PUBLIC MARKS with search \\\"as-built\\\"drawings

Theme of the symposium was “la ville cartographiée” (the city map), and to give our contribute to the discussion, we were warmly welcome to the ‘Cité des sciences et de l’industrie‘; built in the 19th arrondissement, just beside Parc de la Villette, ‘La Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie’ is one of the world’s largest and most visited science museums, and looks as an impressive modern site which offers a wide variety of exhibitions and shows.

The italian magazine WIRED asked us to draw a map based on the scenarios developed by the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto to help the reader in the net of ideas and hypothesis built by 7000 influencers from all over the world.

With such a large amount of content, searchability was essential. For this we built a custom technology stack based on Solr, Lucene and Haystack. Then, to keep all the previous links pointing in the right direction, we created a customizable scheme of Django regular expressions and Apache mod_rewrites.

So, in the best traditions of Heath Robinson and Charles Babbage, I built one:

Underscore is a utility-belt library for JavaScript that provides a lot of the functional programming support that you would expect in Prototype.js (or Ruby), but without extending any of the built-in JavaScript objects. It's the tie to go along with jQuery's tux.

Zoie is a real-time search and indexing system built on Apache Lucene. In a real-time search/indexing system, a document is made available as soon as it is added to the index. This functionality is especially important to time-sensitive information such as news, job openings, tweets etc.

ARCHIGRAM dominated the architectural avant garde in the 1960s and early 1970s with its playful, pop-inspired visions of a technocratic future after its formation in 1961 by a group of young London architects – Warren Chalk, Peter Cook, Dennis Crompton, David Greene, Ron Herron and Michael Webb.

“A new generation of architecture must arise with forms and spaces which seems to reject the precepts of ‘Modern’ yet in fact retains those precepts. We have chosen to by pass the decaying Bauhaus image which is an insult to functionalism. You can roll out steel – any length. You can blow up a balloon – any size. You can mould plastic – any shape. Blokes that built the Forth Bridge – they didn’t worry.”

So wrote David Greene in a poem published in the first issue of Archigram magazine or, as Greene’s co-editor, Peter Cook, called it “a message, or abstract communication”. It was published in 1961 on a large sheet of the cheapest available paper. Filled with Greene’s poems and sketches of architectural projects designed by Cook, Michael ‘Spider’ Webb and other friends, the magazine voiced their frustration with the intellectual conservatism of the British architectural establishment.

Managing News is both a product and a platform. Out of the box it can help your communications team manage a brand reputation, allow geographically dispersed clusters of NGOs stay on the same page, or act as a simple thematic news planet to share feeds with the world. It can also serve as a platform to build highly custom data aggregators that suck in everything from CSV to RDF to custom XML formats and that need unique workflows and visualizations. Managing News is built on Drupal and uses Features, which makes it highly extensible.

architects Irene Cheng and Brett Snyder “have created a virtual map to guide users around Manhattan to sites where projects they describe as ‘visionary’ were planned but never built. The map is available as an interactive iPhone application…that uses GPS technology to detect when a user is near any of the roughly 50 notable sites, triggering a feature that allows the user to learn about the proposal through the architect’s foiled designs and words.

The BookServer is a growing open architecture for vending and lending digital books over the Internet. Built on open catalog and open book formats, the BookServer model allows a wide network of publishers, booksellers, libraries, and even authors to make their catalogs of books available directly to readers through their laptops, phones, netbooks, or dedicated reading devices. BookServer facilitates pay transactions, borrowing books from libraries, and downloading free, publicly accessible books.

This project aims to provide an easy to setup continuous integration server and client. The server side infrastructure is built on top of django. The tasks are described using fabric.

MAP (Manual of Architectural Possibilities) is a publication of research and visions; research into territories, which can be concrete or abstract, but always put into question. Map is not a magazine (it only has two pages) and is not a book (it is issued twice a year). Map presents itself as a folded poster (A1) where information is immediate, dense and objective in one side, and architectural and subjective on the other. Map is a guide to potential actions in the built environment, a folded encyclopedia of the possible, a topography of ideas, or a poster on the wall.

Author Lisa Iwamoto explores the methods architects use to calibrate digital designs with physical forms. The book is organized according to five types of digital fabrication techniques: tessellating, sectioning, folding, contouring, and forming. Projects are shown both in their finished forms and in working drawings, templates, and prototypes, allowing the reader to watch the process of each fantastic construction unfold.