tamu aias

Maybe this will be available for all kinds of things in the future … like famous architectural sites ? ( cough … google … ) maybe some huge internet monster of a company can do this for all kinds of places all over the whole that have some significance … 

When geologists wanted a better look at a Yosemite rock face in years past, they only had one option: climb the cliff.

But now, thanks to super-high resolution gigapixel images created by a team of 70 photographers using GigaPan robotic imagers and a laser-mapping airplane, park geologist Greg Stock now has unprecedented access to the geological features of one of the world’s most famous parks. And all from the comfort of his laptop.

“When you’re climbing, your primary purpose is just surviving,” Stock said. “You can make some observations, but it’s a lot harder.”

The Yosemite Extreme Panoramic Imaging Project is a Microsoft-sponsored collaboration between Los Angeles-based photography studio, xRez, and the National Park Service, intended to help Stock catalog and understand dangerous rock slides in Yosemite. Printed out at magazine-quality 300 dpi resolution, the photos stretch uninterrupted for 40 feet.

“People have been documenting rock fall in Yosemite for 150 years but we’re doing it now with a precision that other people couldn’t have dreamed of,” Stock said. “Every rock-fall event begins with the basic documentation: Where was it, how big was it, and why did it happen? And sometimes these photos are the only way of ascertaining those things.”

via wired

Professor Culp may teach you how to do it via LEED skills  - but why not just turn off your lights? …

via designboom

Monday, November 10th, 5:00 p.m. Geren Auditorium

Hernan Diaz Alonso is the principal and founder of Xefirotarch, a Los Angeles-based design firm working in architecture, products, and digital motion. For the last several years he has been a thesis coordinator and professor in studio design and visual studies at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles. He is also a design studio professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. He worked for several years as a senior designer at Eisenman Architects in New York and has lectured around the world.

Hernan Diaz Alonso is hailed as an architect who pushes boundaries and breaks the rules. His recent winning design for the Lexington Courthouse Plaza (though not the design being built)is a close-to-home example of the tension between cutting-edge design and the inertia of the expected.

Alonso, who has also worked with both Enric Miralles and Peter Eisenman, is uniquely primed to contribute to our current cultural discourse. He continues to challenge with each project, such as the Aqua Center in Denmark and the Queens Museum of Art in New York. The PSI competition. etc.

Alonso received his professional degree in architecture in Argentina, his M.Arch at Columbia University.

via coolhunter

It’s a perfect metaphor for the teetering global real-estate market: Capital Gate, the glassy tower at the center of Abu Dhabi’s $2.2 billion Capital Centre development, has just been submitted to the Guinness Book of World Records as the “world’s most inclined building,” according to the press release. (I prefer “leaningest.”)

Capital Gate practically swoons with a queasy 18-degree westward tilt, easily besting Pisa’s paltry 3.9 degrees. (The more famous building’s accidental declivity comes from a shoddy foundation and loose soil, problems that Capital Gate’s architect, RMJM, expects to stave off with a steel diagrid structure and hundred-foot-deep piles.)

The 35-story tower, which includes a five-star Hyatt hotel, should be completed next fall, but given the tanking world economy, I’m not sure the developers have fully realized its symbolic potential. Why not, for example, tie the building’s angle to the stock markets’ sinking fortunes and turn Capitol Gate into a a huge art-installation-cum-roller-coaster?

recap: +4X more tilted than the Leaning Tower at Pisa, 8 story deep piles, 35 stories tall, steel diagrid

via metropolis mag

“Imagine Learning from Las Vegas as illustrated by Chris Ware, and you’ll get a sense of François Blanciak’s marvelously inventive new book, Siteless: 1001 Building Forms (The MIT Press, 2008).

“Blanciak, a French architect who has worked alongside Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, and the Danish provocateur Bjarke Ingels, now lives in Japan, where he is a research fellow at the University of Tokyo. In Siteless, his first book, he displays an equal gift for playfulness and rigor, drawing by hand 1001 building types—fanciful and sometimes impossible—with no thought paid to site, program, or budget….”

via wired