced at £ 17.99, here the app a bit less than half). You can buy the app from HERE on itunes and the book from Taschen or amazon.
Image taken from the Yes is More app / Spread showing the project with the very poignant title Swept under the carpet. It is not a particularly famous BIG project, but it is one that summarises a lot about the approach. (click image to read the details) The introduction of the publication shows Bjarke with his feet on the table proclaiming his architecture paradigme is to say YES to everything. He claims that architecture can incorporate everything and still be progressive. In this very particular project, Swept under the carpet, he literally sweeps the pollution, this very project is built on a piece of land with polluted soil and the competition asked for solutions to deal with this fact, under the carpet with the argument: “Instead of cleaning up the mess we just cover it. We can spend the money required for cleaning the soil on my project and cover up.” He in fact says NO, in this case to the environment and a longterm solution. Much rather, he lets the polluted soil continue to contamine the water around the community and sailing centre and lets the kids swim in the dirty waters, but everything is nicely covered up. Even though BIG claims for their working attitude to be about process the reflection stage is missing in their project. No critical questions are asked, there is often little attitude or actual opinion on things. Even though BIG is subjectivated and purely focused on the person of Bjarke Ingels it is a brand and not a person.
The comic style fits well with the experiment of a ebook hybrid. There isn’t much to loose by putting it in an rather experimental form and it thrives on it. However the comic style dose not add anything to the content. It is however playful option to publish a book base don figure notes. Yes is More is a graphic novel taking the communication of architecture in visual terms to the extreme by not even attempting to talk about architecture in text form. The comic here is interpreted as annotated pictures and this fits perfectly with the way BIG explain projects, in simple steps explaining what is happening as if it were a DiY manual.
For BIG it’s all about the presentation. They way the projects are presented makes the projects directly ind simply accessible, see video below. The media used are engaging, playful and fitting. The explanations are very simple making every move easily understandable even for a layperson. Interesting however is more how arguments are made and here BIG’s background shines through. Everything is very much the famous and with this publication very much targeted form follows function. Following this paradigma the entire project is presented, throwing in here and there a few clever references and options, but essentially argumentation is very much founded on functionality.
Ingels, B., 2010. Yes is More: An Archicomic on Architectural Evolution, iPad App., Cologne: Taschen GmbH.
Continue reading »Sample of geolocated tweets referringOccupy Wall Street.We have just finished a paper entitled ‘Social Media and the Emergence of Open-Source Geospatial Intelligence’ for Socio-Cultural Dynamics and Global Security. For those interested below is the ab…
Continue reading »Sample of geolocated tweets referringOccupy Wall Street.We have just finished a paper entitled ‘Social Media and the Emergence of Open-Source Geospatial Intelligence’ for Socio-Cultural Dynamics and Global Security. For those interested below is the ab…
Continue reading »So we are coming to the end of the first 31 days of 2012 and I’m pleased to report that I’ve won 2 separate awards for my research at UCL. The first award, which I won this week, was the UCL Provost’s Award for Public Engagement 2012. This award was really unexpected and I still can’t […]
Continue reading »The Mappiness project is run by one of CASA’s technology superstars Dr George MacKerron – it was his Ph.D project at LSE. The project, which is still going, aims to quantify happiness based on environmental factors, such as location, views … Continue reading →
Continue reading »I am giving a presentation to the MRes course at CASA, UCL today. There are two part to this lecture. The first part is covering the PhD research with a focus on the city and an overview of the methods of investigation that have been used. It is organi…
Continue reading »I am giving a presentation to the MRes course at CASA, UCL today. There are two part to this lecture. The first part is covering the PhD research with a focus on the city and an overview of the methods of investigation that have been used. It is organi…
Continue reading »Today is the third session in our five session introduction to urban modelling and simulation. This will be about land use models and how we construct them from elements of spatial interaction submodels. And I will illustrate a worked example. … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Readers will know that as part of the MRes in Advanced Spatial Analysis and Visualisation, here in CASA, we are exploring new methods and techniques for visualising data. As part of the course we are looking at collecting data from the Twitte…
Continue reading »Readers will know that as part of the MRes in Advanced Spatial Analysis and Visualisation, here in CASA, we are exploring new methods and techniques for visualising data. As part of the course we are looking at collecting data from the Twitte…
Continue reading »GIS solutions for London’s Crossrail. Wayne Marsh, Crossrail. Abstract. Crossrail is the largest civil engineering project in Europe and the largest single addition to the London transport network in over 50 years. It has been designed to provide a new railway network for London and the South East and carry 200 million passengers a year. Within Crossrail, GIS is being used through the entire lifecycle of the project, including design, construction and maintenance, integrating and joining up data such as BIM and Asset Registries. At the heart of the GIS solution is an Oracle Spatial 11g server acting as the master repository and spatial analysis tool, glueing the information together. This talk will discuss how Crossrail arrived at this solution, how it is currently being used and how we plan to enhance it in the future. To download a PDF of the seminar please click here. In addition, here are some facts about Crossrail that @oobr tweeted during the seminar: – Crossrail is so vast that has its own coordinate reference system – London Survey Grid. British National Grid was not accurate enough. – Crossrail route has to weave through not just existing tube lines but also the post office […]
Continue reading »In one of the more unusual invitations that I’ve received over the past few years, I was asked to speak about visualisation and open data at Transport Ticketing 2012, currently happening down in South Ken. Interestingly, in spite of …
Continue reading »As Editor of Future Internet i am pleased to announce that Nathan Jurgenson of the University of Maryland has just published a new paper entitled ‘When Atoms Meet Bits: Social Media, the Mobile Web and Augmented Revolution’:
The rise…
Continue reading »As Editor of Future Internet i am pleased to announce that Nathan Jurgenson of the University of Maryland has just published a new paper entitled ‘When Atoms Meet Bits: Social Media, the Mobile Web and Augmented Revolution’:
The rise…
Continue reading »A friend of mine has just started using Python, and asked me for a quick run down of the basic syntax. Given that, wherever possible, I try to live my life according…
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