The Art-Architecture Complex

Swindon gets two mentions in Hal Foster’s new book The Art-Architecture Complex:

Team 4’s Reliance Controls Factory – “a breakthrough structure in Swindon (in southwest England), which the architectural writer Kenneth Powell describes as ‘neither a factory nor an office building nor a research station but a combination of all three.’  The first of many ‘flexible sheds’ that Rogers has designed over the years, the Reliance Controls Factory owed much to the elegant simplicity of the Case Study Houses in Southern California, especially the famous Eames House of 1949.  Yet Rogers was also open to the new Pop and high-tech ideas of the 1960s.” (20-21)

Norman Foster’s Renault Center – “That ‘Foster’ is able to design efficient structures that are also media-friendly is proven: Renault uses its center in Swindon (1980-1982) in the southwest, with its yellow exoskeleton of piers, cables, and canopies, as the backdrop for its UK advertisements (36) […] In such ‘Foster’ designs, both history and nature appear abstracted, even sublimated, and the same might be said of industry.  In the background of these projects one often senses the early jewel of industrial structures, the Crystal Palace by Joseph Paxton for the Great Exhibition in London in 1851.”(47)

The History of Swindon in Maps

1880

1920

1960

1980

sites 1-5

Planomania

Cocktail napkin sampling and synthesizing.

Mansueto Library at the University of Chicago.

The New York Times reports on the new Mansueto Library at the University of Chicago, which houses cutting-edge facilities for preservation and digitization of physical books, as well as a high-density underground storage system with the capacity to hold 3.5 million volume equivalents. With its soaring elliptical dome and prime location on campus, the Mansueto Library’s Grand Reading Room, which opens May 16, 2011, provides an inviting space for rigorous scholarship in an array of fields.

HOW IT WORKS:

1. Book is requested using online catalog.
2. Five cranes run along parallel tracks; one is activated and locates materials using bar codes.
3. Crane removes appropriate container — one of nearly 24,000, each weighing up to 200 pounds — and transports it to an elevator, which lifts it to the resource desk.
4. Human retrieves and scans book’s bar code, initiating e-mail notification to student.

Time elapsed: Five minutes or less.

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