An open source penis

Open source is a great ideal. However, thus far it has hardly been implemented for objects that are actually needed. Take prosthetics, for instance. They are currently mainly commercial and insanely expensive. Open Prosthetics is aiming to make prostetics more readily available by means of open source.

The question is how amateur culture (which, to some extent, open source always is) will manifest itself in the design of bodily parts. Will actual need be the key focus, or prosthetics designed for extremely personal uses, for comfort, obsession, crime, sleaze, curiosity and pleasure?

This was the starting question for Sputniko!, urging her to design an open source prosthetics to satisfy her own personal curiosity. She asked herself the question
“What does it feel like to have an extra body part (in this case – penis) which reacts to my emotions?”
This turned out to be a design project called Penis Cybernetique. Simply put, it's an open source penis. The penis moved up and down, according to changes in heart rate.

This might just be the final outcome of the ideas behind open prosthetics. Open source body parts can go beyond mere need into the realm of play, culture and curiosity - one can test themselves with extra additions. For me, personally, I'd like to see what it feels like with an extra eye in my neck, for instance. The test is the goal, the means is the end. Is that what this project means, or does it indicate the extremities of open source?

If you want to build on the penis cybernetique yourself: in true open source-style, the entire project code for the open source penis is published online.

Solids

The question of flexible spaces has always been a difficult one. Mainly, flexibility was defined by constraints. An architect, developer, city planner of someone else defined either a function, the size or the partitioning.
There have been quite some developments around the theme of flexibility, but none of them have been as radical as the concept of solids in Amsterdam.

Solids are about complete freedom, and complete flexibility. Tennants are free to decide the amount of square meters they want to rent - with a minimum of 90 m2. So far, nothing radical. However, tennants can also freely decide what they want to do with those square metres. If they'd like to use it to live in, it's just as good an option to start an office in the building. Pretty much everything goes, as long it doesn't cause disturbance for the neighbors (be it noise, pollution or whatnot).

That's what makes the concept of Solids so interesting: the building gives way to a mixture of functions, even if it isn't completely planned in advance. The buildings live, change and are adaptable to whatever the users would like. This also means that the spaces are completely empty and free of any interior obstacles. There's a front door, a wall and a facade and electrics, gas and water. All the interior walls, bathrooms, and furnishing can be decided by the tennant, and changed at will.
This way, the chance that the building becomes obsolete within some years of construction is pretty small. If there's a bigger market for dwellings, more of the casco spaces will be used as appartments.

A lot can be said about the currently planned Solids - about their facades, about their location in the city and what that means for the possible programming, the connection with the urban tissue, etcetera: but that's not quite the most fascinating part of this concept. The thing is: the appearance of the facade is literally only skin-deep. What makes the concept fascinating is it's flexibility in all senses. Even the rental price is to be decided by the tennants (within some reasonable ranges, of course)!

The concept of Solids is developed by Stadsgenoot, by the way.

Sermon on the train

Question: how 'public' is public, actually? Especially, how 'public' are 'public lectures'?

Many universities go out of their way to organize lectures that are accessible to anyone who's interested. This means, however, only that an institute choses to liberate only a small part of the information available, at a carefully picked place and time. Generally, the effect is that only visitors from a small circle will attend, not the general public. Most of the time, this isn't out of a lack of interest. It could be that the institute is, despite the open entrance, not easily accessible. Or that people outside the confined universe of the institute don't know when or where the public lecture is. Or think about the psychological barrier someone who's not accustomed to a university might have.
All in all, it's pretty safe to argue that, however good the intentions might be, public lectures are, in fact, not completely public.

The logical next question could be to think about how to increase the public character of those lectures. Think about the biblical public sermons, for instance. Jesus preached on the mount and on the plain, he went towards the public to share his view. If that idea is converted to our times, "Sermon on the Train" isn't that far-fetched.

Here, well known academics, as well as artists, go out into the public realm to share their ideas. Or, more precisely, they hold a lecture on a train in South-Africa. The lecture is announced beforehand by means of posters and such, meaning that people who want to hear the lecture mingle with the normal traveling public.
The difference is that the commuting public didn't choose to listen to the lecture, they are immersed into it, simply because they cannot get out of the train. In that essence, it's a bit like preaching in public - hence the term "sermon". One could ask whether this is more public as the traditional form, what the relation between lecturer and audience is, and who can access (or owns?) the information.


The idea behind the sermons stems from the artists "Made You Look". That means Nare Mokgotho and Molemo Moiloa.
"The works of Made You look are, as the name suggests, tongue-in-cheek interventions that encourage a re-observation of and de-familiarization with the ordinary." as they say themselves.

Reading light

French designers Jun Yasumoto, Alban Le Henry, Olivier Pigasse and Vincent Vandenbrouck collectively worked on a simple, yet brilliant reading lamp. It's sensitive to touch, meaning that the lamp shuts off when you put a book on it, and it illuminates if you remove the book. Lovely, isn't it?

I've discovered this via core77.com

Inside / Outside

What if an outside wall of a house would be more than a stringent division between inside and outside? What if a house would be able to intermingle the inside and the outside?

Well, that's exactly what Sou Fujimoto achieved in their House N in Oita (Japan). In this project, parts of the outside are integrated in the building, creating a weird mix-up that's neither inside or outside. Or both, at the same time.

The basic idea behind this is the concept of stepped privacy, by nesting three cubic volumes in eachother. This makes the space of the building a continuous whole with different parts.

It might even be a bit like a traditional Japanese house. These normally consist of a ornamental garden, a transitional area and the living area. The last one is always the really private space with a exeptional position in the whole.
However, the way the walls are punctured has nothing to do with traditional Japanese houses - where the walls are mainly layers of translucent sliding doors on top of eachother. The wall openings of the House N are more like traditional western windows - whether or not the frames are filled with glass. The only way these resemble the traditional Japanese wall is by means of the roller blind, that can close the window opening to vary the privacy of the spaces of the house.

Wearing a new building like a hat

Even though one wouldn't guess so at first glance, the Faculty of Mathematics by Bevk Perović in Ljubljana (Slovenia) is actually an extension of an old edifice. On top of an existing, two story building, the new structure was placed - with a completely different programme. At a second glance, one could still see the old building shining through on the ground floor, retaining it's own identity whilst being absorbed into the new building.

Since the new building does not have a ground floor per se, the architects went for a different approach to create public spaces in the building: these large, transparent rooms are carved out of the building mass. By doing so, the second floor becomes what normally the ground floor would be: the public realm of the building. It consists of the lecture halls and the two larger communal areas of the faculty, with all the other programme of the school on the higher floors.


I found this through archdaily.com

Kunst-haas

Combine an iconic image (the one from the Obama elections, for instance), and combine that with a reluctant star. And what do you get? An installation called Kunst-haas at the Harvard GSD.

And, in case you are wondering what mr. Koolhaas himself would think of his iconic stardom as a posterboy for architecture:

Border control

Sometimes, an image doesn't need that many words. I could write loads of different articles about this picture, but I think the sheer image of the American-Mexican border in the Tijuana-San Diego Metropolitan Area suffices to explain a thing or two about the local conditions...

P.S.: If it isn't clear: left is the USA, right is Mexico...
P.P.S.: I found this image via deputy dog, and the source is wikipedia.

The bigger picture

When photographers play with the interconnection of the actual reality and a constructed illusion, it's nothing new. It comes with the turf, I'd say. But especially if it's large-scaled, and if it's an actual installation in the public realm, it can become a work that verges in of the concept of street art.

And the work of the photographer/artist Renate Buser (from Basel) is exactly that. She takes an existing situation and adds a distortion of reality to it. It could be a shifted perspective, a new layer of meaning or a new way of seeing things. Because of the reality of the image, mixed with the large scale, it ends up in a rather surreal setting, where all constructed realities can be questioned as being true and false at the same time. Other than that: it just looks really amazing!


I found these projects on wrongdistance.com

A radical conversion

The German Meixner Schlüter Wendt got a commission for a house in a wealthy residential area near Frankfurt. The thing is: on the site was already an unspectacular, 1930-style house. Most (rationally thinking) architects would've probably suggested to tear down the house. But not the architects of this project: they decided to have a little bit more fun with the house, and went for an approach that seems to be barrowed from Gordon Matta-Clark.

They took the original house and went for a process of transforming the object. But not in the traditional way, but by means of a metamorphosis. The appearingly normal setting of the house in the nature is distorted, but at the same time made more tangible. They built a shell around the old house, creating interesting intermediate spaces between the old and the new. Then they slowly started to cut open the old house. Either to let light in (or to create a stronger relation to the surrounding nature), or to allow for spatially more interesting places. Some other parts (such as the rooftop rooms) were extended to meet the boundaries of the new structure.

It's a paradoxically unnormal house. Or a paradoxically normal house. It depends on the way you look at it. The thing is that the distortion of the existing reality into a blurry, new reality creates a spectacular building that can be read like a house, like a piece of art and like a layering of history, all in one.


Read more on convertible ity.de.

Sleeveface

Sleevefacing is, according to the website sleeveface.com: "one or more persons obscuring or augmenting any part of their body or bodies with record sleeve(s) causing an illusion." Well, that basically says it all: pictures of people with record sleeves in front of their faces and such. Oddly enough, it is quite fascinating to see the interplay of two photographed realities - even though it tends to come close to the kitsch holiday snapshots of people holding the Eiffel tower on their hands and such...


Other than the aforementioned website, flickr.com is a great source for sleevefaced images, too...

Stadtlounge St. Gallen

In early 2005, construction workers finished work on the building on the Schreinerstrasse 6 in the Swiss town of St. Gallen. With this, the end of the building for the Raiffeisen-group was finished. What was left was an attractive re-design of the public space of the area. To get the best solution for the area, a competition was held. The goal was simple: to create a urban coherent area. To cut a long story short: the competition was won by the artists Pipilotti Rist and Carlos Martinez with a radical proposal, called Stadtlounge (city lounge).

To unify all the different segments of the rather clustered public space, they came up with a carpet that covers the area. With this, the area is formed like a living room, with various different themes, all dealing with interaction and meeting people in different ways - there are cafes, business-lounges, relax-lounges etcetera. And the designers took the concept to its extreme: the lights are designed just as lamps in a living room (instead of being street furniture), and all normal street-elements are "swept under the carpet"...

Sneakers delight store (igor ferreira) lissabon

The owner of the Sneakers' Delight store in Lisbon, Igor Ferreira, was looking for the perfect way to make his shop a little bit more personal, attractive and fun. Since he's a designer, too - and loves graphic insanity. And he had a nice idea to make his shop more interactive. On the walls, he put a black and white mural by the French illustrator 'Skwak'. And then, he gave his costumers some coloured pencils, and let them colour in the illustration. So the shop is always "under construction" and in transition. Lovely.

If you think that you've seen this before, you might be right. And you are probably reading Frame Magazine, too...