And the new White House is...

The White House Redux competition results have been announced!

First Prize: #834
J.P. Maruszczak, Ryan Manning (assistant), Roger Connah

Second Prize: #1485
David Iseri, Jefferson Frost, Justin Kruse, Laura Sperry

Third Prize (Shared):
#198
Grant Gibson, Chris-AnnMarie Spencer
#1369
Wayne Congar, Arrielle Assouline-Lichten

Honorable Mention: #892
Pieterjan Ginckels, Julian Friedauer

Congratulations to all the winners – and a gigantic thanks to everyone who participated.
It was a lengthy, but very, very fun jury process, as partially documented in the video, below, and I have about half-a-million things I still want to add to the discussion, but I'll wait until the popular vote is announced on October 3 before putting up a longer post.

[Image: The White House Redux jury meeting for a quick breakfast on the Die Hard-like unfinished 45th floor of World Trade Center 7 in New York; photo by Marty Hyers].

Meanwhile, watch the jury deliberate at the end of the day (it was dark outside before we all left the building):


It's interesting to watch this and the vox populi poll back to back:


More soon.

Into the Woods

A new exhibition called Forest, curated by Cécile Martin, opens up tomorrow night in Montreal. For the show, "artists and architects have joined forces to propose a new vision of the forest."

There are three pavilions in all: "three installations that invite one to penetrate and explore the movements and dangers of the canopy, soil and hidden dangers of the forest." They include the poetically named "From Chernobyl to Montreal, the Incandescent Zen Garden," whose creators note that "the natural phenomena of radioactivity and sound waves are amplified," with part of the installation "illuminated night and day by a red light, the same one that made the forest – the Red Forest – adjacent to the Chernobyl nuclear reactor vibrate."
This slightly unclear image nonetheless leaves me wondering what the biological effects might be if you could cause a several-acre test-forest to vibrate constantly: what strange roots and branches would grow? Would constant vibration cause radically new tree structures to grow – or just make for some very happy plants?
It'd be like the sound farm, only more tactile – and far stranger.
A perpetual earthquake as a lab for cultivating the unnatural.
The other two pavilions, meanwhile, are "The Macrocosm of Fiber or the Filtering Pavilion" and "The Mobile Branch, A Forest of Hypnosis and Vertigo." The latter project, a collaboration between architect Philip Beesley – whose work was explored here a few years ago – and artist Patrick Beaulieu, is described a kind of animatronic thicket: "A raised three-dimensional flooring and a cover propelled at 300 rotations per minute form a vibrating dance of branches and twigs, constituting a human-sized space of the in-between from which humans are nevertheless excluded."
You wander into a forest – only to realize that it's not a forest at all, but a vast machine...
There are a series of workshops on Friday and Saturday, as well – so if you're anywhere near Montreal, check it out! Tell them you heard about it on BLDGBLOG.

White House Redux: The Book

The White House Redux competition – discussed earlier this summer on National Public Radio – will soon be a book:

With almost 500 submissions from 42 countries around the world, White House Redux, a competition launched by Storefront for Art and Architecture and Control Group last January, became one of the most talked-about architecture competitions in 2008. The brief was simple: what would the residence of the most powerful individual in the world, the White House in Washington, D.C., look like if it were designed today?

Published to coincide with the opening of an exhibition of the competition's results at Storefront for Art and Architecture, White House Redux—The Book contains a compendium of documentation related to the competition and an overview of the results. It includes essays by Joseph Grima (Storefront for Art and Architecture) and Geoff Manaugh (BLDGBLOG and Dwell Magazine), a history of the existing White House and 123 selected projects as well as the four winning submissions. A jury assessed the submissions in the spectacular setting of the 45th floor of the World Trade Center Tower 7, a process documented in the book's 30-page photoessay by Marty Hyers.

The book is to be available for pre-order and will ship on October 2, 2008, to coincide with the prizegiving and opening of White House Redux at Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York. White House Redux was printed in a limited edition of 500 copies.

734 pages, color and black & white (7.8” x10.5”)
$39 USD Shipping: $5 (USA), $12 (Rest of the world)
Discounts available on shipping for multiple copies

With a print-run of only 500, the book should go fast – so order a copy before they all disappear.

(Note: This might be my last post here for a few days, as I'm going away for a quick – but much-needed – family vacation).

Outer Darkness

Apparently, "almost half" of the fluorescent light bulbs used in the Japanese module of the International Space Station have begun burning out far earlier than expected.
An entire section of the station thus might soon be left in darkness.

[Image: Kibo, the Japanese module of the International Space Station, soon to be without internal light].

Although an impending delivery of new bulbs will undoubtedly bring light back to the failing module, the implication that astronauts aboard something like the International Space Station – or some special, trans-galaxial touring edition, launched twenty-five years from now – might be faced with total darkness, a darkness from which they cannot be rescued, is mind-boggling.
At the very least it would make a great film: ten minutes into what you think is a science fiction adventure story, all the lights on the ship go out. There is no way to replace the bulbs.
The next hour and a half you listen – after all, you can't watch – as a group of orbiting athletes and scientists slowly comes to grips with their situation. They are drifting out past the rings of Saturn inside a strange constellation of unlit rooms – and they will never have light in the station again.
Five years from now one of them will still be alive, half-insane, speaking into a dead transmitter. The price of seeing stars is darkness, he whispers to himself over and over again, as his failing eyes gaze out upon nebulas and planets he'll never reach.

(Via Wired Science).

The Landscape Anthropology of Photography Museums (and the spatial implications of graven images)

[Image: A new wing for the Museum of Photography in Charleroi by l'Escaut; photo by Filip Dujardin].

Belgian architects and scenographers l'Escaut have completed a new wing for the Museum of Photography in Charleroi, Belgium.
In an email received this morning, l'Escaut describes the project as being "situated at the intersection of architecture, landscape, city planning, photography and fine arts."
This wide-ranging program, they go on to point out, "matches the interdisciplinarity of l'Escaut both in its daily life (l'Escaut is situated in a building shared with theatre actors and artists) as in its architecture practice (anthropology, landscaping, city planning, communication intervene in the projects)."
They are not really architects, in other words; they practice something more like landscape anthropology.

[Images: A new wing for the Museum of Photography in Charleroi by l'Escaut; photos by Filip Dujardin].

L'Escaut's new wing is a surprising addition to the existing structure.
Partly raised on stilts, partly cantilevered, and almost entirely defined by a very clean-lined modern geometry, the added galleries nonetheless include a brief glimpse of botanical free-will: a "winter garden" that "shelters fragrant plants inside the museum." Photosynthesis meets photography.

[Image: A new wing for the Museum of Photography in Charleroi by l'Escaut; photo by Filip Dujardin].

The galleries themselves, we're told, are part of an overall "spatial scenography" of the site. Everything here is about views, counter-views, cross-views, and panoramas. Everything helps to frame everything else.
The architecture itself is photographic, you could say: the rooms flow into each other through a succession of bare white walls and exposed concrete, as if the space has been edited.
This raises the question, though, of the point at which space, actively experienced, becomes cinematic.
Are buildings ever truly photographic, or are they more like short films?

[Images: A new wing for the Museum of Photography in Charleroi by l'Escaut; photos by Filip Dujardin].

In any case, the story behind the original building itself is fascinating: it turns out that the Museum of Photography is a former Carmelite convent. The grounds include what used to be the nuns' orchard.
This entails all sorts of interesting theological problems, as we'll see.

[Image: A new wing for the Museum of Photography in Charleroi by l'Escaut; photo by Filip Dujardin].

Religious prohibitions against "graven images" become abstractly involved in the planning process:

The transformation of the convent into a museum of photography was a reverse process of existing logics in the building. A place where looking at the world was forbidden because of religious reasons became a place of revelation of the image for societal reasons. Its extension defies conventional museum logics by multiplying the relationships to photography, its history and its many facets of representation.

In other words, is a museum of photography – a temple of the graven image – a site for the "revelation of the image," as the architects write – an inherent violation of Christian doctrine?
Is it de facto heresy to celebrate photography in a site formerly dedicated to the worship of god?
These unresolved tensions help to animate the interlinked spaces of the museum itself.

[Image: A new wing for the Museum of Photography in Charleroi by l'Escaut; photo by Filip Dujardin].

Here are some photos of the construction process, More about the project, meanwhile, can be found here.

Artificial Migration Routes for Monarch Butterflies

Something about the previous post reminded me of a project by Elliott Malkin called Graffiti For Butterflies.

[Images: Graffiti For Butterflies by Elliott Malkin].

Graffiti For Butterflies attempts to "direct" monarch butterflies "along migratory routes in North America," using "images of milkweed flowers to broadcast the location of food sources."
Malkin applies sunblock to these images in order "to optimize the graffiti for butterfly vision." He calls this Urban Interspecies Communication.
Overlooking the most basic question here – of whether or not this would actually work – the very idea that we might deliberately construct an alternative visual system inside our cities, legible only to other species, is totally fascinating. What devices of route-finding and navigation could we purposefully produce for non-humans?
Is there a burgeoning field of graphic design for other species? Post-human signage and symbology?
There are already olfactory labyrinths left behind by dogs, for instance, and there are accidental but extraordinarily complex sense-trails following us everywhere – from food scraps to automobile exhaust to whiffs of perfume on the subway – but what deliberate "graffiti," otherwise undetectable by humans, could we create in order to help other species navigate the urban world?
Using special UV paints to mark artificial migration routes across the continent seems like an amazing way to begin the investigation.

The Brain in Space (Cognition and the City)

[Image: Route-finding and spatial perception in the brain; via the BBC].

Like something out of a short story by China Miéville, "scientists have uncovered evidence for an inbuilt 'sat-nav' system in the brains of London taxi drivers," the BBC reports. "They used magnetic scanners to explore the brain activity of taxi drivers as they navigated their way through a virtual simulation of London's streets. Different brain regions were activated as they considered route options, spotted familiar landmarks or thought about their customers."
Taxi cab drivers' brains, we read, "even 'grow on the job' as they build up detailed information needed to find their way around London's labyrinth of streets – information famously referred to as 'The Knowledge'."
It's interesting to note, meanwhile, that this appears to be an almost complete retread of news released more than eight years ago. There we learn not only that "the hippocampus is at the front of the brain," but that it "was examined in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans on 16 London cabbies."
Cabbies' brains, that article reports, "'grow' on the job."
However, it's also interesting to speculate here that "sat-nav" was not referred to by that earlier article because certain technologies – such as dashboard navigation and handheld GPS – simply had not yet reached an adequate price-point, or the required level of social acceptance, for "sat-nav" to be useful to that writer as a metaphor.
If this were true, then perhaps you could track the infiltration of GPS and sat-nav technologies into the fabric of everyday life by the speed with which they have become recognizable as urban-spatial metaphors.

(Via Boing Boing and Geoffrey S. George).