In the early 20th century, the visionary inventor Buckminster Fuller started looking for ways to improve human shelter by:
Applying modern technological know-how to shelter construction.
Making shelter more comfortable and efficient.
Making shelter more economically available to a greater number of people.
And what he came up with (read more here) was the “geodesic” dome.” This dome held appeal for two main reasons: 1.) its surface would be “omnitriangulated,” meaning built out of small triangles, which would give the overall structure unparalleled strength. And 2.) domes by their very nature enclose the greatest volume for the least surface area, which makes them very efficient.
Fuller developed the mathematics for the geodesic dome and helped make it an architectural reality. You can find instances where these domes served as auditoriums, weather observatories, and storage facilities in the US and Canada. And then above, you watch a documentary called A Necessary Ruin: The Story of Buckminster Fuller and the Union Tank Car Dome. Shot by Evan Mather in 2010, the documentary tells the story of the dome built in Baton Rouge, LA in 1958. At 384 feet in diameter, the Union Tank Car Dome was the world’s largest free-span structure then in existence. Mather’s documentary includes ” interviews with architects, engineers, preservationists, media, and artists; animated sequences demonstrating the operation of the facility; and hundreds of rare photographs and video segments taken during the dome’s construction, decline, and demolition.” It was funded by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, and you can now find it our collection of Free Documentaries, a subset of our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.
Visit handcraftedfilms.com for more info on Mather’s film and/or to purchase the DVD.
Apart from from writing here on Open Culture, I write about cities. Having mentioned my city-related projects here from time to time (the podcast Notebook on Cities and Culture, the City in Cinema video essays), I’d like to submit for your approval my newest and most ambitious one yet: Where Is the City of the Future?, an in-depth search across the Pacific Rim for the best city to lead us into the urban century ahead — using a brand new model of journalism.
Not long after the turn of the 21st century, the world’s urban population surpassed its non-urban population for the first time ever. And the deeper humanity gets into the this century, the more urbanized our world becomes: developing cities develop, neglected cities revitalize themselves, and the long-standing great cities of the world continue to find (or struggle to find) new ways of accommodating all those who’ve never stopped coming to live in them. How can the ever-growing urban world prepare itself for things to come?
This series of reports, combining both text and photographs, and informed by both extensive on-the-ground exploration and in-depth conversations with those who know these fascinating urban places best, aims to find out by taking as close as possible a look at cities all across the Pacific Rim. These include 20th-century metropolises looking toward the future like Los Angeles, Seattle and Vancouver, compact city-states like Singapore and Hong Kong, fast-developing capitals like Jakarta and Bangkok, lower-profile but nevertheless inventive “sleeper” cities like Wellington and Santiago, and east Asian megacities like Seoul, Tokyo, and Shanghai.
I’ve launched “Where Is the City of the Future?” as one of the flagship projects on Byline, a new platform for crowdfunded journalism. For every $2000 raised there, I’ll go report on one Pacific Rim city, seeking out the important lessons it has to teach every other, from the urbanistic to the architectural to the cultural and beyond. This will begin with reports on Los Angeles and Seoul, and will continue on indefinitely to potential cities of the future in an order voted on the backers. (Theoretically, you could keep me at this for quite a long time!) If you like, you can get involved at the project’s Byline page. Thanks very much indeed — and I look forward to finding the city of the future together.
Every year for the past decade or so, we‘ve seen new, dire pronouncements of the death of print, along with new, upbeat rejoinders. This year is no different, though the prognosis has seemed especially positive of late in robust appraisals of the situation from entities as divergent as The Onion’s A.V. Club and financial giant Deloitte. I, for one, find this encouraging. And yet, even if all printed media were in decline, it would still be the case that the history of the modern world will mostly be told in the history of print. And ironically, it is online media that has most enabled the means to make that history available to everyone, in digital archives that won’t age or burn down.
One such archive, the British Library’s Flickr Commons project, contains over one million images from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. As the Library wrote in their announcement of these images’ release, they cover “a startling mix of subjects. There are maps, geological diagrams, beautiful illustrations, comical satire, illuminated and decorative letters, colourful illustrations, landscapes, wall-paintings and so much more that even we are not aware of.” Microsoft digitized the books represented here, and then donated them to the Library for release into the Public Domain.
One of the quirky features of this decidedly quirky assemblage is the Mechanical Curator, a bot-run blog that generates “randomly selected small illustrations and ornamentations, posted on the hour.” At the time of writing, it has given us an ad for the rather culturally dated artifact “Oriental Tooth Paste,” a product “prepared by Jewsbury & Brown.” Many of the other selections have considerably less frisson. Nonetheless, writes the Library, often “our newest colleague,” the Mechanical Curator, “plucks from obscurity, places all before you, and leaves you to work out the rest. Or not.”
Speaking of commerce, we also have an album devoted to advertisements, found by the community from, yes, the Mechanical Curator Collection. Here you will discover ads like “Oriental Tooth Paste” or that below for “Gentlemen’s & Boy’s Clothing 25 Per Cent. Under Usual London Prices” from 1894. Our conception of Victorian England as excessively formal gets confirmed again and again in these ads, which, like the random choice at the top of the post, contain their share of awkward or humorous historical notions.
Doubtless none of the proto-Mad Men of these very English publications foresaw such a marvel as the Mechanical Curator. Much less might they have foreseen such a mechanism arising without a monetizing scheme. But thanks to this free, newfangled algorithm’s efforts, and much assistance from “the community,” we have a digital record that shows us how public discourse shaped print culture, or the other way around. A fascinating, and at times bewildering, feature of this phenomenal archive is the requirement that we ourselves supply most of the cultural context for these austerely presented images.
In late August, one of Tokyo’s grandest hotels, Hotel Okura closed its doors and its main wing will be demolished to make way for a $980 million reconstruction. The new hotel will open in 2019.
The move was met with howls of protest around the world. The original hotel was hailed as a modernist treasure. “It’s a masterpiece,” lamented noted architecture writer Hiroshi Matsukuma. “It has a cultural and historical value that can never be reproduced again.”
The hotel first opened its doors in 1962 at a pivotal time in Japanese history. Eager to distance itself from its militaristic past, the country put on a new internationalist face to the world. The 1964 Tokyo Olympics were meant to be a sort of coming out party for a new, thoroughly modern nation. The Hotel Okura was designed in this same optimistic spirit.
Architect Yoshio Taniguchi said that he intended the hotel to be crisply modern though imbued with “a firm dignity impervious to fleeting fashion.” Five decades later, the hotel’s interiors still seem striking, elegant and wonderfully atmospheric. Taniguchi recruited master artisans Hideo Kosaka, Shiko Munakata and Kenkichi Tomimoto to craft the hotel’s look. The hotel’s murals, furniture, exterior facing, even the light fixtures, all draw upon elements of traditional Japanese design, re-imagined for the jet age.
“It’s the lighting fixtures, the furniture. What’s exciting is that you see this concept of Japanese design history play out across the lobby,” said Don Choi, professor of architecture at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. “You wouldn’t see that in Paris or New York. That attention to detail makes it a complete work of art.”
Hotel Okura has played host to several US Presidents, from Ford to Obama, along with other international luminaries from the Dalai Lama to Mikhail Gorbachev. Even James Bond spent the night there in You Only Live Twice. Haruki Murakami later featured the place prominently in his beloved tome 1Q84.
For 50 years, the hotel has continued to operate largely unchanged. Even the menu for the hotel’s restaurant, the Orchid Room, serves up the same fare they had back in 1964 — from crepes suzette to wiener schnitzel. The place was the Kennedy era dipped in amber. For the 21st century visitor, that was no doubt much of its charm.
Monocle Magazine has produced a lovely video elegy to the hotel, which you can watch above.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
You can learn a lot about an architect from looking at the buildings they designed, and you can learn even more by looking at the buildings they lived in, but you can learn the most of all from Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin. For that best-known of all American architects, this house stands still today not just as his home but as one of his notable works, and as the studio in which he designed other notable works (including Fallingwater). Wright’s enthusiasts make pilgrimages out to Spring Green, Wisconsin to pay their respects to this singular house on a hill, which offers tours from May through October.
For those less inclined toward architectural pilgrimages, we have this HD 360-degree “virtual visit” of Taliesin (also known as Taliesin East since 1937, when Wright built a Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Arizona). “The center of Frank Lloyd Wright’s world was Taliesin East,” write the online tour’s developers. “It was his home, workshop, architectural laboratory and inspiration for nearly all his life.” In the comfort of your web browser, you can “experience what he saw daily, surrounded by Asian art, expansive views of Wisconsin’s rolling hills, his own courtyard gardens and a space to relax before a fire watched over by a portrait of his mother.”
You can also get a view of “the actual drafting tables where Wright designed his most famous buildings” and the drawings on them, all while “staff historian Keiran Murphy shares the history, the personal stories and points out special objects in the room” (if you choose to keep the “tour guide” option turned on). And Taliesin certainly doesn’t lack history, either personal or architectural. Wright built its first iteration in 1911, and it lasted until a paranoid servant burnt it down in 1941, axe-murdering seven people there (including Wright’s live-in ladyfriend and her children) in the process. Wright, who’d been away at the time of the tragedy, recovered from the shock of it all, then set to work on Taliesin II, though he didn’t really live in it until after he returned from his work on Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel in 1922.
Three years later, another fire (this time probably due to an electrical problem) badly damaged the house again, necessitating the design of a Taliesin III, which he could begin only after digging himself out of a financial hole in 1928. It is more or less that Taliesin that you can see today, whether you visit in person or through the internet. If you feel sufficiently inspired as a result, you could even apply to study at the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture located there. While the house won’t likely turn you into an architectural genius just by osmosis, at least you can rest assured that it has probably put its most dramatic disasters behind it.
During the 1970s and beyond, Brand founded CoEvolution Quarterly, a successor to the Whole Earth Catalog; The WELL (“Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link”), “a prototypical, wide-ranging online community for intelligent, informed participants the world over;” and eventually The Long Now Foundation, whose work we’ve highlighted here before. When not creating new institutions, he has poured his creative energies into books and films.
Above you can watch How Buildings Learn, Brand’s six-part BBC TV series from 1997, which comes complete with music by Brian Eno. Based on his illustrated book sharing the same title, the TV series offers a critique of modernist approaches to architecture (think Buckminster Fuller, Frank Gehry, and Le Corbusier) and instead argues for “an organic kind of building, based on four walls, which is easy to change and expand and grow as the ideal form of building.”
Brand made the series available on his Youtube channel, with these words: “Anybody is welcome to use anything from this series in any way they like… Hack away. Do credit the BBC, who put considerable time and talent into the project.” And he added the noteworthy footnote: “this was one of the first television productions made entirely in digital— shot digital, edited digital.”
Find the first three parts above, and the remaining parts below:
Next month, when you step into one of the “five special elevators servicing the observatory atop the new 1 World Trade Center,” you will get a pretty great view. Though it’s not the view you might initially imagine. The New York Timesdescribes what you’ll see:
From the moment the doors close until they reopen 47 seconds later on the 102nd floor, a seemingly three-dimensional time-lapse panorama will unfold on three walls of the elevator cabs, as if one were witnessing 515 years of history unfolding at the tip of Manhattan Island.
For less than four seconds, [the Twin Towers devastated on 9/11] will loom into view on one wall of the cab. Then, in a quick dissolve, they will evanesce.
The timelapse animation, shown in a smaller format above, was designed by the Hettema Group in Pasadena, CA, and Blur Studio of Culver City, CA. Hope you enjoy the early preview.
In this talk, artist Jae Rhim Lee models her Mushroom Death Suit, a kicky little snuggy designed to decompose and remediate toxins from corpses before they leech back into the soil or sky. Despite Björk’s fondness for outré fashion, I’m pretty sure this choice goes beyond the merely sartorial.
For more information, or to get in line for a mushroom suit of your own, see the Infinity Burial Project.
Continuing with the mushroom / fashion theme, Björk next turns to designer Suzanne Lee, who demonstrates how she grows sustainable textiles from kombucha mushrooms. The resulting material may variously resemble paper or flexible vegetable leather. It is extremely receptive to natural dyes, but not water repellent, so bring a non-kombucha-based change of clothes in case you get caught in the rain.
For more information on Lee’s homegrown, super green fabric, visit BioCouture.
Björk’s clearly got a soft spot for things that grow: mushrooms, mushroom-based fabric, and now…building materials? Professor of Experimental Architecture Rachel Armstrong’s plan for self-regenerating buildings involves protocols, or “little fatty bags” that behave like living things despite an absence of DNA. I’m still not sure how it works, but as long as the little fatty bags are not added to my own ever-growing edifice, I’m down.
For more information on what Dr. Armstrong refers to as bottom up construction (including a scheme to keep Venice from sinking) see Black Sky Thinking.
Björk’s next choice takes a turn for the serious… with games. Game Designer Brenda Romero began exploring the heavy duty emotional possibilities of the medium when her 9‑year-old daughter returned from school with a less than nuanced understanding of the Middle Passage. The success of that experiment inspired her to create games that spur players to engage on a deeper level with thorny historical subjects. (The Trail of Tears required 50,000 individual reddish-brown pieces).
Remember those 50,000 individual pieces? As photographer Aaron Huey documented life on Pine Ridge Reservation, he was humbled by hearing himself referred to as “wasichu,” a Lakota word that can be translated as “non-Indian.” Huey decided not to shy away from its more pointed translation: “the one who takes the best meat for himself.” His TED Talk is an impassioned history lesson that begins in 1824 with the creation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and ends in an activist challenge.
Proof that Björk is not entirely about the quirk.
Björk opts to close things on a musical note with excerpts from composer Eric Whitacre’s “Lux Aurumque” and “Sleep” performed by a crowdsourced virtual choir. Its members—they swell to 1999 for “Sleep”—record their parts alone at home, then upload them to be mixed into something sonically and spiritually greater than the sum of its parts.
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