Hasta La Ideas

Bre Pettis: Actual Size, S, M, L

No sooner do we finish covering Tokyo’s Eye of Gyre 3D-printing photo booth, billed as the first in the world, when another company swoops in with a similar product and timing. At today’s official Grand Opening of MakerBot’s physical storefront, located in Manhattan’s NoHo district, company founder Bre Pettis pulled the sheets off of the MakerBot 3D Photo Booth.

It’s different than Eye of Gyre’s, to be sure; MakerBot’s is head-only and monochrome, versus the Harajuku gallery’s painted (we assume) full-body shot. But for $5 to sit and $20 to print–or just the fiver if all you need is the scan, to bring home and print yourself–you can have your head immortalized in plastic in “smaller than golf-ball size, golf-ball size, and larger-than-golf-ball size.”

The MakerBot Photo Booth’s camera rig and attendant software is provided by ShapeShot, a Baltimore-based company that’s developed a 123D-Catch-like way of converting 2D photos to 3D data. Click here to manipulate a model of a baby captured using their method.

“This is beyond digital photography—it is the future—and to be able to create a 3D image of yourself is just amazing,” said Pettis. “We’ve had celebrities and musicians come in and get a 3D Portrait made. It’s fun, it’s inexpensive, and it’s totally cool.”

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It’s been a while since I wrote a damning piece about robots, because there hasn’t been anything robotic to scare me witless in quite some time.

Well that’s changed now, thanks to the Trossen Robotics Community, a “one stop robot shop” responsible for the unholy monstrosity you see here. No thing on Earth and under Heaven ought move like this; it alternately scuttles with the grotesque urgency of a cockroach and the obscenely suggestive swaying of a strip club pole dancer. And unlike a marauding giant spider, it is the exact same creature when you flip it over, rather than being incapacitated. It is unstoppable and it is an abomination. Look upon it:

To the designer of this PhantomX Hexapod that retails for a fairly reasonable $1,199.95: I do not appreciate, sir, the wicked and sensuous way that the robot moves in the beginning of the video, its frightening ability to accelerate, its freakishly quick ability to rotate in a clearly menacing way, its disturbing rotational symmetry in all axes. I will not be fooled by the presence of children in this video, and when all of humanity toils under the yoke and direction of millions of self-assembled creatures like these, I will say, “I told you so.”

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Produit par la société Wizzprod, Mathieu Bétard a réalisé le dernier clip de Kris Menace en featuring avec Miss Kittin pour le morceau « Hide ». Une vidéo d’animation en noir et blanc visuellement intéressante, qui joue avec talent sur les formes et les contrastes pour servir la musique. Plus d’images dans la suite.

Gabled bungalows are scattered over the rooftops of bulky apartment blocks that are perched above rows of narrow townhouses in this social housing development outside Paris by French studio Maison Edouard François (+ slideshow).

Urban Collage was designed by architect Edouard François to contain a mixture of all the surrounding residential typologies in the suburban neighbourhood in Champigny-sur-Marne.

The three-storey townhouses provide the base of the structure and are clad with copper or zinc panels or terracotta tiles. Each one also has its own entrance from the street.

The apartment blocks span the middle sections, while the individual houses are dotted across the rooftops. Both can be accessed using staircases slotted between the townhouses.

Describing the designs during a talk last year, François said: ”I cannot do beauty, because it will make the rest look ugly, so I decided to do something very ugly, to make the rest look pretty.”

Now complete, the development provides 114 new residences as well as shops and parking areas for residences.

Edouard François is known as a pioneer of sustainable developments and green walls. See more of his projects on Dezeen, including housing set in an “urban wilderness”.

This isn’t the first project we’ve featured that looks like a pile of buildings. Others include a set of apartments in Japan, a hotel in the Netherlands and a furniture gallery in Germany.

Photography is by Paul Raftery.

Here’s a description from Maison Edouard François:

Urban Collage, Champigny-sur-Marne, 2012
Avenue du 8 mai 1945, Rue du 11 novembre 1918, Les Mordacs, 94500 Champigny-sur-Marne, France

At Champigny-sur-Marne, respect of the context and the refusal to interpret it led us to take a unique position. The site is a grand ensemble that was built in the 1970′s: a large zone of housing filled with towers and multi-story housing blocks near the old town center. The program asked for an urban renewal plan based on a new town center with shops and housing.

Assuming that the city is a complex body, we superimposed elements found on site: townhouses at the base, a housing block from the 1950′s in the middle, and on the roof, single family homes. We organized them as archetypes to be read from bottom to top. The complexity of this project lies in the vertical superposition of these structural elements, shifting the three typologies independently.

Beyond the creation a new retail shops, the perception of centrality is also reinforced by the creation of numerous entries, gateways, lines of sight, and alleys that open the block to passers-by. These anchor the project in its context. The townhouses have separate entries from the sidewalk. Their copper, zinc, and tile facades complete the scenography.

The quality of the housing plays a central role in this new story: the apartments open on two opposite sides and meet the highest standards of energy efficiency.

Program: 114 social housing unit, retail, parking
Client: Paris Habitat
Team: Maison Edouard François, Intégrale 4 (structure), Nicolas Ingénierie (Mechanical Engineering), Pre Carre (landscape architect)
Area: 9 000 m² Net Floor Area
Budget: 14,3 M €

Competition: 2006
Construction permit: 2008
Delivery: 2012
Environmental Label: Label H&E (Habitat & Environnement)

Above: site plan – click above for larger image

Above: section – click above for larger image

Above: street elevation – click above for larger image

The post Urban Collage by
Maison Edouard François appeared first on Dezeen.

Yesterday, we saw a ‘retirement home for chickens‘; today we have yet another urban agriculture project by a group of students from New Zealand. “Pod” is a household ‘fogponics’ gardening concept by a quartet of second-year Industrial Design students (Adam Ben-Dror, Nick Johnston, Casey Lin and Robert Skenea) at Victoria University of Wellington, who have adopted the name Greenfingers for the recent term project.

They researched several other options for a nutrient/watering system before arriving at fogponics, a variation of aeroponics, which differs from hydroponics in that it doesn’t require a growing medium.

The fogponic system is similar to aeroponics in that the nutrient solution is vapourised, allowing it to be more efficiently absorbed by the roots of the plant. In fogponics an ultrasonic fogger to create an extremely fine mist. The optimum particle absorption range for plant roots is between 1 and 25 microns in size, and ultrasonic foggers typically create mist from 5 to 10 microns.

Fogponics require little maintenance to the system, with the primary thing being refilling the nutrient solution as it is absorbed by the plant, as well as periodically cleaning the ultrasonic fogger as a build up of salts can occur. Between crops the growing medium that is supporting the plant also needs to be replaced to remove all traces of the previous crops. The typical lifespan of a ultrasonic fogger is around 6000 hours, meaning it would need to be replaced 2-3 times a year, if continuously active.

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