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. ...Glass Sponge Skeleton Structure
John D. Currey, a biologist at the University of York, in England, analyzed Euplectella (Class Hexactinellida), commonly known as glass sponge, and has found “a skeleton of extraordinary structural and mechanical refinement.” It is built in structural levels. Silica particles become filaments, which are formed into spicules, then gathered into larger spicules, which are arranged in a grid with struts and formed into a cylinder, with stiffening surface ridges.
From ZMA:
Marine sponges which have siliceous skeletons built of triaxone - hexaradiate spicules. Which means that the three axes of the spicules intersect at right angles. The axial filament is square in cross section (as opposed to triangular or polygonal in Demosponge spicules). They lack any calcareous or spongin components in the skeleton. Living tissues are syncytial, that is they lack cell walls, and they have distinctive hollow cell-plugs connecting differentiated regions of the tissue. Predominantly found in deep sea environment and called “Glass Sponges”. There are about 500 species.
via NYT
related : [Frameless Structural Glass Dome][Polyp Oriented Modelling of Coral Growth][Moving Structure][Metallic Glass : The Perfect Alloy][Self-Cleaning Glass][Programming Through Geometry][Capturing Refraction]
Greetings. As a non-darwinian zoologist I find this glass structure fascinating. I have also been reading the Annual Review of Biochemistry (v 74) where Johnson & O’Donnell describe sliding clamps, clamp-loading machines and other multicomponent machines of the DNA molecule. Incredibly, thay state that these machines “have evolved clever strategies to perform their functions.”
Huh?
How can submicroscopic, protein-based machines fine-tune themselves?
Help me in my unbelief.
- frank sherwin, ICR
i am an architecture student in india a and designing with modern glass technologies.can u send me more info abot glass sponge structure?
Hi Kaustav -
I think this page has some of the best references regarding glass sponge.
Is it not altogether amazing that man can produce glass - in a blast furnace - and yet the lowly sponge can - in sophistication & detail - do so at much lower temperatures? I need to have a neo-darwinian explanation from someone out there.
- frank