(source: bostworld – Flickr).

“Want a skyscraper but suffer from a really bad case of acrophobia? Then Japan’s Depthscraper from 1931 is the ticket. It’s allegedly “earthquake proof” and even has real sunlight beamed in courtesy of a dirty great mirror”. (source: davidzondy).

“Richard Neutra (1892-1970) helped to introduce the Internationalist style of architecture to America, which puts him right up there with the chaps who brought over smallpox, fire water, and really tight Italian shoes”.

“His vision of a future city is that of Le Corbusier’s. Given that modern architects had thrown out just about everything developed over 6000 years there wasn’t that much left to disagree about unless you wanted an empty lot for your money. Hence an “International” style in the sense that a menu is international if you strip it down to nothing but tea and buns”.

“In Neutra’s “Rush City Reformed” (1928) we see all the familiar marks of the moderns: straight lines, huge concrete slabs holding thousands of resentful working class tenants, and spaces that were as open as they were pointless. But Neutra did Le Corbusier one better by ensuring that no one had any view except that of the flat opposite”.(source: davidszondy)

“Tanaka was one of the key animators on Akira and was responsible for, among other things, the animation of Testuo’s rapidly mutating arm. His still illustrations draw from similar imagery, telling stories of young people set in a crumbling future, and filled with grotesque experiments and bizarre creatures. The images here come from Tanaka’s art book Cannabis Works”. (source: i09)

“The High Houses are proposed as part of the reconstruction of Sarajevo after the siege of the city that lasted from 1992 though late 1995. Their site is the badly damaged “old tobacco factory” in the Marijn dvor section near the city center.

The concept of the project is simple. The houses rise up high into the airspace once occupied by falling mortar and artillery shells fired by the city’s besiegers in the surrounding mountains. By occupying the airspace, the High Houses reclaim it for the people of the city. Balancing on scavenged steel beams welded end-to-end, they are spaces of a new beginning for Sarajevo, one that challenges—in physical terms—the city’s past and present, aiming at a future uniquely Sarajevan. Stabilized by steel cables anchored to the site, the houses, poised like catapults, fulfill the paradoxical desire to fly and at the same time be rooted in their place of origin”. (source: LEBBEUS WOODS)

“In 1964 United States Steel called upon the nation’s electric utility companies to reconsider the current look of our power stations and transmission towers to be both functional and beautiful. Two years later, Henry Dreyfuss and Associates were commissioned to investigate possible design alternatives, and I believe they were documented in a book entitled “Power Styling” which was produced by United States Steel in the mid-to-late 1960s”. (source: grainedit)

Le Corbusier: Plan Voisin in Paris. “Since 1922 (for the past 42 years) I have continued to work, in general and in detail, on the problem of Paris. Everything has been made public. The City Council has never contacted me. It calls me ‘Barbarian’!” (Le Corbusier’s writings, p. 207)

Source: NYU

Under the guidance of British cybernetician Stafford Beer, often lauded as the ‘father of management cybernetics’, an interdisciplinary Chilean team designed cybernetic models of factories within the nationalized sector and created a network for the rapid transmission of economic data between the government and the factory floor. The article describes the construction of this unorthodox system, examines how its structure reflected the socialist ideology of the Allende government, and documents the contributions of this technology to the Allende administration.”

“The system was most useful in October 1972, when about 50,000 striking truck drivers blocked the access streets that converged towards Santiago. Using the system’s telex machines, the government was able to guarantee the transport of food into the city with only about 200 trucks driven by strike-breakers.

After the military coup on September 11, 1973, the control centre was destroyed. (wiki)

Eden writes that Project Cybersyn eventually consisted of four sub-projects: Cybernet, Cyberstride, Checo and Opsroom.

* Cybernet: This component “expanded the existing telex network to include every firm in nationalized sector, thereby helping to create a national network of communication throughout Chile’s three-thousand-mile-long territory. Cybersyn team members occasionally used the promise of free telex installation to cajole factory managers into lending their support to the project. Stafford Beer’s early reports describe the system as a tool for real-time economic control, but in actuality each firm could only transmit data once per day.”

* Cyberstride: This component “encompassed the suite of computer programmes written to collect, process, and distribute data to and from each of the state enterprises. Members of the Cyberstride team created ‘ quantitative flow charts of activities within each enterprise that would highlight all important activities ’, including a parameter for ‘ social unease ’[...]. The software used statistical methods to detect production trends based on historical data, theoretically allowing [headquarters] to prevent problems before they began. If a particular variable fell outside of the range specified by Cyberstride, the system emitted a warning [...]. Only the interventor from the affected enterprise would receive the algedonic warning initially and would have the freedom, within a given time frame, to deal with the problem as he saw fit. However, if the enterprise failed to correct the irregularity within this timeframe, members of the Cyberstride team alerted the next level management [...].”

* CHECO: This stood for CHilean ECOnomy, a component of Cybersyn which “constituted an ambitious effort to model the Chilean economy and provide simulations of future economic behaviour. Appropriately, it was sometimes referred to as ‘Futuro’. The simulator would serve as the ‘government’s experimental laboratory ’ – an instrumental equivalent to Allende’s frequent likening of Chile to a ‘social laboratory’. [...] The simulation programme used the DYNAMO compiler developed by MIT Professor Jay Forrester [...]. The CHECO team initially used national statistics to test the accuracy of the simulation program. When these results failed, Beer and his fellow team members faulted the time differential in the generation of statistical inputs, an observation that re-emphasized the perceived necessity for real-time data.

* Opsroom: The fourth component “created a new environment for decision making, one modeled after a British WWII war room. It consisted of seven chairs arranged in an inward facing circle flanked by a series of projection screens, each displaying the data collected from the nationalized enterprises. In the Opsroom, all industries were homogenized by a uniform system of iconic representation, meant to facilitate the maximum extraction of information by an individual with a minimal amount of scientific training. [...] Although [the Opsroom] never became operational, it quickly captured the imagination of all who viewed it, including members of the military, and became the symbolic heart of the project.

Sources:
Cybersyn, Chilie

Read more: Wikipedia: Project Cybersyn

Even more: The Guardian

Image Source: Grancomo

Physicist and former Sante Fe Institute president Geoffrey West practically stole the show with his talk on urban metabolisms. Cities are like organisms, he explained, except they grow much faster and much bigger than anything living – in fact, there appears to be no upper limit to their size or propensity for innovation… or disaster. “Urbanization is the problem,” he said, “and it can also be the solution.”

These being Silicon Valley types, it was clear what that solution should be. “Copying 20th century cities in Dubai and Shanghai is crazy,” said former Sony chairman Nobuyuki Idei in yet another session. “We need… a city OS” – a single platform managing power, water, traffic, security and any other urban system you can think of.

Via: Fast Company

I’m much more interested in the beginnings of things than of the finished products. How things get organized and created intrigues me.

These pictures were taken by Albert Fernique and are now in the collection of the New York Public Library.