Abp

An urban design fiction co-authored with Lasse Kilvaer.
In a time where architects are offering the appearance of a naturalized built environment, Melbourne Australia is faced with an uncontrollable organism that reorganizes and re-appropriates the concrete matter of the city. The organism, nicknamed Muronoma by locals, slowly eats its way through living rooms and cubicles, leaving webbed, coral-like tunnels in its wake—spaces which provide habitat for a new wilderness in the heart of the city. American journalist Gabriella Canui travels to Melbourne to write a feature article on the organism and its consequences on the daily lives of Melbournites, but goes missing and never delivers her piece. After her disappearance, the CIA and their local ally the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) suspects Gabriella of joining the Architecture and Urbanism Bio-Terrorist Underground Syndicate, a.k.a. AUBTUS. As UNESCO is conducting a larger investigation on the Muronoma phenomenon, they request the CIA dossier on Gabriella Canui, including printouts of her notes and a series of transcribed interviews. The origin of Chemotaxopolis is told through these documents.

Computer Architectures is a collection of multidisciplinary historical works unearthing sites, concepts, and concerns that catalyzed the cross-contamination of computers and architecture in the mid-20th century.

Weaving together intellectual, social, cultural, and material histories, this book paints the landscape that brought computing into the imagination, production, and management of the built environment, whilst foregrounding the impact of architecture in shaping technological development. The book is organized into sections corresponding to the classic von Neumann diagram for computer architecture: program (control unit), storage (memory), input/output and computation (arithmetic/logic unit), each acting as a quasi-material category for parsing debates among architects, engineers, mathematicians, and technologists. Collectively, authors bring forth the striking homologies between a computer program and an architectural program, a wall and an interface, computer memory and storage architectures, structures of mathematics and structures of things. The collection initiates new histories of knowledge and technology production that turn an eye toward disciplinary fusions and their institutional and intellectual drives.

Constructing the common ground between design and computing, this collection addresses audiences working at the nexus of design, technology, and society, including historians and practitioners of design and architecture, science and technology scholars, and media studies scholars.

This article examines the Labyrinth, a multi-screen pavilion created by the National Film Board of Canada for the Montréal World Exposition in 1967. Within the Labyrinth, audiences were corralled through three chambers, each containing immersive multimedia environments that were designed to represent the chapters of an essential human life. The National Film Board envisaged the Labyrinth as a ‘new kind of instrument for communication […] created by the marriage of two ordinarily unrelated fields — the art of cinema and the art of architecture’. The purpose of this article is to evaluate the exact nature of this marriage of mediums. We will specifically focus on assessing the ways by which architectural space curated the phenomenological and epistemological relation that the audience had with the cinematic presentations in each chamber. Based on archival and primary sources, our research traces the design development of the Labyrinth and interprets its significance by employing Marshall McLuhan’s concepts of visual and acoustic space. As such, the article demonstrates how the Labyrinth modulated the balance between meaningful and affective modes of communication within its telling of the human story.