[Image: From "Lower East Side Quarry" by Rebecca Fode; open each image in a new tab for a larger view]. Last month, several students from the Bartlett School of Architecture—studying as part of Unit 11, taught by Mark Smout, Laura Allen, and Kyle Buchanan—came through town for some field trips, workshops,...
Ground Environment Déjà Vu
[Image: From the talk by Zebra Imaging at Studio-X NYC; photos by BLDGBLOG]. Last week at Studio-X NYC, we hosted Michael Klug of Zebra Imaging, whose 3D printable holographs I also had the pleasure of covering for the 2012 Year in Ideas issue of Wired UK. The gist of Zebra's work can be gleaned from...
Autonomous Angels of Maintenance
[Image: Undersea robots guard the internet; image via Wired UK]. In what appears to be a sponsored post, a short article published on Wired UK presents an interesting scene in which semi-autonomous robots protect undersea internet cables from harm—that is, "dexterous robots toil at the bottom of the...
HoverMast
[Image: The Sky Sapience HoverMast, via sUAS News]. The Israeli-made HoverMast is a "tethered hovering platform specially designed for small vehicles." As the consistently fascinating sUAS News explains: At the click of a button, the system autonomously deploys, rising to heights of up to 50 meters...
Where'd the road go?: Cool Hand Luke (1967)
[Image: From Cool Hand Luke, courtesy of Warner Brothers]. Breaking Out and Breaking In: A Distributed Film Fest of Prison Breaks and Bank Heists—co-sponsored by BLDGBLOG, Filmmaker Magazine, and Studio-X NYC—continued last week with Cool Hand Luke (1967), directed by Stuart Rosenberg. The film tells...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Ball Games: The Great Escape (1963)
[Image: The Great Escape from MGM]. Note: This is a guest post by Nicola Twilley, written as part of Breaking Out and Breaking In: A Distributed Film Fest of Prison Breaks and Bank Heists. Alongside The Dam Busters and The Wooden Horse, The Great Escape was shown on British TV at least once a month...
