Hypercities 2.0
I have working as an information and data architecture consultant to the UCLA Hypercities project, a map-based information publishing framework. My interest in the project lies in its approach to the spatial organization of digital media and in particular how a single system might be designed to offer a broad range of approaches to documenting the history of specific built environments, from synchronic comparison to diachronic narrative.
The current version of Hypercities that predates my involvement is here. The new version will be launched later in 2009.
The early 20th century World-wide Web
The New York Times recently ran this feature on Paul Otlet, the Belgian information scientist and utopianist. You can also view a short documentary on Otlet that was made for Dutch television here. The article is a helpful overview, cribbing primarily from Françoise Lévy’s essential, detailed, but very hard-to-find film, The Man Who Wanted to Classify the World. It doesn’t, however, clarify what has always seemed to me the primary difficulty of Otlet’s project: the often confusing distinction between collecting original documents (in the form of paper or evidentiary objects) and cataloging them. Otlet’s Mundaneum did both.
The Informational Built Environment
I taught this upper-division architectural history and theory seminar at UCLA in 2008. Focusing on case studies between the early 19th century and the postwar period, it examined ideas, models, and metaphors shared by the architectural culture of modernity and the information society. [More...]
The mediated spaces of the archaeological park
This paper considered the history of the archaeological park (the passeggiata archeologica) in Rome as a result not only of changes to the practices of curatorship, archaeology, and preservation, but also of the emergence of a modern information society.
Centre d’interprétation du Bourg de Pabos
This project proposed an archaeological park in the far eastern shore of Québec organized around paradigmatic themes that link the landscape and the fragments of an 18th century French settlement.
Some friends of mine won this competition with a nice project, which you can see here. [More...]
Three gardens on the Lachine Canal
Second prize, ARQ magazine competition, 1990. Three gardens in the form of excavations provide rest areas and drinking water for the users of the bicycle path in the present day public park on the Lachine Canal in Montréal. [More...]
A Tour of the Monuments of the Lachine Canal
Original statement: Faced with the task of developing a plan for the re-use of industrial sites, urban planners need not resort to behavioral, social or economic determinacy; instead, form itself can suggest program and architectural representation can be a planning tool. This project tested the capacity of highly abstract formal orders to suggest forms of inhabitation. [More...]