Archive for May, 2008

The Bouwkunde is Burning

Bouwkunde burn­ing today at (photo: Radio TV West)

This morn­ing the Fac­ulty of Archi­tec­ture of the Delft Uni­ver­sity of Tech­nol­ogy caught fire.
The build­ing was evac­u­ated imme­di­ately, there were no injured.

The prob­a­ble cause of the fire was a short-​circuiting in a coffee-​machine on the 6th floor of the north­ern wing of the build­ing, result­ing from water leak­age. The fire spread to the upper floors and later to the south­ern wing. Due to the height of the build­ing, the fierce­ness of the fire and pos­si­ble col­laps­ing of the build­ing fire­men had to retreat and con­tinue their work from the ground.

Accord­ing to the fire depart­ment the build­ing by Van den Broek and Bakema is to be con­sid­ered lost entirely and could even col­lapse due to severe damage done to it’s structure.

Images here (Nu.nl) and here (NOS.nl). Movies after the break.

Con­tinue read­ing ‘The Bouwkunde is Burning’

Open Form Architecture @ Pecha Kucha, Montreal

Fellow dys­turber, Darrel Ronald, founded Open Form Archi­tec­ture in Montréal (Canada) with col­leagues Maxime Moreau and Mau­rice Martel. We were recently invited to par­tic­i­pate in the Pecha Kucha Montréal as our first public pre­sen­ta­tion. Fol­low­ing our 20 slides / 20 sec­onds at the spe­cial edi­tion of Pecha Kucha Montréal as part of the Portes Ouverts Design Montréal fes­ti­val, we have made the slides, as well as video avail­able online.

The title of our pre­sen­ta­tion is, Simple Rules, Com­plex Behav­iour, and illus­trates a lim­ited selec­tion of our work over the past years deal­ing with gen­er­a­tive design, cel­lu­lar automata, simple pro­gram­ming and com­plex­ity. We have been par­tic­u­larly influ­enced by the work of Steven Wol­fram and his book, A New Kind of Sci­ence. Having par­tic­i­pated in two of his NKS Summer Schools, we’ve been for­tu­nate to col­lab­o­rate with him and a team of math­e­mati­cians and pro­gram­mers in the United States using Math­e­mat­ica software.

The pre­sen­ta­tion is bilin­gual French and Eng­lish, just like our favourite city! Unfor­tu­nately the first words are cut off, and they are: WE ARE OPEN FORM, and WE LOVE OPEN FORM! We hope you enjoy! Below are our 20 slides, that accom­pany the video.
Con­tinue read­ing ‘Open Form Archi­tec­ture @ Pecha Kucha, Montreal’