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24/7 Late Capitalism And The Ends Of Sleep - Johnathan Crary

While the underpinning thesis of this book is a Marcusean reappraisal of the role of capitalism in the information age, it also, perhaps inadvertently, dwells with some elegance on the role of sensation, perception and attention and our increasingly deliquescent relationship with the physical world. Crary sees the mechanisms of the market relentlessly usurping every moment of wakeful attention ...

The World Of Charles And Ray Eames - Barbican - London

The Barbican continue an unbroken run of brilliant exhibitions with this detailed survey of the work of the celebrated designer couple. In a deftly articulate parade of media and materials the world of Charles and Ray Eames is unpacked across the gallery's perfectly sympathetic complex of spaces. Of particular interest are the many examples of publications and films expressly made to convey...

University Of Illinois Press

The Deepest Sense - A Cultural History Of Touch

It is almost impossible to open a collection of writings on sensory thought without coming across Constance Classens's name. She is one of the finest writers on the subject we have. This welcome study succinctly excavates the history of our most immediate and primal sense. Touch is so fundamental to our momentary experience that it goes largely unanalyzed and so the revelations in this work...

Thames & Hudson

Listening To Stone, The Life And Art Of Isamu Noguchi - Hayden Herrera - Thames & Hudson

This biography, assembled from correspondence, interviews and extensive research, is that rare thing: an invisible text. By this I mean that the writing is so direct, so self effacing in serving its subject, that the account it conveys feels like a direct memory. Herera has the skill to deploy words deftly enough that they carry information and nuance without leaving a trace of the author upon ...

Late Night Tales

Late Night Tales - Nils Frahm

Coincidentally, as I received this new disc, I was musing over the wonderful cassette compellations my friends and I used to make for each other decades ago. I'm not sure I can think of a more personal gift than a selection of music, carefully curated, mixed and laboriously transferred to tape. This release, the latest in the ongoing Late Night Tales series, has the feel of a highly p...

Lauren Coleman.

Catch - Lindsey Adelman

Catch is a collection of lights designed by Lindsey Adelman. The forms suggest clusters of hanging plant life or insect larvae. There is an unexpected formal integrity which looks alien, beautiful and ordered all at once. Sometimes a designer manages to describe forms which feel as though they might usurps the materials used and move them into a new grammar of behavior. Lighting is littered wit...

RubÃ©n Dâ€™hers

Chords Tunnel #1 - RubÃ©n Dâ€™hers

Using tiny servo motors to agitate beaters and plectrums is not a new idea. I've seen literally dozens of sound-works over the decades which have done this with varying degrees of success. The real point is the physical placement of multiple acoustic sound sources within a space and the complexity/beauty of the resulting sonic environment. Chords Tunnel #1 is a highly effective deployment o...

The World Beyond Your Head - Matthew Crawford -

While this may at first seem a puzzling inclusion on DTA, it is, despite ranging freely through philosophical and political enquiry, a book concerned with our direct experience of the world. The author argues very elegantly for a resumption of physical engagement in actions which are increasingly disembodied. Not only is the finite resource of our attention being fought over with increasing fer...

Horror In Architecture - Joshua Comaroff & Ong Ker-Shing

If it contained nothing more than the joyful riffing on semi-detached housing as essentially bi-polar, this book would make a splendid read. As it is, the authors mine the links between horror's visceral tropes and the creeping distortions which characterize even the most innocuous of buildings. This is a hugely enjoyable series of musings on the social pathology represented so emphatically...

Curiosity Studio

Curiosity Essence bottle - Gwenael Nicholas

We all accept the premise that every moment leading to an experience informs our predisposition to it. The senses build a narrative around all encounters which is why the voodoo of packaging has such a persuasive hold over the consumer experience. Architecture (BIG packaging) can use the same promise and reveal to great effect. This bottle design effortlessly conveys an exquisite image of pure ...

Sense Of Smell - Marcel Van Brakel, Wander Eikelboom, Frederik Duerinck

This collection of projects, articles and essays emerges from some pretty adventurous course-work in Breda. Centering around olfaction in all its many manifestations, the anthology covers experimental sensory work, art projects, commercial applications, historical critiques (a fascinating piece about little known Futurist preoccupations with smell) and current thinking about the science of smel...

Le FantÃ´me - video - Kristof Brandl

This video for Monogrenade, at first glance, seems to hark back to the rather particular 70's surrealism of Hypnosis with several favorite tropes (nonchalant combustion, empty swimming pools) revisited. However, underpinning the eye/mind candy, a rigorous, more Ballardian intention lurks. The protagonist is seeking, through the uncomfortable administration of drugs to rebuild memories of pa...

Pichola - Neela Vermeire

Neela Vermeire's collaboration with perfumer Bertrand Duchaufour continues here with their fifth perfume, Pichola. Named after the spectacular lake in Udaipur and sharing a character of echoing reflections, of limpid, hazy tranquility, Pichola is clearly part of the cross-cultural narrative already established in the earlier works. While I could spend time here parsing the construction of this ...

I am here but you've gone - Fiorucci Trust - London

Artists Adam Christensen, Patrizio Di Massimo, Adham Faramawy, Ed Fornieles, Celia Hempton, Mary Ramsden, Magali Reus and Prem Sahib have each developed olfactory works as part of a program sponsored by the Fioricci Trust. In collaboration with London based company Creative Perfumers, the artists were encouraged to embrace smell as part of their existing practice. The results are currently...

Asunder, Sweet And Other Distress - Godspeed You! Black Emperor

Those unfamiliar with GSYBE's material may be baffled by my reticence to attempt description here. Once you have heard them you will understand just how effectively they defy both description and classification. Suffice to say they are quite unique. Moving from pulverising unison arrangements of aching force and beauty to drones of such sinuous articulation as to rewrite the history of dron...

The Peripheral - William Gibson

Those unfamiliar with Gibson's novels (as opposed to simply being aware of the influence of his thought) should know that to open a page is akin to stepping onto a moving train. He has never troubled himself with the yawning disjunction between the speed of everyday thinking and that of his own jacked-up prose. Part of what makes his novels quite the rush they are lies in his trusting the r...

Evgeny Kazantsev

Future Cities - Evgeny Kazantsev's illustrations

While there have long been fantastic illustrations of possible/impossible cities, it was the arrival of the Science Fiction paperback that accelerated these visualizations exponentially, establishing a vast pool of ideas that, with the advent of CGI, can be realized in 3D. Countless films and games are now furnished with environments that reference this rich image history. There is almost certa...

Filippos Tsitsopoulos

Filippos Tsitsopoulos - photographs

Better writers than I will doubtless spend time decoding the impulse (currently at epidemic proportions online) to create portraits in which the face of the subject is violently expunged. I come across a dozen new examples each day, usually photographs, attacked with knives, scourers, vivid slabs of pigment, extreme digital distortions etc etc. This may turn out to be one of the most wide...

Ephemera - Sound and Scent - Unsound

Curators Malgorzata Plysa and Mat Schulz of Unsound have developed a project in which three musical pieces: Bass, Drone and Noise by composers Steve Goodman, Tim Hecker and Ben Frost respectively act as direction to perfumer Geza Schoen in creating three parallel perfumes. At a time when random or forced "synesthesic" connections are becoming ubiquitous, this is a direct and arti...

GÃ¶rkem Åžen - The Yaybahar - new musical instrument

Every so often a new instrument is announced, often a hybrid cobbled together from parts or, an electronic "trigger, which simply activates preselected sounds and sequences, they almost always fail to excite. The Yaybahar is exceptional principally as both the origin and the sole means of expressive control over the sound. Görkem Åžen clearly has near virtuosic command of his c...

Neclumi - projected light jewellery - panGernerator

We recently featured Maiko Takeda's shadow jewelry here. The pieces felt genuinely innovative particularly because there is no reason they could not have existed centuries ago but for the idea. These works by panGenerator are more of their time existing at the edge of current technology. They rely on the use of portable computation and projection devices and owe their interactivity to tools...

Jewels - video for Black Atlass by Yoann Lemoine

Yoann Leoine (or Woodkid, when working on his own musical projects) has developed a very distinctive yet unpredictable visual style. Every video, regardless of musical content or the artist he is working for, is reliably exquisite, sumptuous and seething with sensuous ideas. He is clearly fascinated by matter, its behavior and its symbolic power, things dear to the heart of the DTA project. The...

Alibis: Sigmar Polke - Tate Modern - London

When he died in 2010 Sigmar Polke left an astonishingly rich body of work behind him. Born in 1941, Polke restlessly interrogated the very mechanisms of perception and failed entirely to slip into the unconscious self parody defining the output of many acclaimed artists today. His fearless experimentation, often undermining the foundations of his own practice as well the more complacent output ...

Marian Goodman Gallery

Marian Goodman Gallery London - David Adjaye

As London's recession grinds on, we welcome yet another New York power-dealer arriving with another huge and splendid exhibition space. Architect David Adjaye has deftly remodeled what seems to have been a warehouse in the center of Soho into one of the most beautiful galleries in the city. If a gallery space can be more chapel than white cube and effectively predispose viewers toward awest...

MESHUGGAH - The Ophidian Trek

Last year's world tour saw Swedish Math Metal shockwave Meshuggah in seismically pulverizing form. I can vouch for live shows of astonishing brilliance. This box set of recordings documents both the band's crushing live presence and the synapse - fraying complexity of their performances. The DVD gives some tiny inkling of the energy which drives their playing. A great memento-mori...

Factory Fifteen

The Bug - Function/Void - Factory Fifteen

The Bug's magisterial second album Angels & Devils has already done what second albums regularly fail to do and surpassed all expectations. In a rare and near perfect marriage of sound and image Factory Fifteen have perfectly distilled the spirit of Kevin Martin's urban psychic cataclysm. Yet somewhere in the exquisite design of this film is a buried hymn to the late, great architec...

Fallingwater Light and Sound show - Luftwerk

The creative duo of Petra Bachmaier and Sean Gallero formed Luftwerk to develop immersive sculptural installations, often featuring projection mapping and the ingenious manipulation of existing and familiar surfaces with light. This commission from the Fallingwater foundation produced a lively meditation on the context and dynamism of Frank Lloyd Wright's astounding (and, yes, ge...

Alexander Alexeieff and Claire Parker

Le Nez - Animated Film - 1963 - Alexander Alexeieff and Claire Parker

Made using their own creation, the Pin Screen this astounding animation seems even more amazing when you know the Pin Screen consisted of one million headless steel pins in a board which had to be pushed in arrangements into or out of an oblique light source to create each frame of the film. The design, animation and pictorial narrative are so beguiling, the rendering of the Gogol story ...

History's Shadow - X-ray Photographs - David Maisel

The paradox of photography has always been the elimination of both time and 3 dimensional space in the service of their recording. Rendering a world of surfaces down still further into a single plane has a thrilling sense of reductive fatality to it. The x-ray offers (in much the way flight and scuba diving do) a moment of escape from our surface bound existence. Suddenly we can see through the...

nobumichiasai.com

Omote - Real-time face tracking and projection mapping from Asai Nobumichi and his team.

Asai Nobumichi has produced this astonishing, live face-tracking project which takes techniques we have seen used with dancers and robots just one huge step further. The precision and accuracy demonstrated here with a live model feel streets ahead of anything demonstrated to date. it is easy to extrapolate applications which will doubtless be dazzling.The projection device might soon be worn by...

Johnathan McCabe

Johnathan McCabe - generative images from diffraction and diffusion computation

It is often in experimental science-based works like those of Jonathan McCabe that we see the seeds of imminent generative algorithms for the gaming environments and CGI which will further saturate our cinemas. These simulations of familiar material growth and behavior are uncanny and seductive as they offer the strange and the familiar in equal measure. As our sense of what is real, indeed of ...

Pendular Movement - Felippe Moraes - BarÃ³ Galeria in SÃ£o Paulo

In the areas where the arts and sciences meet and overlap there is a good deal of spurious concillience. Using a form or a number system lifted from an unrelated branch of science or observation to give supposed meaning to an otherwise vapid artwork is an old trick and it never quite works. These pieces however work perfectly because they actually employ the forces and phenomena they reveal to ...

Kepler's Dream - Michael Burk

Kepler's Dream is a brilliant fusion of almost antique analog projection methods with state of the art 3D modeling and printing. There is something hugely engaging about the direct physical connection necessary to view this work, the clear evidence of cause and effect, the great beauty of the simple optics employed. The light phenomena revealed are every bit as complex as the minute modelin...

Kimchi and Chips

Light Barrier - Kimchi and Chips

The earliest fictional visualizations of holographic projection fired the imagination of all who saw them. Free - standing 3D projections have existed as a bench mark of "future tech" ever since. The technique of projecting onto mist or smoke has been explored in several artworks over the last decade but 3D scanning has now enabled us to generate images with physical depth. Kimchi and...

The Acid - Mute Records

Video for Basic Instinct - The Acid

Mute have just released the debut album Liminal by The Acid. This video for the track Basic Instinct very beautifully captures the somnambulant mood of the music by slowing the footage so dramatically one is effectively taken through a series of memorably arresting stills. The subject and context feel rooted in traditions of Persian miniature painting particularly as some of the more impossible...

Matthew Simmonds

Matthew Simmonds - architectural sculptures

The architectural sculptures of Matthew Simmonds play upon ideas of scale, antiquity, enclosure and the very fundamental psychological bedrock of our relationship with the spaces we occupy. There is a profound sense of understanding this typology of forms and voids as our lives are spent almost entirely, navigating, personalizing and reimagining the built spaces of our urban environments. The m...

Music for Matthew Barney's - River Of Fundament - Jonathan Bepler

Matthew Barney’s epic River Of Fundament is impossible to discus in the short form available here. However the astonishing score by Jonathan Bepler needs to be heralded for what it is: a blueprint for an altogether new approach in the articulation/integration of sound with image. Indeed the word score seems hardly adequate for what is entirely integral to the total work, quite inseparable...

Thames and Hudson

The Sick Rose - Richard Barnett - published by Thames and Hudson

The Sick Rose documents the illustration of disease and the material frailties of the human condition in the 19th century. In the time before photography, during industrialization and the renewal of urban disease which accompanied it, this morbidly beautiful volume depicts an alarming wealth of disorders through painstakingly detailed and accurate images. Richard Barnett describes the exa...

Thomas Joshua Cooper

The photographs of Thomas Joshua Cooper

Thomas Joshua Cooper is one of the truly great landscape photographers of this or any decade. His rigorous methodology: researching locations (usually remote) traveling with his heavy field camera and finally making a single exposure before returning to the darkroom, transforms the act of image capture into a ritual of physical meditation. The resultant prints are exquisite and impossible to re...

Dane Penland, Smithsonian Institution

The Great Picture - 3000 Square foot photograph at The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum

Officially the worlds largest photograph, taken by the world's largest camera. An army of volunteers turned an aircraft hanger into a light-fast box and exposed a vast canvas via a quarter inch aperture. Now on display at The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center the image is inextricably linked to its location causally and physically. The six arti...

Touch sensitive colour

As we drift away from physical contact with our immediate environment, it is heartening to see developments which encourage or indeed reward tactile enquiry. A team of chemists at the University of California happened upon an arrangement of gold nanoparticles which respond to touch and pressure by changing colour. This may have numerous applications of a more science-based, practical natur...

Turbo-Gusli - VTOL - demo performance

Dmitry Morozov's VTOL project has seen the creation of a number of fabulously eccentric robotic instruments. Turbo Gusli clearly speaks to the creator's Russian roots and the essential, audible addition of servo sounds integral to the working is hugely engaging. Heard without vision, this recording produces an imagined narrative of baffling activity in the mind of the viewer: a meticulo...

Port de Savoirs

One of the preoccupations arising out the exponential increase in information transmission and density is the urge, indeed the need, to symbolize this phenomena somehow. While it might be argued that the very speed and scale of our information landscape define it as effectively invisible, the temptation to visualize is irresistible. While the vertical streaming, phosphorescent, green hieroglyph...

FG+SG Fotografia de Arquitectura

STM School of Technology and Management / MONTENEGRO Architects

While we frown on purely form driven projects here at DTA, this is a case where the form itself is so startling, so well resolved and so apt, it deserves special pleading. The ruthless precision MONTENEGRO Architects express through the blade like canopy with its beautiful shadows and almost mesmerizing physical lure is undeniable. STM School of Technology and Management as an image will be ent...

EglÄ— JacinaviÄiÅ«tÄ— & Savvas Laz

The Domestichordphone - Piet Zwart Institute

As part of Instruments: Reimagining The Music Room at the Piet Zwart Institute EglÄ— JacinaviÄiÅ«tÄ— and Savvas Laz have devised this wonderful hybrid object. Taking the most prosaic of domestic objects, subject to equally prosaic physical interaction, the makers have injected an entirely unexpected and some might say unnecessary sonic behavior. That the passage of eac...

Subliminal Transcription light installation - Yael Erel - Ressellaer Polytechnic Institute Architect

Yael Erel's research project on the reflective characteristics of surfaces has produced an impressive body of documents which, while being seductively beautiful, are also deeply thought provoking. The behavior of light will always be a source of constant fascination but in this instance it is what is revealed about apparently featureless surfaces and consequently the shortcomings in our vis...

Museum Of The Fangshang Geopark - BAID architects - Beijing, China

The Museum Of The Fangshang Geopark locates itself discretely into the landscape of the park through a very particular use of material and profile. The topology of the build appears continuous to the site while architects BAID have chosen and worked the materials to ensure a pallet of colour and surface which integrates the building beautiful into the landscape. What is most interesting however...

Transform - MIT Media Lab

In the search for a physical flexibility which mirror's the deliquescence of information media and the limitless malleability of the virtual world, we dream of materials and objects that are as biddable as the CGI which now shapes our imagined environments. This project from MIT Media Lab proposes a responsive, tactile and highly flexible surface/mass which could be furniture or the limited...

Toki Ori Ori Nasu - Falling Records - Ei Wada

Japanese artist Eli Wada has memorialized the medium of analog tape (so alien an idea most people under thirty find it baffling) in this poetic construction. Using the peculiar properties of the physical medium to create writhing falls within the glass towers, the tape sounds as it unspools, then reverses into recognizable music while whizzing back onto the reels. This is such an elegant idea, ...

The Final Turn - Funerary urn - Tom Kundig

Tom Kundig is responsible for designing some of the best houses we have seen over the last decade. With a sensuous use of materials, ingenious fabrication and a genuine feel for the lives to be lived within, his work offers an antidote to the myriad dumbly glossy boxes bullt for the rich and witless. This funerary urn, commissioned by artist Greg Lungren distils Kundig's architectural aesth...

Dimitri Daniloff

Parkour Athletes - Dimitri Daniloff

At the core of our built environment is the relationship between the human body and the spaces we make to contain it. Parkour radically rethinks those relationships while also throwing our habitual journeys through and around the urban landscape into question. These compelling photographs capture perfectly the intensity, the poetry and the radical "reshaping" proposed by these sp...

Using bees to diagnose disease - Susana Soares

In a poetic fusion of craft, entomology and diagnostics Portuguese designer Susana Soares has developed a blown glass vessel in which the hyper-acute sensitivity of bees to minute indications of certain diseases may be observed. The bees will move from one chamber to the other in response to the presence of diseased cells in the breath of the user. There is something wonderfully arcane, ev...

Fernando Guerra

Tapestry Museum - CVBD Architquitectos

A Tapestry Museum in the small Portuguese town of Arraiolos. CVBD Architectos feature crisp plaster and expanses of cloudy local marble which wash through the beautiful vaulted rooms as though a mysterious tide had carried surface and pigment into the spaces describing lines at various marks. The serenity of this contrast, between the highly polished marble and pristine plaster, is inspired. Th...

Jonas Dahlberg Studio

Memory Wound - UtÃ¸ya memorial by Jonas Dahlberg Studio

Memorializing something as shocking as the massacre on the island of Utøya is a near impossible task especially for the victims of the event. When the victim is, in effect, ultimately an entire country, the possibility of arriving at a solution unclouded by rage, the need for revenge or the outpouring of raw sentiment is remote. This proposal is striking in its profundity, in its se...

Matthew Pillsbury

Matthew Pillsbury

These photographs beautifully contrast emphatic architectural form with the vaporous evidence of human occupation. Captured though long exposures, the paradoxical relationship between the builders of these marvelous structures and their ethereal presence in the spaces created is continually fascinating. As a metaphor for the brevity of human life and our heroic efforts to deny it Pillsbury'...

Musicians With Guns

Overstepping Artefacts

While the fascination with fractal geometry is ongoing and its application in music video hardly new, this piece is interesting as much for the fizzing edges of computation visible in the evolving details as anything else. Viewed closely it is as if one can see the furious number-crunching involved in actually building these complexities whilst on the move. I have always imagined that the virtu...

Thomas KneubÃ¼hler.

Electric Mountains - Thomas KneubÃ¼hler

This series of images, showing the nocturnal illumination of deserted ski-runs, delivers, quite aside from the intriguing beauty of the photographs, a layered and complex set of observations about landscape and our use of it. Encrusted with gem-like illuminations, formed and shaped for a seasonal leisure activity, this seemingly pristine set of views bears witness to a sprawling and careless re...

Lâ€™Autre Monde - 1656

Museum Of Imaginary Musical Instruments

Deirdre Loughridge and Thomas Patteson curate this wondrous website collecting instruments from fiction and speculative projects. To propose the engine of any sensory experience in the abstract requires a good deal of thought and no little experience around the edges of that given sense. To imagine sounds as yet unheard, to devise the means of their making is a genuine act of sensory engag...

Landscape augmentations - Till Nowak for Pjusk

Some cunning and well judged manipulations by Till Nowak of already glorious aerial footage cements a splendid fusion with Pjusk's minimal electronica. Both elements making rounded sense of the other in a neat transcendence of the sum of parts. When your raw material contains the seeds of something as well embedded and familiar as landscape, you can rely on the mind of the viewer to contrib...

Sound as destruction at the ESA's Large European Acoustic Facility

The idea of sound as being lethal, destructive in and of itself is the stuff of fictions yet this facility exists to test sound's limits. There is something transformative in thinking of any sensory phenomena amplified to levels which can endanger matter or life. The point at which a medium of communication becomes a weapon is strangely fascinating. It begs we re-imagine the familiar which ...

Louvre Lens - SANAA

While it may be premature to judge just yet, this SANAA designed outpost of The Louvre promises an unusually coherent integration of architecture and landscaping seldom seen today. SANAA's signature white-on-white elegance and transparency is offset by Catherine Mosbach's beautifully sympathetic, often quite graphic tones, forms and textures perfectly complimenting the stature and profi...

J.G. Ballard's High-Rise - The Movie

A very interesting take on visualizing J.G. Ballard's reliably prescient novel of 1975, worth revisiting particularly in the light of an imminent feature film of the project. This animation dwells not unreasonably on the building itself as the main protagonist. The text and silhouetted characters feel like parasites on the body of something implacably vast and indifferent. Curious that the ...

Boom Room - sound sculpting in Berlin

The Boom Room in Berlin uses an array of directional speakers in concert with movement sensors to create a body responsive, targeted sound environment. Whilst this installation is both hugely complex and somewhat monolithic in its presence, the idea of motion-tracking sound has very seductive possibilities. As we are awash with unwanted and unresponsive sound sources, the idea that environmenta...

Vertical Glass House - Atelier FCJZ

In a radical rotation of modernist orthodoxy, this rectilinear house moves transparency to the horizontal planes, enclosing the structure from the outside yet opening a vertical view from the base to the sky. The idea is so simple it is hard to imagine it has not been tried before yet the reality of occupying such a space would be genuinely confronting. In the same way that artists such as Jame...

Abedian School Of Architecture - CRAB Studio - Queensland

Without visiting this site my thoughts here are conjecture but: there is something about the wonderful height and modulation of this structure which feels right for the rather particular climate experienced in Queensland. With it's canyon-like atrium and beautifully articulated exterior shading elements this building seems to propose precisely the kind geological features which would offer ...

Benjamin Grosser

The other gaze - Computers Watching Movies - Benjamin Grosser

There might be no better insight into our human sensory habitudes and limitations than observing something non-human, observing. Computers Watching Movies is a very interesting project which sets a computer program to "watch" various famous scenes from cinema so we can, in turn, observe the machine's viewing "decisions". The very idea of this is intriguing and while any ...

Shimizu Corporation

Infinite Tokyo

In an extrapolation which goes to the heart of what DTA is all about, we are here forced to guess( from photographs only) that this is a very interesting project. It appears to present an enormously complex combination of mapping, projection, reflection and 3D printed models which act as a diagram of Tokyo's Yamanote metro line. This line is circular and is represented within this huge refl...

Nakashima Harumi

These unassuming ceramic objects share a precise and faithfully organic formal language. They look as though they might be faithful replicas of marine creatures even down to the playful patterns of spots across their surfaces. There is also a strong sense, perhaps rooted in the careful observation of material and animal behavior evident, that they move, of their own volition and in the currents...

Non Human Device

CAD has enabled the visualization of hitherto impossible objects. Many of these ideas remain trapped within the virtual world of their inception. They exist at the edges of build ability, even comprehension. This interactive installation, by linking the geometry and "behavior" of its hypothetical subject to bodily gesture, brings the object into the real world in a fundamental way. A ...

For Those Who See

This beautifully realized device renders controlled air movements visible through the addition of vapor. The unseen complexity of aerodynamics is made fascinating spectacle, allowing us a glimpse of the invisible splendor which attends virtually every environment we inhabit. Once "seen" the baroque enthusiasms of air movement must surely inspire the skin to thinking when next a breeze...

GASP! Stage 2

Architects Room 11 have created a presence within this coastal context which acts as a framing device both visually and functionally. With a beautifully direct and uncontrived series of optical provocations, the structure introduces the fundamental ideas of bending light and form to sculptural end. A fitting springboard for for future thoughts and projects Stage 2 sets a high bar for dialog wit...

image Â© nexttriptourism

Subterranean History Museum

An utterly jaw-dropping space, "designed" by the very process it now celebrates, this immense salt mine has been brilliantly repurposed as a museum. The elements of design are beautifully delicate and amplify the colossal scale of the space. The video is for once essential viewing and even the bombastic music fails to over-sell the staggering proportions involved. Quite why the awestr...

Lucid Stead

This inspired transformation exploits its location to the maximum. The clever use of reflective material leaves the remaining elements "floating" within the perpetually changing landscape. A thoroughly engaging illusion made doubly compelling through the iconic shed form it employs. There are certain embedded shapes which the brain will struggle mightily to "protect" from di...

ETAT arkitekter.

The Sea Library

As part of the Setouchi Triennale Architects Erik Törnkvist and Malin Belfrage of ETAT have installed this splendid undulating brass reading table into a traditional Japanese school room. Evoking the ocean surface which surrounds the island location, this beautifully elegant intervention, mirrored by a free standing brass wall, produces a marvelous rupture in the regularity of the arc...

National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea.

Home within home, within ...

Do Ho Suh's work continues to explore familiar, iconic architectural forms with uncanny verisimilitude given his chosen materials. The eerie transparency and evident fragility of his structures is directly at odds with the forms from which they derive. Oddly we are given a refreshed appreciation for the voids and solids of our built environment when we can walk around a life size repl...

Miguel de GuzmÃ¡n

Semi-transparent banking

The beautiful interior of a banking office in Bilbao eschews the long standing open-plan layout and instead uses borosilicate glass tubing to delineate zones of public and private use. The effect of this is to produce an atmosphere which is mysterious, provocatively secretive and almost sinister. It seems the designers have rather thoroughly explored the (largely mistrustful) public percep...

Akane Moriyama

Collecting light, rain and wind with a mixture of transparency and flexibility of form, this installation contrasts beautifully with the rigid opacity of it's architectural surroundings. Gloriously luminous colours reflect the changing light conditions and blend through layering as the observer moves. Even precipitation is turned to advantage in coating the layers with jewel-like...

Foam

An installation formed of various prosaic domestic and industrial chemicals engineered to hold the form of clouds and waves. This solid manifestation creates the glorious illusion of a frozen meteorology through which the viewer may stroll. A wonderful meditation on one of DTA's favorite subjects: matter and its whims.

Corneel de Wilde

Skinned

Amsterdam studio Knol are harvesting local architectural surfaces using latex casts. These "skins", whilst being super accurate documents of the surface detail in every case also present a highly charged transformation of the identity of exterior surfaces. Draped and translucent, the casts behave like morbid relics of some unsettling and predatory surgical procedure. They referen...

Artful Teshima Yokoo House

The brilliant Tadanori Yokoo, one of the worlds finest graphic artists, has initiated this hallucinogenic private museum to house his work. Drawing themes from Yokoo's visual grammar, the architects Yuko Nagayama and Associates have produced a group of spaces which could have been pulled directly from the artist's works. His famous collection of waterfall postcards is shown here in a cy...

The Left-Over-Space House

This house by Cox Rayner Architects makes inspired use of a very irregular space, articulating light and space in a beautifully harmonious and sympathetic way. The use of materials creates a wonderfully rich yet elegant palette of colour and texture. By using height and air modulation through ingenious screens and panels the architects embrace the sub tropical conditions of the house's...

Suicide Machine

This amazingly tactile, rather tense film depicts a machine which, by it's own movements is progressively destroying itself. As sand is slowly poured into the open gears the whole thing will gradually seize up and cease to work. There is something really quite disturbing about the total inevitability of this, particularly when the destruction is being carried out in such a tidy and methodic...

Reversed ruins

These photographs arrest this series of structures at a very interesting point in their development. They feel like a wonderful fusion of the Janta Manta structures in Delhi and Jaipur fused with unbuilt Louis Khan. Hugely sculptural, sensuous and responsive to their location, one wishes they might be left in their current state as a sublime folly. This does raise the question : how many other ...

Tree In The House

One of the intriguing problems faced in the perpetual harvesting of information for this site is provenance. I often find things of great interest stranded on sites, unaccompanied by any information or context. Unattributed images abound as do literally thousands of wishful renderings for projects with may or may not exist, now or at any time in the future. As a rule I don't include ar...

SenseFly

3D mapping of landscapes has all manner of applications but one of the most interesting is in the furnishing of real-life complexity for virtual environments. Developing the mis-en-scene for an expansive gaming space consumes both time and computing power. If a growing library of 3D scans were to be available it would greatly enrich these environments and the experience had within them. I...

New complexity

Donavan's intricate porcelain objects combine extraordinary formal complexity with a structural logic and integrity suggesting they might be the petrified remains of botanical specimens, even impossibly ornate crustaceans. The structures transform their material into something beyond mere ceramic matter and invest it with life and mysterious purpose.

Hyocentre

Hypocentre shows us briefly and through clever deception, the unsettling sight of central Paris entirely empty of people. This is a technique we have seen in Masataka Nakano's astounding book Tokyo Nobody from 1996. The difference here is that we are looking at video footage. Despite the movement of escalators, the odd traffic light and a lonely plastic bag, there is nothing. Once one ...

Jun Mitani

If the evidence of these photographs were not enough to demonstrate the staggering ingenuity expressed in Jun Mitani's works, the accompanying video shows just how exacting the process is. These forms defy almost everything we imagine about the materiality of paper. The sheer beauty of their execution and the structures needed to support them are baffling and intriguing. The resulting objec...

Plane site

This short video work beautifully sets up a tension between the depiction of three dimensional environment, the illusions of depth and our increasingly sophisticated ability to furnish familiar conclusions for inherently unfamiliar information. A beautifully apt soundtrack mirrors the visual disjunctions with sound which is fractured yet feels inherently complete.

Bot & Dolly's BOX

This is a remarkable fusion of human movement, precision robotics and 3D projection mapping. In terms of its potential for real time sceniography there seem to be virtually no limits. The integration of live, programmed and virtual elements is resolved so well as to enhance each part rather than restrict the actions of any element.

ECAL/Benjamin Muzzin

Full Turn

Using a very engaging mix of good old physical engineering twinned with digital image generation this piece has a satisfying kinetic presence. The excitement we experience in the presence of speed is rarely evoked through the incomprehensible speeds required for digital calculations alone. The palpable acceleration and power behind these spinning screens brings an elusive but essential element ...

Corb's 5 Points

This is a beautifully clear evocation of Le Corbusier's ideas about the basis of a new domestic architecture expressed through a graphic deconstruction of his most famous house; Villa Savoye. At a time when information is all its manifest forms regularly descends into mere decoration and indulgent obfuscation the crisp simplicity of this is both instructive and refreshing. Take a look...

Michael Shainblum

Mirror City

In what seems to be almost an emerging micro-genre of mirrored video, 3D modeling and photographs, Michael Shainblum's film is something of an exemplar. The progressive levels of kaleidoscopic complexity create a narrative of detail which is genuinely involving and willfully mesmerizing. Symmetrical, mirrored ornament made from quotidian symbols exists in almost every decorative tradition. ...

Sebastian Errazuriz

The Space Between The Void

Sebastian Errazuriz's beguiling kaleidoscope cabinet conceals its dizzying interior beneath a sober rectilinear skin. The gleaming, forest of reflection trapped within calls to mind artist Josiah McElheny's splendid mirror vitrines. The viewing lens on the side enables an un-disrupted view of the infinite reflections within. A lovely conceit as the optical reverie inside is only broken ...

Non paper

As so many buildings now seem to be drowning in filigree, veils, pierced facades and a general orgy of wrapping, this wonderful surface stands as a fine solution to the clearly vexing issue of cosmetic transformation. By creating a paradoxical surface presence on such a scale, the entire structure is refreshed visually. The eye "feels" a surface which should fit into the hand yet cove...

Cymatics

One of the best attempts to visualize sound we have ever seen (and there have been hundreds) this succeeds so well because the precisely visible action of actual sound waves upon the super-fine powder filmed by Sie, feels real and not the result of some forced corespondance.The resulting sequence is amazingly persuasive because of this precise consilience between sound and vision. Perhaps a rar...

TAX arquitectura

The spectacle of knowledge

We have covered this astonishing library before but the sheer vision and drama of the design continue to sweep all newcomers before it. Not only has the architect realized a series of spaces that embody the conceptual functions of memory and learning, the entire structure functions beautifully within the landscape. There are a number of other remarkable projects on TAX arquitectura's substa...

Ryoji Ikeda - Test Pattern

This installation, perhaps more than his previous works places the human observer at the core of Ikeda's ruthlessly precise and "inhuman" constructs. The pace of data, of information flow across digital landscapes made visible, flickers and hums while the audience is made to look, and ultimately become, stationary in response. The environment moves between inspiring awe and crushi...

La Liturgie des Heures

A thunderous, incense heavy, myrrh rich, sleeping animal of a perfume. Still and peaceful in the way monumental architecture is still. La Liturgie des Heures invokes shadowed spaces, cool and silent. At its best in lower temperatures and moments of silence. This is perfume as a meditation on time: enduring and mysterious.

Jaap van den Elzen & Augusto Meijer en Oddstream

Hypercube

The Hypercube installation is a wonderful illustration of space defined, described and delineated. The fundamental elements which position our minds and bodies in the environments we build are indexed by this hyperactive presentation. Allowing a meditation on the sensations of distance and density, of the minimal and the maximal, the programmed manipulations lead the eye and the mind through a ...

Bastien CarrÃ©

Lumigraphies

This series of delicately wrought mobiles with intricate integrated light sources evoke the forms and patterns found on bioluminescent sea creatures and translucent insects. They have a mesmerizing transparency which defeats any sense of scale or material.

World variables.

This sinister and intriguing film is a meditation on the parallel landscapes emerging from the overlapping maps of global satellite positioning, militarized surveillance models and the unholy mix of speculative information gathering and paranoia. These feed so much of our cultural and political map-making today and here, bloom into a dark narrative. Gowland proposes a twilight world of disinfor...

Transplanted city

A powerfully strange video, this documents one of several European "replica" cities constructed in mainland China in what seems to be both a development frenzy and an odd impulse to "own" iconic cultural locations. As the film plays out, the full extent of the folly is revealed in what is a bleak and oddly alien environment. There is something here of the final scenes of Kub...

Karl Martin Jakobsen

Redirecting the day

The Norwegian town of Rjukan is building a system of huge mirrors which will bounce sunlight from an adjoining mountain top into their valley location during the perpetually shadowed winter. A bizarre and wonderfully mechanical solution to what must be a seriously debilitating absence for the villagers. The pool of precious sunlight will be rare and glorious meeting place for the long mont...

Alexey Titarenko

Boiling ghosts

A series of time-lapse images, each depicting prosaic, quotidian events in the grey bustling Streets of a Russian city. What makes the photographs beautifully compelling is the reduction of human traffic to an angry smoke through which the occasional still hand or booted foot is eerily visible. They are a wonderful meditation on the relative permanence of the urban space and our own fleeting tr...

Patrick Lindblom

Worn projections

A series of worn, hand-pierced metal pieces which cast images upon the wearer when light passes through them. The deployment of light, shadow and the revealing and distortion of images as each of these elements move in relation to the wearer is ingenious. Through a relatively simple though painstaking process the pieces engage in a complex way with the environment in which they are seen. The in...

Subbacultcha! and Pllant / Marieke van Helden

Past the edges of expression.

This uncanny series of animated renders presents us with material which is at once deeply familiar and unsettling. At the most basic level we register minute facial movements as communications we ignore to our cost. The amplification of these signs beyond the limits of human anatomy is fascinating and disturbing by turns. Interestingly, the most alarming moments are those just at the edge...

SYMPHONIE CINÃ‰TIQUE

The urge to find correspondence between the eye and the ear, between colour and sound, music and visual movement has produced countess collaborations across various disciplines. Ballets, films, multi media performances not to mention a host of theoretical proposals linking apparently unrelated systems, often, it must be said, dubiously. This video shows the thinking behind a recent collaboratio...

Fabio di Donato

Graphic Saturn

An absolutely rapturous film assembled from 8 years worth of images taken by the Cassini spacecraft. The editing and construction creates a breathtaking impression of both the Cassini's voyage and the almost unimaginable realm occupied by this most striking of bodies. I urge viewers to eschew the bafflingly prosaic Waltz chosen to accompany the film for something a little more fitting of th...

MichaÃ«l Borras A.K.A Systaime

Sexodrome

The daughter of Italian slasher film director Dario Argento, Asia pays tribute the reigning king of cinematic hallucinatory indulgence Gaspar Noé. A seething, lurid, eye-peeling storm of images and sweaty sonic thrusting. There is nothing quite like the power of sound and image properly united in a common cause. One forgets just how limp and pointless most music video is until experienci...

Drawn by laws

There is a wonderful tension in this video between the apparently awkward, asymmetrical wobblings of the machine and the formal geometries of it's drawings. Brings with it all manner of thoughts about making marks on paper, the guided hand, the role of the body in drawing, free will etc etc. One gets the feeling that however random the machine's movements became, the drawings would alwa...

Kenâ€™ichi Suzuki

Weather as architecture

To build a structure in which clouds form as a direct consequence of the fabrication and siting is a wonderful thing. To make the clouds a functioning element of the building is just magical. Tetsuo Kondo Architects have produced something rich and strange: a perfect, simple structure, belying an astonishing phenomenological richness in which every sense is extravagantly serenaded. Manife...

MIKIKO + elevenplay + Rhizomatiks

The movement of movement

3D projection mapping has become a ubiquitous element in large scale pubic events, installation works and commercial presentations. So far the surfaces for projection have been conveniently stationary: buildings, backdrops etc. The very considerable step of applying animated projection to moving objects, in this case dancers, promises some remarkable potential applications. One can imagine it b...

By the eye

Using eye-tracking technology, these two garments react to the viewer's gaze by altering their luminosity and, apparently, the distribution of threads. Calling to mind some of the brilliant transforming dresses by Hussein Chalayan, which are more architectural in their alterations, these feel unsettlingly organic. Almost as though the material is "behaving" in response to the view...

Wouter Van Veldhoven

Playing the studio

Wouter Van Veldhoven seems to have thrown every device he has at this ingenious construction. Most creative production procedures today are tightly wrapped around ubiquitous software packages of limited flexibility. The synthesis of organic, analog and digital sources in this "engine" coupled with a distinctively eccentric methodology yields up results which work beautifully and carry...

Octo

A remarkably successful piece of wind-driven kintetic sculpture. Octo, like much of Howe's work produces very compelling illusions of form changing, organic movement quite apart from the evident articulations of its construction. The meticulous, intricate design of Howe's pieces is intruguing in itself but his real strength is in animating forms which seem to defy the very materia...

The Photograph as Heliograph

A book of Chris McCaw's remarkable photographs is now available, documenting a series of images through which the heat of the sun's rays has actually burned tracks marking it's passage across each scene. In the most tangible demonstration of the relationships between light, heat and optics, McCaw has developed a method involving bespoke lenses, now-obsolete paper negatives and...

Re-imagining the built.

This idea, the mirroring of an image (moving or still) reappears in art, often prompted by enabling technology, regularly. As a device it can produce images which are irresistibly mesmerizing. Sometimes the device can also liberate information from an otherwise obscuring context. This deceptively simple video, the record of a train journey from Shinosaka to Tokyo, by the device of video mirrori...

Michael Hansmeyer

Machine baroque

Hansmeyer's complex symmetries are familiar to readers of DTA but this project to construct a room proceeding from his numerical preoccupations is new. Requiring unfamiliar fabrication solutions and a deal of fanatical craft commensurate with the meticulous detail present in the design grammar, the process explained in this article is fascinating and daunting by turns. There is a sense that...

Transfinite

This fixed position video of Ikeda's Transfinite installation at the New York Armory in 2011 gives some sense of the immersive, physiological impact of the art's recent works. Pitching both sound a vision at the edges of perceptive range, Ikeda compels a highly focused level of attention from an audience. The speed, pitch and precision of information pushes participants to acute states ...

Patterns of thought?

This project presents the visible control of several sound-driven water disks through EEG sensors. While it is difficult to say whether this is in fact what we see in the video, the idea and the execution are beautifully resolved. As a notion it sets in play a variety of ideas on the connections between thought, will and matter which have been with us for centuries.

Sonos playground

Video deconstruction

Referencing the drawings of Sol LeWitt in its geometric minimalism while offering users a chance to surround themselves with graphic extrapolations of their favorite music, this installation also proposes a degree of interaction for participants through motion-capture. Perhaps in answer to music's diminishing commercial status, enhanced presentations such as this are becoming very pop...

The spectacle of air

Remarkable footage of a super-cell forming in the Texas sky. The presence of massive clouds and a glowering light gives epic form to this vast movement of air. You might want to mute the utterly superfluous music.

Beautiful/terrible collision.

Toshio Shibata has spent years documenting the locations at which the Japanese landscape meets the Japanese love of construction. The apparent armoring and transformation of natural terrains into complex geometric super-surfaces is presented as both poetic and, at times, overwhelming. His unimpeachable technique and poet's eye reliably deliver sublime and powerful works.

Grains of sound

Some fascinating footage of a Chiandi Plate vibrating with sound frequency which organizes sand grains into increasingly complex geometric forms. The higher the pitch of sound the more complex the patterns become. Perversely the video is accompanied by irrelevant and rather bad music so mute while you can! These plates were originally activated by drawing violin bows along their edges.

The quality of thought

A space to think and study, this forest library epitomizes the dream of a sanctuary from the perturbations of the world. To read and think in such an environment is a genuine luxury, rare and sublime. Indeed it is perhaps the biggest paradox of the city that in providing experiences demanding thought it often denies us spaces that facilitate contemplation.

Michel Groisman

The body modified.

Brazilian artist Michel Groisman performing with body modifications which enable him to pass a flame from candles attached to his limbs. He can selectively extinguish said candles using various tubes also linked to to him by leather attachments. In performing so self-contained a task he re-examines the place of the body in space and our use of this most defining of tools.

Mouthing geometries

We are seeing more and more examples of works taking cause from one medium to produce effect in another. Murmur adds a quite magical touch to the idea of seeing sound, of visualizing aural information. It has all kinds of marvelous potential.

Crystalline sound

A video proposing sound as generative of crystalline forms. Beautifully synethesic idea, beautifully rendered. There is a real sense of tactility and kinetics, a real sense imparted by undeniably unreal phenomena.

Drawing in the digital.

An audacious combination of drawing, digital mapping, animation and sound cleverly articulate Chung's fluid graphic language. Too often digital tools displace the skills needed to fully explore them. This work seamlessly integrates new technologies while retaining the physical presence of the line-making body.

Annabel Elston.

Twice illuminated

A beautifully conceived light which combines a ceramic sphere and a high-gloss reflective dish as independent components. The relationship between the two and thus the character of the illumination must be configured and adjusted by the user.

Simon Gill Architects

Poetics in space

A lyrical and poetic building which, by harking back to ideas of shelter, observation and unashamed beauty trumps myriad "sculptural" conceits effortlessly.

Louis Khan

Another of Alex Roman's astonishing digital evocations of architectural space. Entirely built and rendered on computer this impossibly controlled journey around Louis khan's Exeter Academy Library evokes the soul of the architecture with very particular attention to material and light. Roman is managing to distil more into these digital "fictions" than most photographer/filmma...

Phantom structures.

A remarkable series of 3D reconstructions based on scans of exisitng, often damages buildings. The extraordianry level of detail extrapolated can assist in reconstruction and research on projects where information has been lost or obscured. The images have an intriguing, layered delicacy.

Mathematical artefacts

These rendered fractal models exhibit a persuasive sense of having been made, considered, even evolved through some physical artisanal process. They feel crafted, ornamental and decorative. That they are computational and primarily express number patterns makes them doubly fascinating.

Pietro Savorelli

Epic discretion.

Discretely embedded in the landscape which provides its raw materials, this Italian winery manages to be both imposing and invisible depending on your approach. Elements of the form invite and direct movement through a series of beautiful spaces that seem to reference the surrounding landscape and the liquids it will yield.

The integrity of matter

Chapman's disturbingly beautiful paintings propose torn, bursting, suppurating, leaking, fraying organic matter. Unspecified organs, bodies and vessels, breached and open, glowing with life but compromised in ways which suggest damage and failure. A deep resonance with our own physical vulnerabilities is unavoidable.

Oscillate

Another sinuously beautiful information visualization from Sierra. The absolute link formed here between the sound as a source of visual movement and the image it activates creates a kind of synesthesic presence where the sound and image become interchangeable. A lovely sensory provocation.

On Space Time Foam

This remarkable installation in the Hangar Bicocca Di Milano creates an environment and topography 99 percent of which is formed of nothing but air. The remarkable photographs capture both a huge collective sense of play and a set of concrete proposals for material and interactive behaviors.

Flake typology

An extraordinarty archive of images capturing snowflakes in freefall. Quite aside from their beauty and infinite variety, these images are helping science predict the behaviour of weather patterns through tracking the evolving shapes on their journey to the ground.

Carsten GÃ¼th

Blind houses

Güth's photographic series proposes homes sealed and impenetrable, or perhaps inescapable. The notion that windows are the eyes of a dwelling is greatly reinforced here by the feeling of sightless, blankness imparted in removing all openings and access.

Abandoned asylums

Photographs of defunct American insane asylums. As a document of a vanishing era of mental health care and the architectural response to sometimes discredited or outmoded notions of treatment Jeremy Harris's pictures are both fascinating and valuable.

Oh Superman

Let's remind ourselves of the mesmerizing genius of this excerpt from Anderson's work United States. Let's also remember that it climbed to number two in the UK charts in 1981. Hard to imagine such a radical assault on the idea of popular music succeeding today.

A dog's progress

The tireless journey of an all-terrain dog unfolds beautifully across this piece. Quietly evoking the works of Muybridge and Beuys, this concise, playful film expresses more about the spirit of the dog than any narrative could attempt.

The greatest movie never made.

An amazing story within a story, arguably as interesting in it's deceptions as the hoax it proposed, uncovered by chance and against the odds by a diligent Wikepedian.

Building worlds

The engines behind our computer games labor diligently to create worlds through which we can roam freely. This one tackles the most unforgiving task: simulating the familiar.

Interior weather systems

Mercedes have created a 34 meter tornado inside one of their buildings. A consequence of ingenious engineering to evacuate smoke in the event of a fire, this spectacle enables us to see air movement in an unexpected context.

The mechanics of flexibility

Paul Heijnen's spotlight takes arthropod mechanics as a sure route to flexibility and elegance while celebrating its own form and workings nakedly.

Principals of Geometry

Oddly poignant escape fantasy in a clip for French electronic duo Look Back To The Future. In a sunlit quotidian setting, the re-purposing of architecture is quite lovely.

A delicate integration

A beautifully elegant extension to the existing stone heritage structure, this building seems to invite movement through and around it, precisely its function.

Botanical beauty suspended.

Seeming to evoke the entire history of Japanese botanical figuration, these beautiful photographs firmly claim nature in the name of art.

The unseen sky

A remarkable series of photo-collages reconstructing the sky we would see over these cityscapes where it not obscured by the light they inevitably emit at night.

Mutant beauty

Leanie van der Vyver challenges the idea that the pursuit of beauty has but one direction by proposing shoes which are emphatically disabling in their design. Oddly elegant yet clearly at odds with the practical functioning of the wearer. Watching the video makes one freshly aware of the complex mechanics of simply walking.

Glass Microbiology

These meticulous glass models of viruses call to mind the work done in the late 19th century by Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka. Made as artworks, images of the models have found favor with the scientific community for whom the lack of colour along with their great precision is helpful. Despite decades of colourful pictorial representation, virus in fact are as colourless as Jeram's pieces...

Evol - urban stencil master

One of a series of astonishing site specific stencil works of incredible precision. Evol seems able to hijack the most unlikely sites, transforming them into persuasive illusions of urban mutation.

Tara House

Studio Mumbai have developed a distinctive vocabulary of forms and atmospheres which set their designs apart. The use of light and water in this particular house is remarkably sensual. The house at once offers a sanctuary from the surrounding landscape while discretely conducting the character and atmosphere of the jungle into the fabric of the building.

Michael Hansmeyer

Hansmeyer columns

Hansmeyer's astonishing mathematical baroque is here expressed as a series of densely elaborate columns. The form and character feels authentically historical, though impossible to attribute, as though the designs have originated from an unknown but rich cultural tradition.

Aesop Le Marais

Yet another of Aesop's splendid shops, this time in Paris' Marais district. With a peaceful courtyard visible through windows to the back and ingenious use of industrial elements for shelving, this space delivers a memorable environment out of all proportion to its compact dimensions.

Glass Loggia House -Sydney

An extension to an existing historic house, this structure brilliantly uses layers as skins which can be adjusted, peeled back and modulated for control of transparency, both atmospheric and optical. Perfectly addressing the dramatic changes in climate which need to be accommodated in the Antipodean climate.

Jonathan Ridsdale

Tadao Ando's Silence fountain

Tadao Ando's first UK work is a discrete, elegant construction directly outside London's Connaught Hotel. Slipping almost invisibly into the street-scape this work gently asserts its presence every 15 min or so by emitting a cloud of vaporized water into the air.