Container Atlas – A Practical Guide to Container Architecture, edited by Prof. Han Slawik, Julia Bergmann, Matthias Buchmeier and Sonja Tinney (available on Amazon UK and USA).

Publisher Gestalten says:

This book presents a wide range of projects in container architecture – a contemporary architectural phenomenon. It features container structures used as pop-up stores and temporary exhibits as well as sophisticated housing and office spaces that provoke and inspire while setting new standards in functionality and aesthetics. But the book is not only visually inspiring. Because it documents plans, describes associated costs, and suggests concrete solutions for common problems, it is a practical reference for architects, planners, and cultural activists as well as event and marketing managers, to guide them in deciding what types of containers are best suited to their upcoming projects.

Adam Kalkin, 12 Container House

Here’s one book i picked up thinking i’d have nothing but a moment of harmless fun. The kind you find inside coffee table books with spectacular pictures and next to no text. How wrong I was! The word “Practical” in the title should not be underestimated. Container Atlas contains indeed plenty of information for anyone willing to live or work inside a container: transportation, construction laws, ecological impact, hidden costs and other economic aspects, even construction physics.

Interestingly, the volume opens on the history of container transportation. It’s not exactly a fairy tale. The man responsible for the standardization and worldwide adoption (nowadays, some 90% of non-bulk cargo transits by sea inside containers) of the metal box. Malcom McLean is depicted as a man keen on achieving maximum profit and efficiency. He was a brilliant businessman, not a philanthropist. For example, he would crush the habits of giving names to trucks and of placing name tags inside the driver’s can. Convinced that a company that allowed employees to develop a personal relationship to one particular truck could not run efficiently, he gave trucks numbers.

Containers have since then been used as emergency housing for asylum seekers, temporary buildings in disaster areas or as construction site offices.

LOT-EK, Uniqlo container store, 2006

The dozens of architects, designers and artists whose work is presented in the book managed to, at at last!, bring emotion and personality to the stern container. And that’s where the fun i was expecting begins. Whether they are used as part of a more ‘traditional’ architecture or as the sole building blocks of a dwelling, whether they are used as a cheap and quirky way to advertise how edgy a company (cf. Freitag’s flagship store in Zurich and that pop Puma City) or to bring culture on a city square, containers prove that they can outdo the stigma of the standardized box:

A spectacular 100 square-meter tea pavilion suspended above the ground overlooking the Sea of Japan.

Bureau des Mésarchitectures, Sky is the Limit, 2008, in Yang-yang, South Korea

Sculp(IT) did the most brilliant job at turning a space only 2.4 meters (7 feet 10 inches) wide into a living / working space as well as a light installation. They are located in Antwerp’s red light district after all.

Let’s fire up the pictures:

Sculpt(it), Headquarters, 2008. Photo Luc Roymans

Angela Fritsch Architekten’s Gold Pavilion in the park of The Alice-Hospital vom Roten Kreuz in Darmstadt, Germany. The container box is covered with a wallpaper made out of sheet metal. The light comes through the cut-out ornamental leaves.

Angela Fritsch Architekten, Gold Pavilion

The Cancer Center in Amsterdam is a semi-permanent structure erected while the research and treatment clinic was rebuilt and enlarged. The 7 storey building was built within a year.

MVRDV, Cancer Center

Just added to my wish list:

Castor Design, the Sauna Box

Not sure my eyes will ever recover from the brashness of these sanitary facilities:

AFF Architekten, Sanitary facilities for Summer camp in Magdeburg (Germany)

Views inside the book:

This post originally appeared on Regine’s blog ‘we make money not art.’

Related stories in the Worldchanging archives:

• Buses, Kegs, and Cranes: Visions of Radical Reuse from Architect Aristide Antonas | Geoff Manaugh, 8 Jun 10
  
• Turning Shipping Containers Into Customizable, Affordable Housing | Julia Levitt, 26 Feb 09
  
• Andrew Maynard’s Newest Brainchild: Corb V2.0 | Sarah Rich, 20 Feb 07
  
• Disaster Relief in a Box | Hassan Masum, 20 Jan 05
  
• More Container Architecture | Alex Steffen, 11 Mar 05
  
• Shipping Container Urbanism | Jamais Cascio, 17 Aug 04

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(Posted by Regine Debatty in Green Building at 10:00 AM)

In the mountain of ludicrously overdue posts that prevent me from getting the sleep of the righteous is a report on the first chapter of Herbologies/Foraging Networks which took place at the Kiasma museum during Pixelache Helsinki in March.

Told you that was so long and cold ago…

Helsinki Central Station

Finnish vending machines sell eccentric sweets.

Herbologies/Foraging Networks is a series of workshops, seminars and expeditions that explores the connection between traditional knowledge of herbs, edible and medicinal plants and media networked culture. The result of the Helsinki chapter of H/FN was a wonderful and eye-opening fusion of hydroponic technologies, vodka-making workshop, fermentation sermon, DNA isolation experiments and lectures on herbs and berries.

The conference was particularly good. We snacked on apples that had been foraged during a Dumpster diving trip through the bins of Helsinki and heard about topics as different as biopiracy, urban beekeeping, and the best plants to eat when you suffer from poor circulation.

Here’re a few highlights from the two days I spent in the company of the Herbologies/Foraging Networks crowd:

Kultivator Logo

The participants that completely blew me away were the members of KULTIVATOR, an experimental cooperation of organic farming and visual art practice located in the village Dyestad, on the island Öland, Sweden. Founded in 2005 by 3 artists and 2 farmers, Kultivator is a platform for art and agriculture that involves an organic farm with cows, sheep, vegetables, forestry but also residences for foreign artists, exhibitions and screenings on site on Öland or internationally.

Over its 5 years of existence, Kultivator has been harvesting potatoes and milking cows but they have also been busy installing rapeseed oil press in art foundations, building a chicken house with students, inviting foreign artists to leave their mark on the landscape of Dyestad, wondering how the open source philosophy can be applied to farming, producing a Glocal guide for an old walking trail from Dyestad to a nearby ancient ceremonial ruin and organizing a dinner with ruminants.

Dinner with the cows.

Publik.dk has a great interview with KULTIVATOR.

Another high point of the seminar was Christina Stadlbauer’s presentation of her experiences in beekeeping on urban rooftops. She installed 3 honey bee hives in Brussels, one of them at NADINE, another at OKNO and the last one on a private rooftop. She observes the hives, how their weight fluctuate over time, how well they can cope in urban environment, etc. The bees’ behavior and the honey they produce act as monitors of natural processes in the city.

Christina searching for the queen. (Photo from thoughtsandatalk)

Within half an hour of being relocated on the Brussels rooftops (with the authorization of the neighbors), Christina’s bees had understood where they were and set out to find food over the city (they can fly up to 3 km to find flowers.) The flora of a city is much more diverse than one would expect. In cities, bees can feast on wild flowers growing in abandoned parking lots, tulips in backyard gardens, tomatoes cultivated on small balconies, etc. Besides, there might be a lot of pollution in cities but there’s also less pesticides on the flowers. The honey that city bees produce has therefore a totally different flavor. In city, there’s also less competition for food and the good season lasts longer as it’s warmer there than in the countryside. The successful Ginza Honey Bee Project, which has hundreds of thousands of Western and Japanese honeybees living on the roof of a 11-story building in downtown Tokyo, demonstrates that bees can thrive in urban settings.

(Image thoughtsandtalks)

Unfortunately, many of Christina’s bees didn’t wake up from Brussels’ Winter.

Andrew Gryf Paterson introducing Herbologies/Foraging Networks programme in Kiasma seminar room. (Photo by Ulla Taipale)

Next, Andrew Gryf Paterson gave a fascinating presentation of foraging culture. Among the projects he mentioned, was Kayle Brandon and Heath Bunting’s The Keepers. Since 2005, they’ve been mapping edible plants that can be found in public places in Bristol. Each plant is assigned a Keeper whose mission is to learn by heart the locations, uses, histories and biology of the plant, committing to share their knowledge when requested.

Keeping and sharing the knowledge about food that can be foraged is important.
For example, many families and individuals in Latvia or Finland gather herbs for consumption or to include them in tinctures without paying much attention to this tradition. Their knowledge should be documented before it gets lost like it happened in many countries around Europe. As Andrew noted, while we might believe that the knowledge about what is edible and what is not around us is straightforward, poor immigrants are at risk of food poisoning if they pick up the wrong fruit.

Vivoarts Workshop led by Adam Zaretsky. (Photo by Antti Ahonen)

Vivoarts Workshop led by Adam Zaretsky. (Photo by Antti Ahonen)

That evening, Adam Zaretsky gave a popular and lively workshop on how to extract DNA using everyday households. I’m not going to blog about it since I’ve covered a couple of Adam’s workshops in the past. What I can say, however, is that each time I meet Adam he does something totally unexpected, not to say utterly bizarre. This time he found horse poo on the street of Helsinki, brought it to the workshop and added it to the ingredients he mixed to obtain the juice we extracted DNA from.

Making of Windowfarms Finland (Kiasma Installation). (Photo by Antti Ahonen)

The morning after, we met at Kiasma again, this time to harvest some plants that had grown on the Windowfarms installed in February in the museum. Right after that, we moved to the botanical garden for a series of workshops.

Making of Windowfarms Finland (Kiasma Installation). (Photo by Antti Ahonen)

Signe Pucena from SERDE, one of the organizers of Herbologies/Foraging Networks, hosted a vodka tincture-making workshop.

The vodka tincture-making workshop was inspired by one of SERDE’s research about the instruments people have at home to brew their own vodka. Although it is illegal in Latvia*, moonshining is still alive and part of the intangible cultural heritage of the country. The alcohol produced by homebrewing can be turned into curative herb tinctures that are later used for internal use and external application. Ironically, SERDE organized workshops on Moonshining in Latvia with the blessing of local authorities and even won a State award for their contribution in ‘innovation in tradition.’

Turns out that making your own alcohol is much easier than I expected. You just need simple kitchen tools, fermented apples or fermented jam and bread.

The second half of the program took place a few weeks ago in the Kurzeme region, Latvia. I’m so sorry I had to miss it. Kultivator wrote a small report and there’s some more information on Herbologies/Foraging Networks Facebook page.

The initiators/organisers of Herbologies/Foraging Networks are Andrew Gryf Paterson, Ulla Taipale from Capsula and Signe Pucena from SERDE.

*Andrew Gryf Paterson just informed me that ‘Since April this year, Latvian government have apparently changed the law so that farmers (who have surplus produce such as apples) are legally allowed to make homemade alcohol (I guess for small to medium -scale sales and use).’

This post originally appeared on We Make Money Not Art.

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(Posted by Regine Debatty in Arts at 12:00 PM)

Art in the Age of Technoscience: Genetic Engineering, Robotics, and Artificial Life in Contemporary Art, by Ingeborg Reichle (available on Amazon USA and UK).

Publisher Springer writes:

Is science the new art? Starting from this provocative question, art historian Ingeborg Reichle examines in her book fascinating responses of contemporary artists when faced with recent scientific and technological advances. In the last two decades a growing number of artists has left the traditional artistic playground to work instead in scientific contexts such as the laboratories of molecular biology, robotics, and artificial life. New art forms like “Transgenic Art” and “Bio-Art” have emerged from the laboratory. These art forms differ dramatically from traditional artistic approaches that explore the natural: they have crossed the boundaries between the artificial and the natural, and thus provoke passionate debates about the growing influence of science and technology. This first comprehensive survey presents a well-selected number of significant artworks and with over 280 color illustrations provides a broad overview of this new and relevant development in art.

Edgar Lissel, Domus Aurea, 2005

Right from the introduction to the book, written by Robert Zwijnenberg, a professor of Art History in relation to the development of science and technology at Universiteit Maastricht and Universiteit Leiden, i knew i was going to be the happy customer. His text does far more than act as the token, compulsory entry to a volume. Instead of focusing strictly on the relationship between life sciences and art, Zwijnenberg’s essay comments on the place that, over time, humanities have lost in the conversation with and about life science. He suggests that it is now time for humanities to find a position of their own in the debate about designer babies, the commercialization of life, cloning, heredity, bio warfare, advancements in brain research, etc. According to him, the new breed of artists who have traded their workshops for the laboratories and are exploring issues typical of the study of the human condition could act as mediators and provide humanities with direct access to life science.

Ebener and Winters, BYTE, 1998

The book itself is the outcome of a solid research on art and technoscience. Instead of presenting these new art forms as coming out of the magic hat of some lab renegade, the author brings them into a broader context and explains their kinship with art history (reminding us for example that Kazimir Malevich used bacteria in his work), history, science, etc. Every single fact is documented with many notes, references and photos. Quick parenthesis: the many images that illustrate the text are presented one after the other at the end of the book, an editorial decision i haven’t encountered since my years at the university.

The work of dozens of artists is analyzed in the book. Jane Prophet, Suzanne Anker, Tissue Culture & Art Project, Pam Skelton, Steve Miller, Herwig Turk, Paul Vanouse, Peta Clancy, etc. Some with more depth than others. The chapter titled Art in the Age of Genetic Engineering is all about Eduardo Kac’s career, Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau get the chapter Art and Digital Evolution almost all for themselves, while the work of Joe Davis is used to examine Genesthetics: Molecular Biology and the Arts.

Catherine Chalmers, Genetically Engineered Mice

If there’s one book that can finally shake off the pure shock and horror stigma from ‘technoscience art’ it’s this one. Reichle does justice to the artists who have chosen to address life sciences but also in many cases the social, economical and political forces that might drive their research. Art in the Age of Technoscience has academic gravitas. It is dense, remarkably well documented and it demonstrates that you don’t have to dumb down a discourse to make it accessible to a broad public. The language of the book is clear, its argumentation limpid. It should interest you whether you know a lot or almost nothing about the theme, whether you have a background in science or are an artist.

Herwig Turk and Paulo Pereira, Labscapes, 2007

This post originally appeared on We Make Money Not Art.

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(Posted by Regine Debatty in Arts at 11:00 AM)