# Cellular Clay Multifamily Habitation by Saken Narynov

Kazakh architect and artist Saken Narynov created a superstructure able to host what we could call an adobe vertical city. In fact, the structure is used as a matrix that can be more or less densely filled with multifamily habitation units.
The traditional earth based material thus hybrids with the steel structure in a very unusual and interesting way and the space resulting between the habitation units and the structure is beautifully occupied by mazes of staircases and elevated pathways.

# Bildbauten by Philipp Schaerer

The series of images created by Philipp Schaerer entitled Bildbauten (built picture in German) includes twenty five rendering of monolithic buildings that seem to have been produced by their environment in some sort of camouflaged bunkers.

Here is the description thanks to which the Swiss artist describes his work:

The series of images with the title „Bildbauten“ deals with the effect and the claim to credibility of images of architecture that appear to be photographs. It further questions the medium “photograph” as a documentary piece of evidence depicting reality.

Frontal views of fictional architectures serve as an example. By means of their exaggerated and orchestrated way of representation, they model themselves on the object-like appearance and the formal language of contemporary architecture in a rather ironic way. All images try to reproduce a reality. They are not a photograph; instead, they were newly designed and constructed from scratch by means of image synthesis and digital image editing.

originally found on butdoesitfloats

# Sadic Apiaries by Brian Buckner & Loukia Tsafoulia

The fifth studio Francois Roche has been tutoring at Columbia University since 2006 recently presented its last projects. One of them drove an interesting conversation between the jury and its authors, Brian Buckner & Loukia Tsafoulia. For this year's studio, Francois Roche was assisted by Ezio Blasetti and Dave Pigram

For the second year, this studio was experimenting processes of life and death of an architecture; in this regard, Sadic Apiaries is a system composed by two robots and thousand of bees. The first robot is used as a mobile matrix for the bees to build the hives architecture, while the second robot exercises a sadistic role on the bees via smoke throw in order to orient the construction.
With time, the wax loose of its consistency (and color) and eventually disintegrates, thus triggering the death of this architecture.

As I wrote earlier, an interesting discussion occurred during the final presentation involving a Darwinist vision of the project that was involving a mutation of the bees making them more resistant to the machine and therefore able to "revolt" against this sadistic apparatus. This revolt drives us to the second vision that was expressed, a Marxist vision of capitalism in which a transcendental will was organizing an energy production into a material product leading to a use of this product by the same transcendental entity.

The following text is Brian and Loukia's interpretation of their project:

Can we orient production of the nature to produce architecture?

Can we use the animal organization to generate the (un)natural artifice?

Can we employ sadistic instruments to torture the animal to construct a domesticity of wax?

Can we use the paradox that the immateriality of smoke creates space?
Through an employment of sadistic instruments within an artificial hive apparatus, a multiplicity of bee colonies constructs a domesticity of wax over a period of time.

The protocol for construction is the utilization of a natural agent animal — the honey bee — its expended energy, and its consequential construct. The bee is the assembler and its derivatives are the spatial artifact.

The process begins in the containment device — a cavernous, mobile, artificial housing — that reveals its interior construct of layered wax honeycomb with time. The containment device actively engages and amends the agents’ behaviors by negotiating the solid void relationship inherent in the agents’ constructive nature. Over time the exposure to external biotope defines a battle between the natural conditions and the semi - artificial structure.

The machine creates a symbiotic relationship with the bee; it enters into a machinic assemblage with it. It therefore extends beyond any earlier distinction between the mechanical and the organic and includes both domains. It is composed of organic and inorganic parts which act together to constitute its life and to produce its power and speed.

A sequence of internal sadistic devices intent upon aggravating and torturing the bees further calculates the consequence of the agents’ energy. The instruments employ smoke to ensure a continuous void space for habitation through the hive construction and create surface deformation of the structure.

There is an interaction between the human body and the structure, the living space, fresh as flesh, supple and formable. In this sense the human body shapes the adaptable wax structure. The space is formed according to the humans’ postures and needs. At the same time the structure either compels the human body to crawl, to contract, or permits it to be released, to stand, defining different spatial qualities.

The hypothesis is focused on controlling the energy of the bee so as to produce architecture full of natural odor, taste, sounds, and touch that moves, wet and slippery in some areas, sticky and hairy in others; a structure that will at last be cannibalized by its natural context justifying the internal process of Birth and Thanatos.

# Sofia Krimizi's first year studio at Pratt /// Khilna Shah & Inti Rojanasopondist

Since September, my friend Sofia Krimizi has been teaching a studio in the first year of the Pratt Institute's undergraduate program. The assignment consisted in a series of three projects related to each other which was exploring both the notion of mass/void and the notion of joint. Several projects can be said to have been successful but the two following ones reached a level of intelligence that is rare in this early stage of the studies.

The first one has been designed by Khilna Shah. She managed to create a model working only in tension and which allow enough elasticity in order to carry a variable amount of weights that would modify the structure's morphology.

The second project, created by Inti Rojanasopondist is divided into two clear different phases. The first one is a sort of clothe assembled by wooden pieces in friction that give to the model a acupuntural masochism dimension. The second phase is a monumental labyrinth which paths are visible from everywhere but only accessible by certain points.

# Bunker 599 + 603 by Rietveld Landscape

After Interaction Between the Elements, here is another project by Rietveld Landscape I wanted to publish. Bunker 599 + 603 is the story of a Matta Clarkian cut in the middle of a bunker on the Dutch coast. The most massive and close architecture thus becomes permeable and proposes to the viewer, a three dimensional section of this mass of concrete.

Here is the official text related to the project:

Bunker 599 + 603

This project lays bare two secrets of the New Dutch Waterline (NDW), a military line of defence in use from 1815 until 1940 protecting the cities of Muiden, Utrecht, Vreeswijk and Gorinchem by means of intentional flooding.

A seemingly indestructible bunker with monumental status is sliced open. The design thereby opens up the minuscule interior of one of NDW’s 700 bunkers, the insides of which are normally cut off from view completely. In addition, a long wooden boardwalk cuts through the extremely heavy construction. It leads visitors to a flooded area and to the footpaths of the adjacent natural reserve. The pier and the piles supporting it remind them that the water surrounding them is not caused by e.g. the removal of sand but rather is a shallow water plain characteristic of the inundations in times of war.

The sliced up bunker forms a publicly accessible attraction for visitors of the NDW. It is moreover visible from the A2 highway and can thus also be seen by tens of thousand of passers-by each day. The project is part of the overall strategy of Rietveld Landscape | Atelier de Lyon to make this unique part of Dutch history accessible and tangible for a wide variety of visitors.

# The Last Land by Hans Schabus

Here is the project that Hans Schabus achieved for the Venice Art Biennale 2005: a monumental piece of rock in the middle of the Giardini. The inside part is as impressive as the outside with numerous wooden beams and posts maintaining the building's structural integrity.

# New Works by Yojiro Imasaka

Yojiro Imasaka is currently achieving his Master in Fine Arts in Pratt Institute and his New Works has been exhibited this year at the Steuben Gallery in New York. Those photographs explore the interstitial voids between high buildings, thus creating some ambiguous corridors driven by a gradient light.

# Mechanical Living by Nelson Larroque

Mechanical Living is a project designed by Nelson Larroque within Peter Cook's studio at the Ecole Speciale d'Architecture in Paris (studio that I was lucky enough to be part four years ago). This project is a very literal vision of dwellings created in former industrial sites which facilities manage to supply energy.