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A mind-bogglingly awesome new project from MIT called Flyfire hopes to use large, precision-controlled clouds of micro-helicopters, each carrying a color-coordinated LED, to create massive, three-dimensional information displays in space.

[Image: Via Flyfire].

Each helicopter is “a smart pixel,” we read. “Through precisely controlled movements, the helicopters perform elaborate and synchronized motions and form an elastic display surface for any desired scenario.” Emergency streetlights, future TV, avant-garde rural entertainment, and even acts of war.

Watch the video:

Instead of a drive-in cinema, in other words, you could simply be looking out from the windscreen of your car at a massive cloud of color-coordinated, precision-timed, drone micro-helicopters, each the size and function of a pixel. Imagine planetarium shows with this thing!

The Flyfire canvas can transform itself from one shape to another or morph a two-dimensional photographic image into an articulated shape. The pixels are physically engaged in transitioning images from one state to another, which allows the Flyfire canvas to demonstrate a spatially animated viewing experience.

Imagine web-browsing through literal clouds of small flying pixels, parting and weaving in the air in front of you like fireflies (or imagine training fireflies to act as a web browser). You’re in a university auditorium one day when, instead of delivering her projected slideshow, your professor simply remote-controls a whirring vortex of ten thousand flying micro-dots. Digital 3D cinema is nothing compared to this murmuration of light.

Channeling Tim Maly, we might even someday see a drone-swarm of LED-augmented, artificially intelligent nano-helicopters flying off into the desert skies of the American southwest, on cinematic migration routes blurring overhead. On a lonely car drive through northern Arizona when a film-cloud flies by…

An insane emperor entertains himself watching precision-controlled image-clouds, some of which are distant satellites falling synchronized through space.

[Image: The Cornucopia Digital Fabricator, “a personal, three-dimensional printer for food,” by Marcelo Coelho and Amit Zoran; Coelho will be speaking this Saturday at Foodprint NYC].

1) Foodprint NYC is this Saturday, February 27, at Studio-X in New York City: “Foodprint NYC is the first in a series of international conversations about food and the city. From a cluster analysis of bodega inventories to the cultural impact of the ice-box, and from food deserts to peak phosphorus, panelists will examine the hidden corsetry that gives shape to urban foodscapes, and collaboratively speculate on how to feed New York in the future. The free afternoon program will include designers, policy-makers, flavor scientists, culinary historians, food retailers, and others, for a wide-ranging discussion of New York’s food systems, past and present, as well as opportunities to transform our edible landscape through technology, architecture, legislation, and education.” It is free and open to the public, and the speaker line-up is amazing. The whole thing goes from 1-5:30pm. Here is a map. Foodprint NYC is organized by Nicola Twilley and Sarah Rich.

2) Here is a great design competition: “Currently, over 100,000 people each year follow informal trails through wetlands and over active train tracks to gain access to the surf breaks at Trestles,” we read. “These impromptu manmade paths present a safety hazard with passing trains and threaten the fragile ecosystem of Trestles.”

In response, a coalition of concerned groups organized by the volunteer non-profit organization Architecture for Humanity, are launching “Safe Trestles,” an open-to-all, two-stage design competition to create a safe pathway to serve surfers, the local coastal community and day visitors to San Onofre State Beach. This coalition is looking for cohesive designs that eliminate the danger of crossing active train tracks, help to restore wetlands that have been damaged by the present path, preserve and improve vistas, and offer education about the history of the site and the beach marsh environment.

Registration deadline: March 17, 2010; submission deadline: April 17, 2010

[Images: From 49 Cities by workAC].

3) workAC‘s 49 Cities exhibition travels to San Francisco next month, where it opens at the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR. “A survey of utopian urbanism, 49 Cities provides a remarkable insight into the contemporary metropolis and our efforts over time to make cities more controllable, monumental, organic, taller, denser, sparser or greener.” A newly expanded reprint of the accompanying 49 Cities book, published by Storefront for Art and Architecture, will be for available for purchase. Amale Andraos, principal architect (with Dan Wood) of workAC will be speaking at Foodprint NYC.

4) Follow the agricultural practices and economic landscapes of cocaine production. Watch heavily processed leaves be transformed from gasoline-infused paste to powder. Then watch this radically alchemized form of plantlife be smuggled across the U.S. border.

[Images: From BANANAS!*].

5) Then go back out into the fields and watch this trailer for a Swedish documentary about bananas.

6) Coastlines: Images of Land and Sea opens at the Dallas Museum of Art on April 25, 2010. The exhibition explores “how modern and contemporary artists—from Childe Hassam and Edward Hopper to Willem De Kooning, Gerhard Richter and Catherine Opie—have drawn upon coastal landscapes as a source of inspiration, metaphor and mystery in their work. Through selections from the Museum’s rich collections and important local holdings, Coastlines: Images of Land and Sea will juxtapose coastal landscapes from around the world and from a range of different artistic traditions.”

7) Pruned supplies his newest list of quick links—and they’re all worth reading: Prunings LIII. In particular, don’t miss the $100 million, seven-story aquarium being planned for Times Square: a Canadian developer hopes to “install tanks featuring sharks, rays, penguins, otters, and other animals in the bottom floors of the 40-story building, known as 11 Times Square, hoping to attract some of the 35 million people who pass through Manhattan’s major crossroads every year.”

8) The new issue of Vague Terrain has been released; its theme is Architecture/Action. “Where is the boundary that separates space from computation?” the issue asks. “What is this territory that lies between interaction design, gaming, physical computing, and architecture?”

[Image: Unknown image, via Interactive Architecture].

9) Speaking of computation, Unconventional Computing & Architecture will be held this Friday, February 26, at the Building Centre in London. “This one-day conference explores new materials for architectural practice in the 21st century. International architects and scientists will explore the decision-making properties of matter and how this may be applied to create increasingly life-like buildings.”

10) Built for the Bush is now on display in the Australian city of Albury, showcasing “green architecture for rural Australia.” The exhibition “explores some of the energy efficient features of Australia’s 19th century country homes and the reappearance of many of these traditional practices in contemporary green architecture.”

[Image: Unknown image, via Interactive Architecture].

And one to grow on: Alberto Pérez-Gómez will be speaking tomorrow night, Tuesday, February 23, in the Great Hall of New York City’s Cooper Union. His talk—”The Splendor of Architectural Shadows in a Nihilistic Age”—is free and begins at 6:30pm.

(Some links found via Design Under Sky, Some landscapes, Foodprint [Dutch], Super Colossal, Interactive Architecture, and possibly elsewhere; Quick Links 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6).

[Image: From Elevated Descent: The Helipads of Downtown Los Angeles, Center for Land Use Interpretation].

I was excited to see that Matthew Coolidge, of the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), will be speaking at Pratt tomorrow night, Monday, February 22nd, in Brooklyn. His subject is “Anthropogeomorphology Today.” The talk starts at 6pm, is free and open to the public, and starts at 6pm. Just head over to Higgins Hall at the Pratt Institute: 60 St. James Place, near the corner of Lafayette. Here is a map.

CLUI’s exhibitions are always worth checking out in detail, as are their field trips through the American landscape. Meanwhile, for an infrastructural tour of Los Angeles, guided by Coolidge, check out an old article I wrote for Dwell.

Two years ago, Colleen Morgan of Middle Savagery pointed out these amazing tactile maps of the Inuit, “3D wood carvings of the East Greenland coastline, with the details of inlets and islands in sculptural relief. These could be employed by [travelers] at night in conjunction with the stars, feeling your way along the coastline, navigating at an intimate scale.”

[Image: tactile maps of the Inuit: 3D representations of the Greenland coastline].

She compares these to Braille maps for the blind—which I would further compare to the embossing printer used by a blind architect in San Francisco to produce tactile building plans. “He began drawing with Wikki Stix,” the L.A. Times reported last month, “strands of wax-covered yarn that adhere to paper with just a little pressure. His most useful tool became a large-format embossing printer, which turns blueprints into raised line drawings that he can read with his fingertips.”

As if using the Inuit maps pictured above, he simply runs his fingers along the creased lines of rooms and hallways, and buildings take shape in their every variation around him.

Briefly diverging here, I was fascinated to read elsewhere in that same article about the subtle architectural design cues that can be deployed for the blind or visually impaired. For instance, the architect once “collaborated on a room-numbering system to help blind students navigate the building. The facility will use different textured flooring in a few key areas so students can tell where they are by the tap of a cane.” Further, “blind students who descend a staircase that deposits them in the middle of a vast lobby will be able to find their way because the ceiling will be enhanced, at [the architect’s] suggestion, to create an acoustic corridor to the door.” Designing “acoustic corridors” across the city sounds like a superb design challenge (as well as something that could be of much wider use in the event of prolonged urban blackouts).

In any case, like Middle Savagery, I am fascinated by the other applications these sorts of handheld, tactile maps might have—where else they might be useful and what other spaces they might be able to represent. Could there be a tactile map of a novel’s plotline, or or the New York City subway system, or of the Appalachian Trail? What about of your own apartment, or the house you grew up in? Could there be tactile cinema? Could you make a tactile map of a song?

(Spotted via an old post on Tightgrid).

1) Constructed Territory: “A juried exhibition of work integrating the use of maps, cartography, or environmental and topographical explorations.” Submissions due: May 14, 2010.

2) made up: “This call welcomes designers, filmmakers, architects, scholars, researchers, and artists to submit proposals for design-driven research projects to be conducted in Summer 2010 in the Graduate Media Design Program studio [at the Art Center College of Design in sunny Pasadena]. We are looking for projects that are motivated by research questions and that use design/making as a mode of inquiry. We are particularly interested in projects that address the theme ‘made up’ which explores the role of fiction in design.” Submissions due: March 23, 2010.

[Image: From Mine the Gap].

3) Mine the Gap: “An international design ideas competition dedicated to examining one of the most visible scars left after the collapse of the real estate market in Chicago: the massive hole along the Lake Michigan shore that was to have been—and may yet be—the foundation for a singular 150-story condominium tower designed by an internationally-renowned Spanish architect, a tower which was to have become a new icon for the city and region. What to do with the gap?” Submissions due: “anytime between March 22, 2010 and May 3, 2010.”

4) All That Glitters Is Good: “How do you prepare your architectural drawings? What mediums do you allow yourself in your quest to explain three dimensional intent and ideas on a two dimensional surface? Answer truthfully, when was the last time you did anything beyond hitting print?

All That Glitters Is Good asks you to submit your most accomplished architectural representation that uses glitter. This includes new drawings made with glitter, old drawings pepped up with a little sparkle, as well as anything else that you can imagine so long as it satisfies two criteria:

1. It’s a drawing of architecture.
2. It uses glitter.”

Submissions due: March 15, 2010.

5) You just missed: GOOD magazine, Studio-X, and PRE Office teamed up to judge Spontaneous Architecture—the results of which can be seen at that latter link. For some background to that call-for-ideas, read Studio-X’s Gavin Browning debate with Cameron Sinclair about the efficacy of design competitions inspired by natural disasters over at Building Design. While you’re there, refresh your memory about Building Design‘s stance on climate change.

(Constructed Territory spotted via Katie Holten; made up spotted via Anne Burdick).

During the New York City blackout of 1965, roughly “one thousand overseas passengers were affected,” the New York Times reported at the time, and “many of them were put up in nearby hotels or motels.”

[Image: “Runway at Sky Harbor Airport” by Kevin Dooley, via Creative Commons].

A slightly different scenario unfolded at the city’s airports, however:

At Kennedy, American Airplanes rolled out all its planes, which are equipped with independent power systems, and loaded eight hundred stranded passengers. They were fed a meal and shown motion pictures until the lights came back.

These self-powered moving rooms—airplanes become hotels become cinemas become emergency shelters, in a jet-setting transformational sequence like something out of the early visions of Archigram—revealed an unexpected flexibility to the infrastructure of global transport.

Next time, perhaps, when the lights go out in your own home city, that jumbo jet parked nearby on an airport runway will be the best place for you to go: an aboveground disaster shelter, independent from the grid whose loss it temporarily saves you from.

(You can watch a short video about the blackout, courtesy of James Burke; here is part one).

[Image: “Melbourne’s Future Wheel” by Büro North].

Danger Room: “As part of its budget for the upcoming fiscal year, Pentagon extreme research agency Darpa is launching the Transparent Earth project. They’ll invest $4 million into the creation of real-time, 3-D maps that display ‘the physical, chemical, and dynamic properties of the earth down to 5 km depth, including natural or man-made structures at militarily-relevant spatial scales.'”

InfraNet Lab: “When snow prospects at lower Cypress looked dim, the Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC) unrolled the contingency plan to use snowcats, trucks, helicopters and a team of about 45 people to equitably redistribute snowfall. This led to two basic weather engineering practices: snow transfer and snow-base packing. Trucks and snowcats are moving snow from higher elevations, while helicopters are ferrying in bales of straw to bolster bases, walls and turns. Snow is being moved hastily—none of the ice brick techniques found at Innsbruck here—almost more as a cut-fill soil strategy. VANOC is trucking in about three dozen loads of snow a day from as far away as Manning Park, more than two hours drive east of Vancouver. That is over 300 truckloads and counting.”

[Image: Snow-hardening in Olympic Vancouver; photo by Jae C. Hong courtesy of the Associated Press (via InfraNet Lab)].

e360: “A group of solutions is emerging under the rubric of ‘rewilding,’ and this new movement has made considerable progress over the past decade. A Marshall Plan for the environment, rewilding promotes the expansion of core wilderness areas on a vast scale, the restoration of corridors between them (to fight the ‘island’ effect of isolated parks and protected areas), and the reintroduction or protection of top predators.”

Mother Jones: “A new study shows how North American birds have changed the shape of their wings in the past century as the landscapes around them have been fragmented by clear-cutting.”

New York Times: “Dirty flags advertise rock-bottom discounts on empty starter mansions. On the ground, foreclosure signs are tagged with gang graffiti. Empty lots are untended, cratered with mud puddles from the winter storms that have hammered California’s San Joaquin Valley. Nobody is home in the cities of the future.”

Sify: “Reports indicate that the third national survey on cultural relics in China has revealed more than 700 km of ancient Great Wall in the northwestern part of the country.”

[Image: Rho Ophiuchus. Photo courtesy Spitzer Space Telescope/NASA].

PhysOrg.com: “According to Michael Mautner, Research Professor of Chemistry at Virginia Commonwealth University, seeding the universe with life is not just an option, it’s our moral obligation… ‘We have a moral obligation to plan for the propagation of life, and even the transfer of human life to other solar systems which can be transformed via microbial activity, thereby preparing these worlds to develop and sustain complex life.'”

PhysOrg.com: “NASA to Study Seeds in Space to Understand Plant Growth… ‘There’s only one way to determine exactly why plants grow differently in weaker gravity environments, like on the moon and Mars, than on Earth—and that’s by using the microgravity environment in spacecraft orbiting Earth.”

White House: “The Environmental Protection Agency is developing regulations that address the safety, efficacy, and environmental soundness of injecting and storing carbon dioxide underground. The Department of the Interior is assessing, in coordination with the Department of Energy, the country’s geologic capacity to store carbon dioxide and promoting geological storage demonstration projects on public lands.”

The Sofia Echo: “Possession and use of a metal detector in Bulgaria [now] requires registration with the Culture Ministry and lack of such registration [will be considered] a crime… Efforts to legalize the open use of metal detectors have consistently been rebuffed by state bodies, which have treated it as attempts to legalize tomb-raiding.”

(Some links via @Tree_Museum, @nicolatwilley, the bewilderingly awesome @treestrategist, and Jessica Saraceni;s posts on Archaeology News, one of my consistent top ten web favorites. Quick Links 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5).

[Image: The “Atomized Library” by Duncan Young and Brett Walters].

For a recent studio at the California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco, taught by Douglas Burnham of envelope A+D, students Duncan Young and Brett Walters produced what they call “The Atomized Library.” It was produced as part of an overall studio exploring the space of the public library in an age of rapidly changing information storage.

[Image: The “Atomized Library” by Duncan Young and Brett Walters].

The basic idea was to scatter smaller information spaces throughout the city: buildings, kiosks, cafes, computer labs, public-access WiFi envelopes, media production centers, “teen spaces,” public meeting rooms, and more. Importantly, though, the entire point of Young’s investigation was to ask what libraries might look like if information was no longer accessed through books.

[Image: The “Atomized Library” by Duncan Young and Brett Walters].

“This methodology,” Young and Walters write, “increases the density of the urban fabric, and allows for a new reading of how we use and access information.” His units would be particularly well-suited, he suggests, for “unbuilt and under-used” urban sites.

[Image: The “Atomized Library” by Duncan Young and Brett Walters].

Think of it as a network of partially prefab, rapidly deployable, plug-in, book-less micro-libraries, with potential for global distribution. EasyLibrary, perhaps.

In fact, it raises an interesting question: when it comes to public libraries, whether we’re referring to New York City or Ciudade del Este, what is the architectural equivalent of One Laptop Per Child? Is the future of the community library a modular shed, or has an entire building type been made obsolete by handheld devices?

Larger versions of these images are available on Flickr.