Cropped

Photographer Gerco de Ruijter—previously seen here for his aerial photographs of tree farms and his pigeon's-eye-view cinema of the city—has edited together a short stop-motion animation from satellite views of circular crop irrigation systems in the U.S. southwest.

The resulting film seems to promise a strange new form of time-keeping, with the irrigation equipment itself ticking like a stopwatch, but this is never, in fact, realized. Instead, the effect is more like watching a record spinning wildly on its platter, like a planetary-scale version of Bartholomäus Traubeck's music played from tree rings, where the stylus has been applied to the abstract patterns of human agriculture.

[Image: The source images for Crops by Gerco de Ruijter].

De Ruijter also sent through the source images, above, used as stills—centered and cropped, playing on the film's title—in the resulting animation.

Elegance at Eighty

Jacquie looks incredible not even considering her age, but at 81 she's even more of an inspiration for us all to continue to dress up and feel great. She designed this gorgeous striped dress out of material she found at a fabric store. I love getting together with her and hearing about all of her adventures, dancing at The Apollo Theater, and listening to her plans for the future.Over the past 80 years Jacquie Tajah Murdock has never stopped dancing and never stopped dressing.

Forensic Flowers

Two quick botanical stories in the news:

1) A short piece in The Scientist profiles artist Macoto Murayama, who "began applying the computer graphics programs and techniques he had learned while studying architecture at Miyagi University of Education in Sendai to illustrate, in meticulous detail, the anatomy of flowers."

[Image: A flower by Macoto Murayama, via The Scientist].

Murayama physically dissects flowers in his studio, uncovering what he calls their "hidden mechanical and inorganic elements"; he then "sketches what he sees, photographs it, and models it on the computer using 3dsMAX software, a program typically used by architects and animators. Finally, he creates a composition of the different parts in Photoshop, and uses Illustrator to add measurements and other labels." See more at The Scientist.

2) Archaeologists in Israel have used pollen trapped in plaster to reconstruct a "luxurious garden created by the Persians." Their method reads like a rejected pitch for Jurassic Park 4: "Using a specialised technique for separating fossilized pollen trapped in the layers of plaster found in the garden’s waterways, researchers from Tel Aviv University’s Sonia and Marco Nadler Institute of Archaeology have now been able to identify exactly what grew in the ancient royal gardens of Ramat Rahel. By examining the archaeological evidence and the likely settings of specific plants they have also been able to reconstruct the lay-out of the garden."

The hydrologically complex landscape, as reimagined by the archaeologists, was able to support a huge variety of species, including "ornamentals such as myrtle and water lilies, native fruit trees including the grape vine, the common fig, and the olive and imported citron, Persian walnut, cedar of Lebanon and birch trees. Researchers theorize that these exotics were imported by the ruling Persian authorities from remote parts of the empire to flaunt the power of their imperial administration."

It would be interesting to reconstruct Central Park based solely on pollen grains trapped inside the painted walls and debris-filled lobbies of ruined hotels of a semi-submerged New York City 2,000 years from now. A Nobel Prize in Landscape Forensics.

The Pop It Up

The whole pop-up phenomenon just got a bit more literal, with the debut of tiny robots inspired by pop-up books.

[Image: The pop-up robot sheet, developed at Harvard].

Equal parts origami and electrical engineering, each robot "has 137 folding joints," PopSci explains. "The assembly scaffold, which has folds of its own, performs 22 origami-style folds, resulting in a fully formed robot you can pop out and turn on."

Science Daily points out that this "will soon allow clones of robotic insects to be mass-produced by the sheet."

[Image: A close-up of the pop-up sheet, courtesy of Harvard].

The system, developed at Harvard, "works by combining all the robots’ component layers, [and] sandwiching each piece of metal or carbon fiber into a single sheet. First each layer is laser-etched into the proper design, and the sheets are laminated together. The end result is a hexagonal sheet with a small assembly scaffold, with the whole thing the size of a U.S. quarter."

On a wildly different scale, and relevant only for reasons of formal resemblance, I'm reminded of Bernard Khoury's B 018 project in Beirut, a nightclub that "comes to life in the late hours of the night when its articulated roof structure constructed in heavy metal retracts hydraulically. The opening of the roof exposes the club to the world above and reveals the cityscape as an urban backdrop to the patrons below." Prior to that moment of retraction, Khoury's "building" is more like a highly compressed 2D surface.

[Images: B 018 by Bernard Khoury].

The point of this comparison being to wonder aloud what sorts of pop-up architecture might be possible using the sandwiched components technique described above. What might "soon allow clones of robotic buildings to be mass-produced by the sheet," if we could export and scale this up to the world of spatial design? 2D surfaces that pop-up—or pull down—into functional buildings.

[Image: A 2005 installation by Do-Ho Suh; photograph by Marcus Trimble].

Buildings that pop up out of city sidewalks; robots that pop up out of those buildings' floors; smaller buildings that pop up out of those pop-up robots; tiny, insect-sized robots that pop up out of them.

80 Year Old Rita Has Over 70 Pairs of Outrageous Glasses

I met 81 year old Rita on a trip to Seattle over the weekend. She walked into the Great Harvest Bakery in Ballard wearing the most interesting pair of alien-eyed sunglasses. I was very intrigued and need to know more about her. I waited until she was finished purchasing her loaves and then asked if I could take her photo for my style blog, based in New York City. She was delighted and told me, "I have over 70 pairs of glasses and I wear a different pair everyday. Meet me here tomorrow and I will bring a whole bag full." I knew that I couldn't miss out on this opportunity!

The next day I met Rita outside the bakery wearing an even more spectacular pair of multicolored sunglasses. She showed me a grocery bag full of glasses that I could choose to photograph her in. We had a great time talking and taking photos and she told me the story of why she wears such outrageous glasses.

Rita says that her tastes are usually pretty simple. She had lost her small vintage sunglasses somewhere in the neighborhood, so her friend Marty accompanied her to a local mall to buy another pair. Marty picked out a big, fun, over-sized pair of sunglasses for Rita to wear and she picked out a smaller, more simple pair. Rita decided to purchase them both and wore the big pair to a recovery meeting sometime that week. Everyone in the group went wild for Rita's big shades. People started sending her huge, outrageous pairs of sunglasses from all over the world, resulting in her collection of over 70 pairs. Rita told me that although she wouldn't normally dress outrageously, she feels that the sunglasses make me people happy. When I asked her how she felt about them she replied, " They aren't really my style, but now I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings by not wearing the pair they bought for me. Now I feel lost without them. They have become my trademark."

I loved meeting this wonderfully eccentric and charming woman and hope you enjoy her story and of course her amazing collecting of glasses.

Electric Landscapes

[Image: An otherwise unrelated photo of marsh grass, courtesy of the USDA].

Gardens might soon be power plants, scaled up to whole landscapes generating domestic electricity. "With a tangle of bright red cables spilling out from among the plants' roots, this grass is wired to the hilt and produces electricity day and night," New Scientist reports. After all, there is "potential in harvesting electrons released among plant roots" in damp, conductive soil, and this "could eventually generate a significant portion of our domestic electricity needs, making juice that will be even greener than power from solar panels or wind turbines."

Researchers in the Netherlands have narrowed in not on trees or other charismatic megaflora—not future forests sparkling with electrical storms between branches—but on any plant "with shallow roots that thrives in damp or waterlogged soil where oxygen is scarce." More specifically, this means marsh grasses and reeds (though we read that "the technology should have particular appeal in Asia, where it could be used to turn millions of hectares of rice paddies into power stations").

The techniques under study in Holland currently involve a specially designed electrode that can harvest excess electricity from otherwise organic plantlife. But, as various species (sugar beet, rice, marsh grass) are trialled, and as chemically different soil matrices are reviewed, it's not hard to imagine a forthcoming scenario for landscape design in which genetically-modified plants grown in carefully mixed artificial soils, fertilized with conductive nutrients and finely wired with grids of geotextile mats, become the gardens of the late 21st century. Warm electric landscapes power houses through the darkness of peak oil, as increasingly efficient landscape formats get tested day after day by amateur planters, who rearrange their backyard plots based not on aesthetics but on the potential for electrical interchange.

(Earlier on BLDGBLOG: Shining Path).

In Memory of Zelda Kaplan

Yesterday 95 year old Zelda Kaplan passed away after collapsing, front row, at the Joanna Mastroianni Fashion Show. Zelda lived an amazing life.When we would get together she would always start by telling me how lucky she had been to have so many great opportunities. She traveled the world and collected hand woven fabrics and worked as an activist to bring the issue of female mutilation into discussion.

Zelda had a zest for life. She loved dancing and was a regular at New York's hottest clubs where she could be spotted dancing the night away in her brightly colored suits and matching hats. When I met Zelda the first thing she asked me was if I liked to dance. When it came to style she told me, "If you look well, then you heighten the atmosphere of a place, but remember to always be yourself. You can't turn marble into silk." Zelda definitely heightened the atmosphere wherever she went. I was lucky to have known her, even for such a short amount a time. I will cherish the advice she gave to me and remember her wonderful spirit always.