Pecha Kucha Sydney Volume 12 is on Thursday 6th August!

This time we will be holding the night at Carriageworks, the excellent performance
venue in Redfern which means that you will all be seated comfortably and will be
able to see and hear all the action…

We have an great lineup of creative peoples and space is limited so please
arrive early or on time to ensure you get a seat.

See you there.

I love the legibly mechanical character of early space exploration. When the future still involved rivets. The Lunar Rover Operations Handbook exemplifies this period, detailing the workings and running of the vehicles that were used to roam the surface of the moon. When the absolutely incredible act of driving a motor vehicle on the surface of an extra-planetary rock orbiting the Earth is described as a series of bullet point instructions for changing a battery, or putting on a hand break, the sublime act approaches the everyday via flowchart.

Velcro, for instance, seems to have played a large role in the operation and deployment of the LRV. Velcro. I know that velcro is a space-age material in so far as it seemed quite possible at one time that it might replace the shoelace, but application in holding things together in space, on the moon, makes extra-planetary exploration disarmingly tactile.

“Astronaut forms loop by placing cable against console velcro and pressing the velcro strap onto itself after covering the cable.”

And the thought that astronauts might carry bags around with them is similarly commonplace. But where will I keep my stuff? You can put your bag here. Under the seat. Don’t worry, it has ‘stiffeners’ so your stuff won’t get crushed. Cool, thanks. Over.

Of course this is an operations manual and not a construction document but I find notations such as “Spring” and “Bag Stiffener” delightfully banal in this context. Like velcro, a spring is something located in the back of a craft draw, not the moon.

And finally, parking codes on the moon have different criteria to here, with the sun playing a significant role in the orientation of parked vehicles as we learn in Section 5.2

“5.2 Parking Limitation

To achieve proper thermal control of the LRV and stowed payload during between EVA parking periods, the LRV must be oriented per figure 5-2. Parking the LRV outside these limits will result in display and control component overheating or LCRU overheating. There are no orientation constraints imposed on short term parking during EVA’s.”

All images taken from the Lunar Rover Operations Handbook, Doc. LS006-002-2H, Prepared by the Boeing Company, LRV Systems Engineering, Huntsville, Alabama, April 19, 1971

Dan Hill! Geoff Manaugh! Talking at Tusculum tomorrow night!

City of Sound and BLDGBLOG are two of the best architecture and urbanism blogs on the planet, and those that are regular readers of their work will know that it promises to be a provocative and enlightening evening.

(ignore the hasty image below… The date is Tuesday 14th July)

An installation by SANAA opened at Sherman Gallery in Paddington last night. The work is comprised of two of SANAA’s flower shapes made of acrylic sitting in the gallery space. As a demonstration of the spatial effects of bending transparent materials and the examination of personal space, privacy and publicness it is quite effective.

It is at ground level though, where the edge of the acrylic inscribes a thin white line on the concrete floor and there is a slight shift in light level within the curves that the clarity of the linework becomes clear, defined by weightless walls.

We strongly encourage you to participate in a survey on architectural publications and their influence, for a research project currently being undertaken by Michael Kubo on publishing practices to be exhibited at Pinkcomma gallery in Boston in September 2009.   The project is the second installment of an exhibition on the legacy of architectural publications, titled Publishing Practices, shown at the University at Buffalo in May as part of the Banham Fellowship for 2008-2009. The survey is intended to study the reception and influence of architectural publications for those who have received an architectural education and are currently practicing in various design-related fields.  The survey should take no more than 15-20 minutes to complete and all responses are anonymous and confidential.

‘Throughout the last century, the history of architecture has been closely related to the history of books produced by architects. Just as buildings produce discourses in and of themselves, so the discourse of the book has often been used by architects to excavate a conceptual space in which (their) buildings can be both produced and understood. Many of the most prominent architects of the past century have also been prolific publishers, whether as editors of magazines and journals (Mies van der Rohe, El Lissitzky, Le Corbusier, Aldo van Eyck, Ernesto Rogers, Rafael Moneo, Peter Eisenman, among others) or as authors of manifestoes and other book formats (Le Corbusier, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, Peter Eisenman, Rem Koolhaas, Buckminster Fuller, among many others). The production of architecture has been inseparable from the production of a related discourse—through magazines, journals, manifestoes, monographs, pamphlets, transcripts, films, interviews—as parallel strands of work that are assumed to support each other, but which in reality often reveal a provocative (and in some cases deliberate) misalignment. Publishing has become a strategic weapon in the architect’s arsenal, deployed for its unique capacity to frame the practice of the architect and to perform as a critical form of architecture itself.

The exhibition investigates the history and influence of the architecture book, through case studies of canonical publications that have constituted this parallel form of practice in the past century. Information graphics contrast the production of these books with their reception, mapping the impact of architectural publications through an international survey of practitioners, scholars, and educators in the field. The investigation reveals the history of publications as an alternative form of architecture, parallel to and frequently more agile than the production of work more typically understood as architectural.’

Jeremy and I took a quick wander through the recently opened Surry Hills Library on Crown Street by FJMT. Like many of FJMT’s buildings this is a highly detailed timber and glass number with what I am told is an extraordinary cost per square metre put towards achieving ‘benchmark’ energy credentials.

And while on first impressions I question whether the building makes the best library, in the sense that a library might be a point in space that celebrates the exchange of knowledge through repositories of information; books, computers, meeting tables, people (the decision to place the public access computer terminals - surely the heart of a contemporary library, and on the day we were there, the busiest space - in an impossibly skinny room in the deepest recess of the library is particularly odd)

One standout, is the signage by Collider. The signage is integrated neatly into the architecture of the building; the entry signage in black lettering leans out from the surface of the black precast walls and internally, wayfinding signage twists within the framework set up by the terracotta wall tiles. This is some pretty brave signage for the City of Sydney to take on given the subtlety of the effect and the range of visitors