Leaving reality behind.
i’m visiting Zai and the etoy crew – just hours before they go to their huge exhibition in Korea. I will stay a few more days in their studio made out of containers. An amazing place to work from…
* www.etoy.com

RoboVault

RoboVault describes itself as a Maximum Security Robotic Storage facility.
Hurricane-resistant, fully insured, and protected by biometrics, RoboVault is proposed for “an extraordinary location at the crossroads of several major roadway arteries including Port Everglades and the Hollywood/Fort Lauderdale International airport.”

[Image: A glimpse inside RoboVault].

“No one enters the storage part of the facility,” we read; this has the effect of “minimizing the risk of theft or damage.” Indeed, “This revolutionary concept in storage uses robotic parking garage technology, allowing you to operate your rented storage unit automatically, so you can store and retrieve your possessions when you want.”
Which raises the question: How much longer must we wait before robotic parking garage technology crosses over into other architectural typologies? Single-family homes (you move your bedroom to the ground floor every morning), libraries (where’s that book? oh, that’s right… whoosh), football stadiums (your seats greet you at the entry gate).
In fact, for me, this whole complex sounds more like something out of a design studio at SCI-Arc, combining transport infrastructure, personal consumption, import/export laws, national sovereignty, exurban geography, climate control (the building offers “atmospheric consistency,” we’re told), new business models, biometrics, and the mechano-Derridean future of the archive – together with the narrative possibilities of architectural representation.
“What’s your building’s story?” the concerned professor asks.
You could even invent a new – presumably quite boring – party game. Take a proposed building or business model from anywhere in the world and then work backward: Try to imagine the design studio in which that project would first have been proposed. Try to imagine what they read. Try to imagine the keywords.

[Image: The biometrics of RoboVault].

In any case:

Here’s how it works: If you rent a RoboVault Space, you simply place your prize possession on the elevator, use the retinal eye scan and keypad security features and your property is safely stored away in a matter of seconds. You use the same process to retrieve your possession. Since there are no floors or entries, you don’t have to worry about theft or vandalism. With RoboVault Spaces, you’re buying peace of mind!

It all seems to have been designed solely to be featured in an as-yet-unannounced Jerry Bruckheimer film.

[Image: RoboVault's "extraordinary location at the crossroads of several major roadway arteries including Port Everglades and the Hollywood/Fort Lauderdale International airport"].

If you’ll excuse the long quotation, this reads like the opening scene of Bad Boys III or Mission Impossible IV – or even Blade: Miami Nights:

A vehicle arrives at the overhead door and notifies the office of their impending entry. The overhead door is raised and the vehicle drives into the building after which the overhead door is then closed. The client is the only person/vehicle in this secure area. The client removes the contents to be stored from the vehicle and accesses the interior door by use of a pin code and biometric scan. When this occurs, the office staff is notified and meets the individual to provide access into the safe deposit box room. Once inside the dual locking system can be accessed by the client and RoboVault staff. The client then has the option to enter into one of two small viewing rooms. Exiting of the safe deposit box room will occur much in the same manner. An important feature is that there is one entry and exit out of the safe deposit box room. Each member of RoboVault personnel is bonded and have gone through background checks to ensure complete reliability.

Et cetera.
I love the idea, though, that certain building types – certain works of architecture – can actually catalyze new business models, complete with ripple effects outward into the worlds of insurance, tax law, and even the private behaviors of everyday citizens.

[Image: RoboVault].

And then you’ll franchise this building type, and build one in London, and wild new filmic possibilities arise. Bank Job 2. National Treasure 3.
Architecture built only for the purpose of inspiring Hollywood sequels.

(Thanks to Adam S. for the link!)”

(via BLDGBLOG.)

Architecture by Accident

[Image: This post was originally published last winter in Blend, translated into Dutch].

Last winter The New York Times reported on a surprising growth industry in the United States: the physical relocation of old houses.
This is the somewhat surreal activity of transporting entire, intact buildings from one place to another, often over more than one hundred miles.
A single-family home, for instance, will be “jacked up” – like a car with a flat tire – so that “long steel beams” can be inserted between the house and its foundations. Very slowly, the house is then disconnected from the surface of the earth and loaded onto the back of a lorry.
If you think that sounds easy, however, bear in mind that some houses “have to be broken into two or more pieces” during this process and the roofs must often be removed. Removing the roofs streamlines the structures for highway transport, allowing them “to pass under power lines, bridges and trees” as they make their way to a new location. After all, as one whole house relocation client jokes: “The last thing you want is to show up one morning and find they’ve lopped off a room during the night.”

[Image: Photo by Stewart Cairns for The New York Times].

Transporting an intact house along the American interstate highway system can take several days. Worse, it can “cost hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars.” One such relocation job was so complex, the article explains, that it “required the bulldozing of a temporary access road,” and that was simply to remove the structure from its original plot of land.
But, even then, the troubles aren’t over.
After a house has been installed on its new foundation, it might need to be re-assembled – and this means “putting the house back together from thousands of pieces” while carefully following page after page of engineering notes, photographs, drawings, and detailed architectural plans so that you don’t put anything back in the wrong place.

[Image: Photo by James Edward Bates for The New York Times].

My first thought when I read this was of all those dinosaur skeletons now standing silently in museums around the world. What if someone, somewhere, got something wrong? What if they used the wrong skull on the wrong spine – or they attached the wrong leg, the wrong jawbone – and so the whole bodily form needs to put together again, perhaps with pieces from other dinosaurs in other museums far away?
Because what if your house gets moved three hundred miles but the bedroom is inadvertently attached to the wrong floor? Or two entire houses get mixed up along the way – what strange new architectural styles might result?
These are more than rhetorical questions.
Just last week, for instance, Christopher Hawthorne wrote a short article for the L.A. Times about a single family house that literally crashed onto the side of a freeway in Los Angeles.

[Image: Photo-illustration by Aaron Goodman for the L.A. Times].

Soon known as the Freeway House, “the single-story structure had been on its way from Santa Monica to Santa Clarita a few weeks ago, riding atop a trailer, when it smashed into an overpass and came to rest on the shoulder of the 101 in the Cahuenga Pass.”
It then just sat there.
For 10 days.

[Image: Photo by John Fuentes, found via the L.A. Times].

It was an uncannily accurate, if entirely unintentional, comment on life in today’s Los Angeles: a house stranded on the side of a freeway, with no context or human history in sight.
But what, I might ask, would have happened if the Freeway House had not crashed into a bridge but into another tractor trailer, carrying another house, and those two structures had then merged – even if only temporarily, in mid-air, a kind of post-deconstructive act of architecture lasting mere milliseconds in a cloud of debris above the L.A. freeway system – and then a third building, and a fourth…?
Soon architecture schools are teaching their students as much about car crashes as they are about CAD.
In this context, perhaps the crash could be a future strategy for architectural design: load the Taj Mahal, the Vatican, something by Mies, and an entire American suburb onto three dozen lorries, then crash them all together on a remote German autobahn. Photograph the results.
J.G. Ballard would be proud.
In any case, the whole-house relocation industry would have it so much easier if residential structures were built to move in the first place. The internal structure of a building could incorporate wheels, pulleys, gears, and other machine parts, thus allowing the house to be reconfigured, even geographically relocated. A building could simply attach itself to the local railroad tracks and slip away…
You report your house missing – but Interpol soon finds it: its windows have been smashed and it’s covered in graffiti, and it’s sitting next to a road outside Thessaloniki.
It misses you.

[Image: Corb v2.0 by Andrew Maynard; view larger!].

With these thoughts in mind, then, I got an email from Australian architect Andrew Maynard announcing a new project that he and his office had just finished putting together.
Maynard’s Corb v2.0 is a speculative housing complex that serves to update Le Corbusier’s old idea of the house as “a machine for living in” – and Maynard takes that statement to its logical extreme.
He proposes permanently incorporating a cargo container-stacking machine into a new residential suburb. The machine would thus rearrange all the houses on a near-continual basis.

[Images: Two views of Corb v2.0 by Andrew Maynard].

If a family doesn’t like where their home is located, they simply wait another day: “Yesterday this was a penthouse apartment on the other end of the complex,” Maynard explains. “Today the family has returned to find it on the ground floor.”
You can move up, down, left, right – even turn 180º around and face the other direction. You see sunset instead of sunrise, or a forest instead of a lake.

[Images: Three more views of Corb v2.0 by Andrew Maynard].

As Maynard describes it, this gigantic, crane-like stacking machine would smoothly glide back and forth over lines of “movable housing modules.” Residents could wake up to find themselves elsewhere, perhaps closer to the parking lot; neighbors would always have new neighbors.
This way, “everyone gets a penthouse as often as they get a ground level apartment” – which has the effect of “transforming traditional real estate valuations.”

[Image: Corb v2.0 by Andrew Maynard].

Taking this yet further, though, I’d suggest that we need more than isolated clusters of container-homes, each connected to one stacking machine. We need thousands of these things, aligned in continuous routes like train tracks, connecting neighborhoods, cities, countries, and continents. A house in the U.S. soon shows up in Mexico; a house in Utrecht moves to Sri Lanka. Immigration laws are rewritten, with complex architectural sub-rules. Customs officials the world over are required to take summer classes at SCI-Arc. Criminal homeowners shift back and forth across the International Date Line, avoiding taxes – while astronauts look down at great crowds of houses: whole cities migrating in a web across the earth.
Every once in a while, though, kicking off new schools of architectural thought and theory, there is a Great Accident. Architects stop reading Paul Virilio to concentrate on derailing entire cities…

(For more Andrew Maynard on BLDGBLOG see Unhinged and treeborne, and for more information about Corb v2.0 stop by Sarah Rich’s write-up of the project on Worldchanging. Meanwhile, there’s a great piece of travel reportage, concentrating on cargo container logistics, over at 765 – go check it out! For more posts that originally appeared in Blend, meanwhile, don’t miss Fossil Rivers, The Weather Emperors, Urban Knot Theory, Abstract Geology, Wreck-diving London, and The Helicopter Archipelago).

(Via BLDGBLOG.)

How to build an etoy.TANK – Part One: “etoy.CEO agent.Zai and etoy.INTERN agent.MAKI are showing how
to customize your shipping-container into an original etoy.TANK.
A welding apparatus, a plasma cutter, some grinding machines and
a lot of steel are needed for the modification.

>Here you can watch how to do it in motion pictures.

> alt="agent.ZAI welding"
/>
agent.ZAI is welding the reinforcing element, also called the
tank.BACKBONE, to the conatainer roof. Because the endwalls
are cut out to the half on two sites the container loses a lot of
stability. With this construction the etoy.TANK shouldn’t collapse
when it is liftet.

> alt="etoy.TANK voelklingen"
/> > alt="etoy.TANK voelklingen"
/>
Here is how you and your contanier should look like after the
etoy.TANK rebuilding Part One.



“

[tags]etoy,tank,container, diy,hardware,workplace,installation,production[/tags]

(Via etoy.CORPORATION.)

Project Blackbox

Sun has announced their
Project Blackbox
: a modular, prefab, stackable, shipping container-based, portable supercomputing and data storage warehouse – ideal for pirate utopias.
“After today,” they say, “you’ll never look at an ordinary shipping container quite the same way again. Project Blackbox is a prototype of the world’s first virtualized datacenter – built into a shipping container and optimized to deliver extreme energy, space, and performance efficiencies.” Project Blackbox is “a glimpse into the fast, cost-effective datacenter deployments coming in the near future.”
Somewhat incredibly, “[t]he Project Blackbox prototype is a computing powerhouse capable of hosting a configuration that would place it among the top 200 fastest supercomputers globally.”

Outdoing Archigram – who once dreamed of air-lifting whole prefab command/control systems into the wild, where, at the push of a button, computerized instant cities and other “plug-inscapes” could take form – Sun continues:

Project Blackbox packages compute, storage, and network infrastructure capabilities into scalable, modular units outfitted with state-of-the-art cooling, monitoring, and power distribution systems. Customers will be able to order a variety of standard and custom configurations of systems, storage, networking, and software. Housed in a standard 20-foot shipping container for maximum flexibility, Project Blackbox will be easily transported using common shipping methods. Simple hookups for water, AC power, and networking will enable customers to quickly deploy Project Blackbox upon delivery.

I’ve ordered eleven.

(Via Boing Boing).

(Via BLDGBLOG.)

[tags]container, etoy, data[/tags]