brkt: inspirations 2

1. the souk

How hard is it to see green (and pink, and blue, etc.) instead of brown overhead?  Not very.  People have been putting screens overhead for thousands of years in the desert to create public space.  No need to reinvent this wheel when we could just bite it.

Stan Allen’s souk project also comes to mind (in that book, but not available to browse online).

Extremely applicable to Nouakchott, Dubai, elsewhere with Arab architectural influence.   Potentially applicable elsewhere.

2. MOS/flip a strip

I think its easy to see an area-based collection system and an algae system being integrated into a single super-surface along the lines of MOS’s flip a strip entry (obviously MOS’s was only an algae-power system, not a fog farmer).  This would be either be an alternative or a parallel construction to an overhead algae pipe-surface.

well, and I’m pretty sure even this project is made up of tubes, even though they are expressing the tubes as panels in the renderings…
http://www.mos-office.net/account/index?article_id=571

Thinking more about it, something demonstrated by the juxtaposition of the MOS renderings with the close-up view of the overhead screen is how much potential there is for us to play with the density, size, and distribution of tubes to effect different perpections of them as a surface.  This is true when considering them in terms of a still image, like the two above, but also when you consider viewing them (especially if they are layered) while moving – I’m thinking here of looking at rows of vertical stakes used in vineyards, and the sort of effects created when you watch them from a moving car for example.  If we decide to push a tube-centric fog+algae system, we ought to look at the ways simple manipulations of tubes can create complex variations in how our tubular-topology (!) is understood.  It could be for as simple a task as framing views according to one’s position or speed; or it could be something more complex, especially when integrated with studies of the milieu between our tubepology (too much?) and the urban fabric.