From the description of the above video at PopSci:

Using nearly half a million Flickr photos of Rome, Venice, and the Croatian coastal city of Dubrovnik, a team of computer scientists at the University of Washington’s Graphics and Imaging Laboratory assembled digital models of the three cities in 3-D… Each video includes clusters of small diamond shapes, which represent each photographer and his or her vantage point.  The team built a new algorithm that proceeds in two steps — first, by matching the photos by what they had in common, puzzle-style, and then by determining the scene and each photographer’s pose.

I wonder if Regina Bittner has seen this. It immediately made me think of this article she wrote for Volume Magazine. This isn’t a model of Dubrovnik, it is a model of our collected visual record of that city – which is far more interesting, in my opinion.  Wouldn’t it be wonderful if this model was constantly accessible through an iphone app?  And constantly updated?  (Kind of like this). You’re walking around the city, and decide that one of your favorite nooks is lacking in detail, so you snap some extra pictures.  Upload them to flickr and tag them.  A few extra polygons further define the model, the crowd-sourced 3-dimensional map developing in real-time.  How many false images would it take to hack the model?  Citizen activists or a private developer pushing for a future project decide to show their vision to the world, and upload thousands of computer renderings photo-montaged into photographs of the existing site, the new geometry competing with the old, our memories mingling with our aspirations.

[via Gizmodo and Nam]

People love living in suburbs. Urbanites often imagine them to be sterile cultural wastelands, but the suburbs host vibrant and diverse communities. While not everyone who dwells in a suburb does so out of love, many do.

Yet there are serious problems with the suburbs. They are energy inefficient, lack public space, and are often hostile to pedestrians. The root of these problems is that suburbs use too much land. The typically suggested solution to this problem remodels the suburbs after the city: building more buildings on smaller lots.

But if we want to imagine a suburban future that solves the many issues created by problematic land-use patterns, we ought to envision one that appeals to dwellers who love the suburbs.

The amount of land offered to each inhabitant is also one of the most cherished characteristics of suburbs. Rather than force suburbanites to use less land, why not make more land in the suburbs?

This new land-surface can be programmed indirectly through the modification of its properties, such as slope, support, perforation, and thickness. These inform a range of possible uses for the surface without strictly defining them, leaving room for the surface to be appropriated according to cultural and market forces. Further, the surface becomes a point of agency for counteracting the above noted land-use issues. By making more land, we can add more of what people love about the suburbs while (ironically) ameliorating problems created by wasting land.

HOW DARE THEY.

Is this Landscape Urbanism?

Or is this?

More on Seoul here.

And here.

Eat your heart out Richard Serra.  http://www.edwardburtynsky.com > ships > shipbreaking.

After reading this post I was referred to here by a friend:

http://www.edwardburtynsky.com/

It turns out to be doubly relevant to recent posts: not only containing beautiful images of manufactured landscapes, but also absolutely stunning images of shipbreaking in Chittagong, Bangladesh.

via Nico Sy, who doesn’t have a blog but probably should.

Architects, more like this, please. Script corporeal properties, not falsely determinist “energy flows”.