AndrewBlum.net

Floor It! (Wired)

En Suite Garages Make for Dee-Luxe Apartments in the Sky (link)
In most Manhattan apartments, a closet counts as a bonus. But a new condo building at 200 Eleventh Avenue in Chelsea ( conveniently located just steps from a nudie bar and a taxicab body shop) takes New York real estate excess to dizzying heights. Behold the En-Suite Sky Garage — an 8,000-pound-capacity freight elevator that whisks your Bentley directly into your pad. Of course, vertical parking is an old idea: At the Starrett-Lehigh Building, two blocks away, massive lifts that could accommodate entire boxcars of cargo once connected a ground floor rail yard with upstairs loading docks. Today, Martha Stewart rides those same elevators in her car to get to her office. At 200 Eleventh, this extravagance will run you at least seven figures — though it looks like every unit will be spoken for when the building opens in 2008. The cheapest garage-equipped two-bedroom carries a $4.7 million price tag, and the 3,585-square-foot penthouse runs $16.8 million. But, really, bringing your car inside is a luxury only in Gotham. As coordinating architect Sara Lopergolo puts it, "It's like suburbia in the sky."

San Francisco Federal Building (AIASF podcast)

San Francisco Federal Building from AIA San Francisco on Vimeo.

Produced for the exhibition STREET CRED San Francisco: Architecture and the Pedestrian Experience, this podcast features architect Thom Mayne, principal of the Los Angles-based firm Morphosis and designer of the new San Francisco Federal Building, in conversation with Andrew Blum, a Brooklyn-based writer and contributing editor at Metropolis and Wired magazines. Mayne discusses the social implications of his most recently built project—both in terms of how it serves federal employees and the public. Produced and edited by Melanie McGraw, with photography by Keith Baker, Tim Griffith, and an introduction by exhibition co-curator Julie Kim. (link)

Olafur Eliasson is Playing With Your Mind (Wired News)

Weather Project Artist Eliasson Brings Techie Installations to U.S. (link)

For Take Your Time, a major new exhibition that opened September 8 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the internationally-celebrated artist Olafur Eliasson changed out the gallery lights, put mirrors on the ceilings, created a small fog bank, filled a room with a pool of water, and turned a skywalk into a trippy disco kaleidoscope, all in an effort to tinker with the way we experience space and light, and how we navigate the world. Open through February, the exhibition travels to New York's Museum of Modern Art and P.S. 1 in April, then to the Dallas Museum of Art in November 2008.

Eliason became famous as an artist in 2003, when 2 million people visited The Weather Project, a giant installation at London's Tate Modern that created an artificial sun from 200 yellow sodium lamps.

But, explains SFMOMA curator Madeleine Grynsztejn, Eliasson's work is never mere special effects. Like a DIY guru morphed into an international art star, Eliasson likes to show the mechanisms behind his artwork. "The revelation of his process is part and parcel of the work," says Grynsztejn. "It's equal parts 'wow' and 'a-ha.'"

The Big Pixel (Print Magazine)

The future of "mediatecture" (link)

In his 2001 book, Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies, architect James Sanders describes the relationship between the city and iconic films like Annie Hall and Miracle on 34th Street. Recently, though, as he discussed at a recent event in New York, Sanders has been thinking a lot about Shark Tale. True, it’s a movie about talking fish, but Sanders sees in it a compelling vision of a city of the future, in which the lines between real events and their video representation become blurred. In one scene, TV newscaster “Katie Current” reports live on a battle against a villainous shark. At the climactic moment, the shark smashes into an outdoor video screen—which turns out to be the very screen we’ve been watching Katie on, in the center of Times Square. In an explosion of flashbulbs and falling fish, we are confronted with what Sanders sees as the coming urban reality: a city that is simultaneously itself and its media representation.

Illuminated signs in public spaces have been around for a century, but recent advances in LED and projection technology are bringing us closer to truly transforming buildings into video screens. Boosters of this phenomenon call it “mediatecture.” For advertisers, it’s obviously irresistible; for the rest of us walking around the city, it could be either terrifying or thrilling. What’s clear is that the final effect depends enormously on designers and their ability to wrangle a larger canvas than ever before. We’ve arrived at a strange time when many designers must scramble to create good solutions for tiny cell-phone screens and, at the same time, devise the best approach for a quarter-acre of pixels.

Since the Sony JumboTron debuted at the 1985 world’s fair in Japan, enormous public video screens have become a familiar sight. But LED technology, with its lower operating temperatures, eliminates the need for big cooling mechanisms to be built behind the screen. The tipping-point products in this more streamlined genre have been developed by ag4, a German architecture and media design company, in partnership with GKD Metal Fabrics (which produces woven metal fabrics for interiors and exteriors). Mediamesh and Illumesh embed LEDs, along with all power and control cabling, into a structural metal mesh resembling an elegant security grate. The electronics are sleek enough to be transparent, so the screen can be used on a full facade without blocking daylight in or views out. For the same reason, it doesn’t look like a blank black wall when turned off. This doesn’t come cheap—prices hover around $200 per square foot—but that hasn’t prevented installation on a handful of buildings in Europe (including projects for Adidas and the 2006 Cannes Film Festival) and, soon, outside shopping malls in California.