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Increasingly, architects are tapping into social media to connect with peers and promote their work.

It seems like everyone these days is constantly plugged into their technological devices, tweeting their whereabouts, Facebooking their statuses, and publicizing anything and everything about themselves. Companies are even engaged in the phenomenon, using social media tools to market their products and services. But for architects, do these online pursuits pay off?

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Pervasive sensing and interactive building controls stand to radically reshape the human response to architecture, the city, and even the air we breathe. Call them the new controls.

As the books by MIT’s Mitchell suggest, buildings are Web sites, and vice versa. A compelling vision for new buildings, perhaps, but most existing buildings are often saddled with undermaintained proprietary systems.

“Unless we come up with robust systems that can be deployed again and again,” Hartkopf says, likening buildings to automobiles, “we won’t make any progress.” Even many of the new Web-based systems have closed programming logics that will make expandability and adaptability difficult in the future.

Regardless, some architects have forged ahead with the building-as-Web-site concept, finding innovative ways to make the new controls part of a comprehensive data-visualization strategy.

1., 2. Every 15 minutes, the Living Light pavilion’s LED lighting system goes dark and regenerates patterns based on Seoul’s air quality.

3. Living Light’s control system depends on two external digital inputs — a Web site that tracks air quality and SMS text messages from people accessing the site.

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http://continuingeducation.construction.com/article.php?L=5&C=653&P=3

Pervasive sensing and interactive building controls stand to radically reshape the human response to architecture, the city, and even the air we breathe. Call them the new controls.

When you approach the pavilion, known as the DWP, a motion sensor in the roof detects your body and signals a processor in a digital control system to alter the solenoid valves at the individual jets of water that your body will displace as you walk through the curtain, just enough so you don’t get wet.

1. Preprogrammed patterns in the water are part of the pavilion’s advanced controls system.
2. Recycled water is pumped from underground cisterns to pipes and nozzles in the roof of the Digital Water Pavilion in Zaragoza, Spain.
3. Carlo Ratti, pictured, describes the pavilion as fluid, both literally and as a “reconfigurable, responsive building,” unlike static buildings designed to appear fluid.

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http://continuingeducation.construction.com/article.php?L=5&C=653&P=1

Trained as an architect, Arbel divides his time equally between designing buildings and objects since founding his own firm, Omer Arbel Office, in 2005. Arbel’s design is a first for the Olympics since each medal is unique. The medal’s undulating surface evokes the iconic sea and mountains of the Vancouver-Whistler landscape. Each medal is laser-etched with a cropped section of a larger artwork by Canadian artist Corrine Hunt—an orca whale on the 615 Olympic medals, and a raven on the 399 medals for the Paralympics.  Like a puzzle, it takes all of the individual medals to complete the artwork.

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http://archrecord.construction.com/news/daily/archives/2010/100212olympic_medals.asp#http:// http://archrecord.construction.com/news/daily/archives/2010/100212olympic_medals.asp#

WORKac: Hua Qiang Bei Road

su·per·ja·cent (sōō’pər-jā’sənt)

adj. 

Resting or lying immediately above or on something else

WORKac’s proposal creates a continuous series of buildings and bridges that coalesce over, under, and alongside the street. A widely varied program of a public library, restaurant facilities, an electronics museum, and a fashion museum create a new, interwoven public zone that tries to mitigate the pedestrian gridlock in the area. Strange, sculptural pavilions hold both program and bridges to cross over the busy street, turning a river of cars into a sort of linear landscape, complete with follies and hanging gardens.

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Can you imagine the Eiffel Tower with wind turbines? The Taj Mahal with rooftop solar panels? No matter how much you support renewable energy, it’s jarring to think about retrofitting such famous and historic structures, but one Turkish architect suggests it can — and should — be done.

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http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/01/21st-century-tech-meets-15th-century-architecture.php?campaign=th_rss