# 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.

# 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.

# 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.

# Stadium Tower in Detroit by Kendra James

Last May, I published two of the three projects (Another Dance Macabre and Underground City) from Thomas Leeser's studio in Pratt Institute that I wanted to show; here is the third one.
Stadium Tower in Detroit is a project narrated by Kendra James who proposes a monument to Detroit's status of "ruin-city" by erecting a frenzied building hosting a bunch of various sizes stadium and a car-park race track.
This project is the expression of the non-thaumaturge power of architecture and thus an invitation to sublimate problems rather than trying to solve them.

# Data Fossils by Tobias Jewson

Data Fossils is the last project of the series about the RIBA President's medals projects. It is a project designed by Tobias Jewson for Liam Young (from Tomorrow's Thoughts Today) and Kate Davies' studio at the AA.
This very interesting project dramatizes a near future where digital data would be biocomputerly archived (fossilized) within organic tissues and mineral substance. In this latest case, Tobias introduces the geological constitution of monumental earth archives in Iceland, offered to far future archeologists.

Here is his text:
In the digital era our information no longer takes the form of the physical, but that of a electronic file stored in ‘the cloud’. Our collective history is quickly effaced from this fragile and ephemeral domain, a computer crashes, formats are quickly obsolete, a hard drive is lost and all is gone. With our attachment to physical objects and mementos becoming increasingly superseded by our relationship to information, what will we leave for future generations?
The project employs design speculation as a critical tool to explore the potential ways in which architecture and landscape may respond to our ever evolving digital fascination. ‘Data Fossils’ has evolved as a series of fictional scenarios grounded in technically rigorous physical and computational investigations. Real techniques have been developed for encoding digital information in the physical world at both individual and collective scales.
Advances in biocomputing are allowing the possibility of storing data in living, physical forms. As the division between our bodies and the digital becomes increasingly blurred, the bone’s ability to remodel itself, in response to stress, can be hacked to provide data storage. Polyps of calcified binary code become written onto our skeleton, recounting our digital identities- a poet’s finest sonnet is read like Braille through his skin; an Internet glutton’s hoarded browser bookmarks cripple his every movement, our remains become an archaeology of memories.
Our collective history can be deposited in columns and strata of earth – where once archivists trawled the library stacks, data geologists now roam the Icelandic landscape. Hoards of machines traverse the lava deserts, scraping loose sand from the surface, and under immense heat transforming it into elaborate glass like geometries, within which our recent internet activities are encased. Topsoil blown by the harsh arctic winds soon gathers in the lee side of these immense structures, the grounded geological layer sprouting grass and moss.
Over time, habitats will grow in the glimmering hollows as fields of data slowly reverse Icelandic soil erosion. Local Islanders read the growth of this landscape from afar, whilst archaeologists look close ,using advanced MRI scanners, searching for insights into our past. And while tourists might flock to see history in the making archaeologists will read the dull fragments of frozen silica as records of our digital pasts.

Software application developed to encode data inputs in physical artefacts.
Software application developed to encode data inputs into the calcifying strucutre of our bones.

Archaeologists decode skeletal remains to bring back a dead poets lost works.
The informational glutton is bogged down by spam and excessive downloads.

Illegal immigrants conceal their data, and copy and paste new identities.

Like climate records trapped in ice cores data archiving can also become a geological process.
Software developed for the realtime growth of data geology from live twitter streams.
Software application developed to encode data inputs into structural building elements.

The machines use the immense heat of burning thermite to fuse sand into intricate data forests of volcanic glass.

Schematics of data archiving machines and physical experiments with thermite glass making.
Experiencing the informational landscape.

Data archeologists deciphering one of the oldest areas of the informational landscape.

People pilgrimage to this area known to hold the last data relating to flurry of internet activity from the day Michael Jackson died.