This talk is part of the Building Technology Series curated and held by Alejandro Zaera-Polo and Jeffrey S. Anderson in the context of their book The Ecologies of the Building Envelope published by Actar Publishers.
Kiel Moe talks about the science of building and how architecture is a practice that needs theory and a theory that needs practice.
Ryan: And Beirut, doctor? Here you’re keeping an eye on another virus?
(…)
Doctor: …Not a physical virus, but a psychological one even more dangerous than smallpox…We need to know how we can manipulate their emotions, how we can twist the news and trigger off their aggressive drives, how we can play on their religious feelings or political ideals.
—J.G. Ballard, War Fever, 1990.
Shortly after 6:00pm on 4 August 2020, an explosion ripped through the port of Beirut. It killed more than two hundred people, wounded over 6,500, and destroyed large parts of the city.
Forensic Architecture was invited by Mada Masr to examine open source information including videos, photographs, and documents to provide a timeline and a precise 3D model to help investigate the events of that day.
The Former French Concession has long left its mark on this part of Shanghai, and it is an honor for a French architect to design an urban space here in tune with its urbanism, its plane trees, narrow streets, and inhabited landscapes. Between Ma Dang and Dan Shui streets, it was tempting to create a shortcut that would be an urban and commercial passageway, a sequence evoking former surroundings that have been completely reimagined and are now new and modern; a high, narrow street that is covered and protected…
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky observed that the “problem” of biology, rather than engineering challenges, would be key to settling spaces beyond the Earth.[1] Drawing on Bruno Latour’s notions of Earthbound [2] and geostory [3][4] I investigate the potential for terrestrial life on alien worlds and the planetary-scale forces that travelers, settlers, and colonists will need to overcome to achieve this aim. Providing an alternative reading of life in space than the present inescapably anthropocentric and terrestrial view of reality, alternative scenarios—such as directed panspermia and the Living Architecture project, which involve spatially and temporally “programming” the metabolism of microbes using a range of technological apparatuses from bioreactors to space probes—are proposed that engage with the physics, chemistry, and potential life-forms that may render space a fertile terrain for alternative kinds of life and modes of inhabitation.