The creators of this online journal and forum controversially argue that computation will engender the final stage of development in the relationship between architecture and computers by ...
Writing software is at the core of Casey Reas’s artistic practice. The digital is his medium of choice rather than a means of manipulation. He reflects on ...
With the dissolution of the last utopian project of Man in the name of Communism, the great spectre that once haunted Europe and the rest of the ...
While computers have dramatically changed the way architects design, construction in the US and around the world is still dependent on ...
One of the great lessons of the 20th Century that our particular generation of architects has inherited is our appreciation of the infra-thin scale: the primal ...
Contemporary telecommunication and computer technologies have fundamentally changed the relationship between sign and space, iconography and matter. While Venturi’s model for the decorated shed grew out ...
The current programming culture in architecture could all too easily be written off as a youthful, geeky obsession with the algorithmic and the parametric among nascent practitioners, who ...
After seeing Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion World Map, a map projected on a flattened isohedron, we began working on the idea of using computer ...
G. Holmes Perkins, 1904-2004 In September of 2004 I attended two events that reflect on each other. One was the Non-Standard Praxis conference held at MIT. The ...
With the dissolution of the last utopian project of Man in the name of Communism, thegreat specter that once haunted Europe and the rest of the world has all but ...
Contemporary architects are judged as much by their buildings as they are by the sophistication of the techniques used in design and construction. A certain fascination with technology is natural ...
Genomic architecture is based on the manipulation of the architectural genome. Like its biological counterpart, this genome is universal and encompasses all architecture — past, present and future. ...Analyzing a Hovering Hummingbird
“We looked at hummingbird flight for 70 years with high speed cameras, but still could only make assumptions and educated guesses about what was happening,” said Douglas Warrick, an assistant professor of zoology at OSU. Scientists from Oregon State University, the University of Portland and George Fox University used digital particle imaging velocimetry (PIV) to capture the subtleties in the movement of air surrounding the hummingbird’s wings to discover exactly how they manage to hover. [article]
“What the hummingbird has done is take the body and most of the limitations of the bird, but tweaked it a little and used some of the aerodynamic tricks of an insect to gain a hovering ability,” Warrick said. “They make use of what is, in other birds, an aerodynamically wasted upstroke. Coupled with taking advantage of leading edge vortices – which you can only produce to substantial effect if you’re small – and voila, you’re hovering for as long as you want.”
