Audi is known for their four-wheel drive prowess, with the Quattro mentality embodied in their very logo. But at yesterday's Worthersee AutoNews 2012 show in Austria, they pulled the sheets off of a two-wheeled creation: Their lithium-ion-battery-powered E-bike Worthersee concept.

We've seen automakers design bicycles to tuck in the trunk before, but this one isn't intended as a crunchy green adjunct to driving; instead it's meant to be an unabashed display of Audi's design and technology prowess. They make no bones about the fact that the bike is intended for "sport, fun and tricks," which explains why the thing produces more torque than my VW Golf did and has a top speed of 50 freaking miles per hour.

The Audi e-bike Worthersee combines the Audi brand's principal competences - design, ultra, connect and e-tron—and explores the limits of what is technically feasible in terms of design, lightweight construction, networking and electric mobility. [The] ultra-light carbon-fiber frame weighs only 1,600 grams (3.53 lb). It makes use of bionic principles derived from nature. Material reinforcements are needed only at the points where loads actually occur. The swinging arm for the rear wheel is also made of CFRP. All in all, the Audi e-bike Worthersee represents the full extent of the brand's expertise in ultra-lightweight design.

The bike has three levels of power: You can either provide all of the juice by pedaling, provide some of the juice with the electric motor taking up the slack, or have the electric motor do all the work. Beyond that are two somewhat bizarre-sounding "Wheelie" modes, where you're meant to tip the bike back on its rear wheel and ride it like a Segway, with the motor taking care of the balance and braking or accelerating when you lean forwards or backwards.

Click here to read more details.

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If you thought Field Notes, the now famous 48-page memo book, was just another Futura-fueled riff on retro design, you obviously never read the statement on the back flap. "Inspired by the vanishing subgenre of agricultural memo books, ornate pocket ledgers and the simple, unassuming beauty of a well-crafted grocery list, the Draplin Design Co., Portland, Oregon—in conjunction with Coudal Partners, Chicago, Illinois—brings you "FIELD NOTES" in hopes of offering "An honest memo book worth fillin' up with GOOD INFORMATION."

Draplin Design Co. is the brainchild of Aaron Draplin, a thoroughbred American who's serious about graphic design and how it's evolved over the past century, especially when it comes to everyday items for everyday, working people. After two decades of trawling to swap meets, flea markets, yard sales and antique fairs for gems of Americana (otherwise known as junking), Draplin has amassed an incredible collection of old memo books, simple, saddle-stitched pocket books that were once given as freebies to farmers and those in the agricultural business to advertise products like feed, tools or machine parts.

Draplin wasn't only interested in the books as ephemera, he wanted to know who designed them, who printed them and who stitched them together. He describes them as "purely utilitarian and free of anyone attaching anything cool or uncool or ironic to it...Some are really colorful and others are really, really spare. They're all different, so I want to think that someone was actually going through and laying every little bit and piece out."

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[Image: Michael Maltzan's Inner City Arts building, Los Angeles; photo by Iwan Baan].

I'll be speaking tonight, May 17th, at Van Alen Books with architect Michael Maltzan about his book No More Play: Conversations on Urban Speculation in Los Angeles and Beyond, edited by Jessica Varner, previously discussed on BLDGBLOG here. The book includes interviews with Matthew Coolidge of the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Charles Waldheim, Qingyun Ma, Catherine Opie, Edward Soja (who quips that "architects should think more like good geographers"), and many more, and will be available for sale this evening, if you can stop by.

Things kick off at 7pm at 30 W. 22nd Street, near the Flatiron Building; here's a map.

[Image: Los Angeles; photo by Iwan Baan, from No More Play].

As Maltzan writes in the book, "we have reached a point where past vocabularies of the city and of urbanism are no longer adequate, and at this moment, the very word city no longer applies" to Greater Los Angeles. "Perhaps it is not a city" at all, he suggests, but something altogether different and more interesting than that (see a slightly longer discussion of this earlier on BLDGBLOG).

But when discussing this resistant, indefinable character of Los Angeles, I'm always reminded of a description from the beautifully written but, sadly, now scientifically out of date 2-part book The Music of the Spheres by Guy Murchie. At one point there, Murchie describes the surprising lack of density found in the surface of a star. He explains, for instance, that the surface of the sun "is really a thousand times more vacuous than a candle-flame on Earth, and even the concentrated moiling gases hidden a thousand miles below it are a hundred times thinner than earthly air." In fact, other stars—such as E Aurigae I, so huge it could "contain most of our solar system, including the 5.5-billion-mile circumference of Saturn's orbit"—are often "described as 'red-hot vacuums,'" Murchie writes, "because their material, though hot, averages thousands of times thinner than earthly air and is normally invisible, so that you might fly through them for days in your insulated space ship without even realizing you were inside a star."

You might fly through them for days without even realizing you are inside a star.

[Image: Los Angeles; photo by Iwan Baan, from No More Play].

Applying this to the urban condition of Los Angeles—a kind of sidereal city, measured by different stars, able to make you feel as if you will never really arrive—it becomes an oddly apt analogy for that region, with its loose outer edges and unclear points of entry into an often off-kilter system of road grids.

In any case, stop by Van Alen Books tonight at 7pm, where we'll be discussing Los Angeles, density, crime, and, who knows, even my own willful misunderstanding of astrophysics—or, as Van Alen Books puts it, topics such as "real-estate speculation and future urban development, infrastructure, resources, site density, urban experience, political structure, commerce, and community, attempting to transform our understanding of how each affects present-day Los Angeles."

[Images: From ZATO: Secret Soviet Cities during the Cold War at Columbia's Harriman Institute; right three photographs by Richard Pare].

Speaking of Van Alen Books: earlier this week, they hosted a panel on the topic of "Secret Soviet Cities During the Cold War." These were closed cities or ZATO, "sites of highly secretive military and scientific research and production in the Soviet Empire. Nameless and not shown on maps, these remote urban environments followed a unique architectural program inspired by ideal cities and the ideology of the Party."

The ZATO, we read courtesy of an interesting post on the Russian History Blog, was a "Closed Administrative-Territorial Formation (Zakrytoe administrativno-territorial’noe obrazovanie, ZATO)":

[T]he cities themselves were never shown on official maps produced by the Soviet regime. Implicated in the Cold War posture of producing weapons for the Soviet military-industrial complex, these cities were some of the most deeply secret and omitted places in Soviet geography. Those who worked in these places had special passes to live and leave, and were themselves occluded from public view. Most of the scientists and engineers who worked in the ZATOs were not allowed to reveal their place or purpose of employment.

In any case, there are two main reasons to post this:

[Image: Photo by I. Yakovlev/Itar-Tass, courtesy of Nature].

1) Just last week, Nature looked at Soviet-era experiments in these closed cities, where "nearly 250,000 animals were systematically irradiated" as part of a larger medical effort "to understand how radiation damages tissues and causes diseases such as cancer."

In an article that is otherwise more medical than it is urban or architectural, we nonetheless read of a mission to the formerly closed city of Ozersk in order to rescue this medical evidence from the urban ruins: "After a long flight, a three-hour drive and a lengthy security clearance, a small group of ageing scientists led the delegation to an abandoned house with a gaping roof and broken windows. Glass slides and laboratory notebooks lay strewn on the floors of some offices. But other, heated rooms held wooden cases stacked with slides and wax blocks in plastic bags." These slides and wax blocks "provide a resource that could not be recreated today," Nature suggests, "for both funding and ethical reasons."

Perhaps it goes without saying, but the idea of medical researchers helicoptering into the ruins of a formerly secret city in order to locate medical samples of fatally irradiated mutant animals is a pretty incredible premise for a future film.

[Images: (top) photo by Tatjana Paunesku; (bottom) photo by S. Tapio. Courtesy of Nature].

2) More relevant for this blog, you only have five days left to see the exhibition ZATO: Secret Soviet Cities during the Cold War up at Columbia University's Harriman Institute, featuring "ZATO archival materials, camouflage maps of strategic sites, secret diagrams of changing ZATO names/numbers, [and] ZATO passports."

That exhibition documents everything from the "special food and consumer supplements given as rewards for the secrecy and 'otherness' of the sites," to the cities' eerily suburbanized, half-abandoned state today: "Today there are 43 ZATO on the territory of the Russian Federation. Their future is uncertain: some may survive; others may disappear as urban formations within the context of Russian suburbs." Check it out if you get a chance.

More info at the Harriman Institute.

"buildingSMART Singapore is a non-profit alliance of the building industry including: architects, engineers, contractors, building owners and facility managers, software vendors, government agencies and universities. Its mission is to integrate the AEC/FM industry by specifying Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) as a universal language to improve the communication, productivity, delivery time, cost, and quality throughout the design, construction, operation and maintenance life cycle of buildings." to find out more...
Passage via http://www.buildingsmartsingapore.org/about-us.htm

"National Board of Architectural Accreditation of China (NBAA), established in 1990, is an expert authority in charge of the organization and implementation of the architectural accreditation at the university level in the mainland of China. It was jointly initiated by the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, the Ministry of Education and the Academic Degree Commission of the State Council, operates and coordinates with the National Administration Board of Architectural Registration (NABAR), who is the authority in charge of the examination and registration of the First Class Registered Architect. NBAA is composed of 23-25 experts, of which half are from educational background and half are from practice background. The Architectural Society of China has an ex officio seat in NBAA. The architectural accreditation in China mainland started in 1992. Up to May 2008, the architectural programs from 38 universities passed the accreditation, such as Tsinghua University and Tongji University. Among them, 37 are undergraduate programs and 20 are graduate programs." to find out more...
http://www.canberraaccord.org/signatoriespublic/China.aspx

I'm off to Washington, D.C. for the AIA Convention, so posts will resume early next week, and my weekly page will be on hiatus until the Tuesday after Memorial Day.

The deadline for NYIT's sLAB Costa Rica Kickster campaign, a project I featured previously, is six days away (May 21). As I type this they are ~$7,500 short of their new goal of $24,000. Below is a video about the project, which will result in students from NYIT helping to build a recycling facility they designed for Nosara, Costa Rica.

A Weekly Dose of Architecture Updates:

This week's dose features Mini-Studio in Mexico City, Mexico by FRENTEarquitectura:


The featured past dose is the Azteca Multimodal Transfer Station in Mexico City, Mexico by CC Arquitectos:


This week's book review includes three journals: Boundaries #3, City Limits #5, Log 24:


**NOTE: The next weekly dose will be 2012.05.29.**

american-architects.com Building of the Week:

BSA Space in Boston, Massachusetts by Hӧweler + Yoon Architecture:


Unrelated links are now found in the left sidebar and on My Diigo Bookmarks page.

[Photos by John Hill, unless otherwise noted]

Last week, a bunch of press folks squeezed into MoMA PS1's Performance Dome to listen to artist Marina Abramović, architect Shohei Shigematsu (of OMA's New York office), and others unveil the design for the Marina Abramović Institute for the Preservation of Performance Art (MAI) in Hudson, New York. The unveiling kicks off a fundraising effort on the part of the artist, who aims for an optimistic completion of the project in 2014. The design, by Rem Koolhaas and Shigematsu, reconfigures an old theatre-cum-tennis-center, preserving its exterior walls, balcony, and structure, and inserting new floors and spaces.



At first blush I thought the combination of a well-known artist and well-known architect added up to a lot of hype, but not necessarily a good architectural design. But after learning more about Abramović's art and OMA's design during the press conference, I gradually warmed up to it. The above study models indicate the basic parti of the design: a large central performance space is surrounded by smaller spaces. The more developed study model below (bottom right, above) makes it clear that some of the smaller spaces serve the large performance space -- the reused balcony, in particular -- but most of them work independently; the design's reality is somewhere between these two relationships, as will be seen.



The site plan below illustrates how the building Abramović purchased has a strong public presence in Hudson, overlooking a large open space. MAI is envisioned as another element in a string of public buildings that ring the open space and extend to other parts of the town. According to a press release, MAI "will host workshops, public lectures and festivals." But its bread and butter will be training people in the Abramović Method.



The artist explained her Abramović Method after showing a short trailer for the documentary The Artist Is Present, which is based on her show of the same name at MoMA in 2010. As the title indicates, Abramović was part of the exhibition, actually sitting in MoMA's large atrium gallery for hours each day, staring at museum-goers who sat across from her; many were moved to tears. It's obvious that her long-duration performances take discipline on the part of the artist, but it is less obvious that it requires the same (if to a lesser degree) from the viewer, who actually becomes part of the performance. The Abramović Method is her means of training people to have the right mindset and discipline to endure long-duration performances. This makes it sound like these performances are painful more than grueling, but given today's short attention spans and speedy communications, even the 2-1/2-hour period without a smartphone may be difficult for many.



To get back to OMA's design, the large performance space is centrally located for two reasons: first, the theatre/tennis courts were in the same location; and second, this flexible white-box space for up to 650 people is overlooked by every other part of the Institute, elevating it to be the most prominent and important space. In the model above, the bottom left corner -- the piece that juts from the building mass -- is the entrance, which includes a vertical gallery. From the entry, those attending a performance would go to the left, while those for training would continue straight and to the right; therefore a distinction between public and private is created, but each has views of central space.



Of the public and private spaces, the latter are easily the most interesting. The Abramović Method requires some traditional classroom-type spaces, but it also includes a levitation room, a crystal room, and a sleeping chamber; in the case of the latter, employees wheel trainees in custom wheelchairs -- somewhere between a traditional wheelchair and a cabana chair -- from elsewhere in the building (wherever the fall asleep) to the chamber. Considering that trainees don white lab coats, and that they eventually perform (like in Milan at PAC) for the public, I can only imagine a strange dynamic happening in the building between the public and private, between the curious and the immersed. The building "type" is a strange hybrid of a performing arts institution and a school, anchored by Abramović and her unique method. One can only imagine how the building would "work," but for some reason I think it needs to be a 24-hour institution, in order to truly embrace the long-duration performances the artist promotes.



This last illustration, a longitudinal building section below, shows the relationships of some of the smaller spaces to the central performance space. The idea is that a visit to the library or some other space gives a peek at the performance space, as well as views across to the other openings; therefore people watch each other watching the performance. A breakdown occurs between long-held distinctions between performer and viewer, both in the art and in the architecture. In that regard, OMA's design is simple yet completely appropriate to the complex task of turning Abramović's art and method into a building for the ages.


[Building Section | Image courtesy OMA]

[Image: Wifi-blocking wallpaper from the Grenoble Institute of Technology].

1) A collaboration between the Grenoble Institute of Technology and the Centre Technique du Papier has produced wifi-blocking wallpaper: a printable electromagnetic shield that "only blocks a select set of frequencies used by wireless LANs, and allows cellular phones and other radio waves through."

As The Verge explains, the wallpaper uses "conductive ink containing silver crystals" printed in an otherwise innocuous abstract snowflake pattern. In other words, only if you know exactly what to look for—or in a strange moment of speculative paranoia—would you realize that the paper on the walls around you is actually an electronic device.

Competitively priced with standard wallpapers, it might soon be decking and protecting the walls in a house or office near you.

[Image: Printed electronics produce 2D loudspeakers; photo by Hendrik Schmidt, via Printed Electronics World].

2) 2D printable loudspeakers have become a reality. Fully functioning speakers can now be "printed with flexography on standard paper" using "several layers of a conductive organic polymer and a piezoactive layer."

Like something out of The Ticket That Exploded, we read that "paper loudspeakers could, for instance, be integrated into common print products. As such, they offer an enormous potential for the advertising segment." In other words, books, newspapers, and magazines could soon literally be yelling at you to buy more products. Less cynically, though, this also raises the fairly fascinating possibility that we could someday release songs inside pamphlets, audiobooks inside the very hardcovers they narrate, field recordings inside road maps, or even add strips of ambient acoustics to rooms through loudspeaker wallpaper.

After all, sound wallpapers are, incredibly, also possible, resulting in large-scale, acoustically active surfaces, from objects to interior walls. The rave of the future will be one person with a roll of paper, pasting up sounds till sunrise.

[Images: Lasercut survival kits by Steffen Kehrle].

3) However, if wifi-blocking wallpaper and printable 2D loudspeakers aren't your cup of tea, then you can also laser-cut any reasonably stiff 2D surface into an urban survival kit.

Designer Steffen Kehrle's work implies that, with the right laser patterns and a thin sheet of cardstock—even wood veneer—the keys to the city could be yours. Done right, this same approach could offer more than just tactical culinary devices, as seen above, but small-scale urban equipment: pop-out objects for navigating the built environment around you.

Here are a few photos of the Conrad Hotel in Beijing, China by MAD Architects, 2012. Photographs are by Willian Veerbeek, who has many more photos of buildings new and old in his Beijing/CN, 2012 set on flickr.









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