PUBLIC MARKS with tag architecture

In 1993, the City of Darkness, or the Walled City of Kowloon, was demolished. To the 35,000 people living in this dense urban slum, the change was the end of a lawless existence. The area was a diplomatic black hole, the model of an anarchist society somehow allowed to grow organically without the aid of any government, existing somewhere outside of both British Hong Kong and China.

The buildings of "Hak Nam" folded into one other in a dense configuration of labyrinthine corridors and seedy brown shacks stacked up 10, 12 and 14 stories high. It was a solid building, 200 x 100 meters, a pulsating anomaly, one of the most densely populated places in the world at the time of its destruction. It was called "the world’s first flexible megastructure, the closest thing to a truly self-regulating, self-sufficient, self determining modern city that has ever been built," "an environment as richly varied and as sensual as anything in the heart of the tropical forest."

Support Structure is an architectural interface. Support Structure aims to create a space which is continuously reinvented by its users in relation to its context. Support Structure houses artefacts as well as activities and aids reconsideration of existing spaces as an impulse for future change. Support Structure is an evolving collaborative project between architect Celine Condorelli and artist-curator Gavin Wade. Our aim is to design and create a universally adaptable support structure that approaches the specific rather than the generic. To achieve this we are putting Support Structure through a learning process.

Support Structures is a manual for what bears, sustains, props, and holds up. It is a manual for those things that encourage, give comfort, approval, and solace; that care for and provide consolation and the necessities of life. It is a manual for that which assists corroborates, advocates, articulates, substantiates, champions, and endorses; for what stands behind, underpins, frames, presents, maintains, and strengthens. Support Structures is a manual for those things that give, in short, support. While the work of supporting might traditionally appear as subsequent, unessential, and lacking value in itself, this manual is an attempt to restore attention to one of the neglected, yet crucial modes through which we apprehend and shape the world.

"The existing floor was uneven from inaccurate construction," writes Schemata architect Jo Nagasaka, "so we poured epoxy mixed with pine ash on the floor to create a flat surface. The transparent black liquid made different shades of black, following the uneven surface on the floor. It looked like gradation of color on a gradually shoaling beach."

A tangle of utility in both architecture and typography offers a fascinatingly structured title sequence for the BBC’s “How We Built Britain” that bespeaks an acquisitive England. The artificial monuments of type seem proportionally sound, the final title card an achievement of engineering.

"It's almost what you'd see if you flew around the area," says Hart. See a video of the map, above.

ARMCHAIR explorers who soar over 3D cityscapes on their computer may be used to the idea of maps with an extra dimension. But they are now getting accurate enough to offer much more than a preview of your next holiday destination. Accurate, large-scale 3D maps could soon change the way we design, manage and relate to our urban environments.

During his more than 14 years in Hong Kong, German-born photographer Michael Wolf‘s perspective on his adopted city has boiled down to an essence of density – the hemmed-in, closely built environment which shapes everything from its peoples‘ lifestyles to their outlooks and even dreams. In Hong Kong Inside Outside, Wolf collects the works of his two previous collections – Architecture of Density and 100x100 – into a two-volume set focusing on the visual elements of one of the world’s most crowded cities.

The design of a physical space can and should take advantage of information architecture (IA) deliverables, in particular when designing an integrated model of IA across environments. The user must be able to easily consult technology-dependent environments such as digital media or printed paper catalogs in line with the information flow carried through the website. Conveying the relevance of information to the user/consumer by means of applying IA principles with a view to designing a crisscross-connecting model of human-information interaction is the focus of these studies.

. Imagine a society based on slow farming trees for housing structure instead of the industrial manufacture of felled timber.

The November issue of Metropolis magazine is on newsstands and I can't think of a better way to ring in the holiday season than with a quote from the piece I wrote on the Deform Courtyard by Thom Faulders. Here's what Thom's client had to say:

Many other Bauhaus women simply vanished without trace.

A 900m-tall snow-capped artificial mountain has been proposed by architect Jacob Tigges as an iconic landmark for the German city of Berlin

The CLOUD proposes an entirely new form of observation deck,connecting visitors to both the whole of London and the whole of the world, immersing them in euphoric gusts of weather and digital data. Each individual footstep on the ascent to the CLOUD participates in a vast collective energy-harvesting effort. Everyone around the world can contribute to the Cloud - whether by visiting or by sponsoring an LED, helping to keep the London lamp aflame.

The project also didn’t much consider the crews of low-wage farm workers that would be needed to plant and harvest the crops of the ambitious vertical farm; presumably these crews would share elevators and stairwells with the residents of the market-rate condos above.