In the latest issue of Wallpaper the future Ljubljana Air Traffic Control Tower gets it’s 15 minutes of fame. Well I have to say that i do like our retro airport, but agree that it’s time to shift into the 5th gear. I can’t wait to get some more news about it… but for now this is the only “teaser” i could find:

Air traffic controllers at Ljublana airport will be moving out of their 1960s tower and into this splendis new 100m structure in 2008. The airport is expanding with a new terminal, hence the need for new tower and air traffic control centre. According to Boštjan Vuga, of Slovenia’s Sadar Vuga Architects, air traffic controllers can use the centre to “relax after intense working hours, read, work out, look at the mountains or sleep in a capsule dorm”.

And what I find cool is that on the same page they talk about the new towers for ground zero in New York.

I found this post about an abandoned housing in Taipei some time ago. The architecture is amazing, almost like a sort of a shelter on the moon. I’d love to shoot some rolls of 6×6 around there.

The area is called San Zhi. They say it’s been built in the early to the end of 60s. There are no named architects since the whole site was commissioned by the government and several local firms. They were trying to create a posh luxurious vacation spot for the affluent and rich streaming out of Taipei. Now this is where things get weird. The local papers say there were numerous accidents during its construction, and as news spread to the urbanites of the island state, nobody wanted to vacation there, much less visit. Locals say the area is now haunted by those who died in vain and because they are not remembered, they linger there unable to pass on.

This explains why the area was abandoned. If the site is haunted, no amount of redevelopment is going to bring the masses to that spot. Even demolishing it is out of the question because destroying the homes of spirits and lost souls is a HUGE no-no in Asian culture.

You can find some more pictures on the Formica Flicker site and on Electro-plankton.

The Musée du Quai Branly also known as the museum of “art and civilisation of Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas” just opened last week. It’s really close to our place next to the Eiffel Tower. We tried to go there this week-end as it was opened to the public for free for 3 days but this also meant queueing for 3 hours so we are going to wait a bit longer.
Anyway, the site and the building are amazing. The project was made by Jean Nouvel, famous french architect also known for his previous work like the Fondation Cartier of contemporary art.
This museum is in fact the legagy of the current french president, Jacques Chirac. It has become some kind of a tradition for each president to leave his architectural imprint on the Paris skyline. Georges Pompidou had his Pompidou Centre, completed after his death. François Mitterrand a pyramid in the courtyard of the Louvre, the Bastille opera house, the grand arch of la Défense and a national library.
You can check out a few of our pics here!

While doing a major research for my master thesis from interactive architecture i found this cool idea from electrical engineering students at the Delft University of Technology. They have build an interactive 3D-display called MatriXX with 8000(!) ping pong balls equipped with red LED lights. At the moment this is the biggest 3D-display on the world having 8 metres in width, 4 metres in height and 2 metres in depth. It plays your favourite games like snake, pong, duckhunt and it can also display SMS messages, simple animations, movies – all that with freaky 3rd dimension. Go for it ppl!

P.S.
For this installation 3.2 km of wire was used.

WHY?

Short answer (1): Because the ETV (association for electrical engineering students at the TU Delft, The Netherlands) celebrates her 100th birthday this year.

Short answer (2): Because we can.

Long answer:
Part of the centennial celebration is this 'lustrumstunt', which is performed every 5 years. The MatriXX is based on an idea by James Clarr. The ETV is an association with a rich history. For over a hundred years, she has organized many study related activities for the electrical engineering students in Delft. These activities include lectures, excursions, symposia and study trips. In 1930 the ETV was the first association for students to travel to the United States of America. During the sixties she founded two other associations for electrical engineering students at other universities. Beside that she helped to start the European association for electrical engineering students. The ETV is not unknown in the media. Ten years ago the ETV wrote history with the largest Tetris-game in the world, projected on the building of the faculty. Five years later the same idea was used, but now to send sms-messages to the building. For that stunt 300 lamps, 3 kilometres of cable and 1500 metres of paper were used. The current stunt will exceed these numbers.

It's not every day that you have an opportunity to see an exhibition like that. I wish Ljubljana could see the architecture giant as Morphosis agency is. But anyway, Morphosis are now in Paris – Centre Pompidou, until 17 July 2006. If you are in the neighbourhood and you would like to see how some guys are pushing the borders in architecture don't miss this expo!

A 250m2 showcase, resembling a kind of transparent horizontal Hollywood screen, reveals at our feet a view of 24 recent projects by Morphosis, the LA architecture agency founded by Thom Mayne in 1972. The exhibition, designed by the agency, takes us back to contemporary myths of LA as illustrated by its cinematographic and photographic images or by its central position in our perception of the large contemporary metropolis. The proposed structures are hybrids, perfused with symbolic, political and material complexity of the continually changing urban situations. Our eyes plunge through this glass screen – a sort of oversized computer chip that muddles up the scale – and dive into the intricacies of the communication networks that permanently distill information from all kinds of sources and with no sense of hierarchy. Relations and connections grow between the elements presented, offering direct access to the language of the architect more than to the shape of the constructed object. Moving away from the traditional disciplines of architecture and town planning, Morphosis puts the question again pd relationships between body, space and territory. the designers reaffirm the capacity of architecture to invent its own controls and organisational models following examples provided by biology and computing.