Interesting seminar at SFI this coming week.
Seminar Abstract
*Wednesday, February 13, 2008* ? 12:15 PM ? Medium Conference Room, SFI
*Nicholas de Monchaux* University of California, Berkeley
*Spacesuits and Cities*
In the last five years, the language of self-organization and evolutionary
development has become influential in architectural design ? particularly at
the level of formal research. In a recently drafted manuscript* ? (to be
published by Princeton Architectural Press), the design and evolution of an
extreme designed environment, the Apollo A7L Spacesuit, is used as a case
study of the limits and possibilities of such language in architectural
design. Against the background of a large-scale population shift to urban
environments, and a crisis of confidence in the ability of traditional
architectural & planning techniques to deal with accelerating urban change,
'Spacesuit' draws a set of lessons from the extreme context of human
dwelling on the lunar surface to offer both prediction, and (anti-)
prescription for making places here on earth.
*First presented as a SFI public lecture in 2003, "Spacesuit" studies the
soft, 21-layered Apollo suit's design and manufacture by the Playtex Bra &
Girdle company, and its victory over competing 'hard' designs, as a case
study in the evolution and design of human shelter. Recent work has extended
the thesis of the project to an urban scale, relating both to the historic
context of the suit's development (in which, to give one example, arguments
for a systems approach were extended directly from the context of the space
program to the Department of Housing and Urban Development's "Operation
Breakthrough"), and also to recent research into the crucial, informal and
adaptive qualities of urban environments.
*Host: Geoffrey B. West*
--
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J. T. Johnson
Institute for Analytic Journalism -- Santa Fe, NM USA
www.analyticjournalism.com
505.577.6482(c) 505.473.9646(h)
http://www.jtjohnson.com tom at jtjohnson.com
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the
existing model obsolete."
-- Buckminster Fuller
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