Smogr Invited to STS-130 Tweetup at Johnson Space Center

500px-NASA_logo
In two weeks I will be joining the STS-130 Tweetup at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. This will coincide with STS-130 (wikipedia page) – the Space Shuttle flight to the International Space Station which will deliver and install the Tranquility module and the Cupola.
Hopefully I will be able to bring to you live video, but the morning will be livecast on ustream at: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/nasa-television, and you can follow us on twitter at http://twitter.com/nasatweetup/jsc-sts-130-tweetup.
I’m going to try to do a combination of livecasting through ustream, twitter updates, and a flickr page. I think I might even make a standalone page combining all of that so it will be easy to find. More details to follow.
Question: what would you like to see?

Do Not Challenge Alaska Polar Bears

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=7577554&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=0&show_portrait=0&color=ffffff&fullscreen=1

First they smash your boat in half with an electric hockey stick; then they take to the skies, blow up Miami University, The Ohio State University and then Michigan. If that wasn’t enough, they go and get Xenu on us and blow up a volcano, creating a chain-reaction, exploding the whole damn Earth! To top it off, they fly through a space wormhole to a floating hockey arena, break in and then catch the goal on fire.
Two things I’ve learned watching these videos: first, do not mess with polar bears; second, we should show this every morning at work to start the day off right.

Morphosis Restraint &#8212 41 Cooper Square

new cooper union buildingnew cooper union building, originally uploaded by Sam 森崩

I’ve talked about Cooper Union’s Architect Trading Cards in the past, but the above timelapse of 41 Cooper Square by Morphosis in the past, so this timelapse is very revealing to me: the building is fairly standardized (repeating floor plates) but idiosyncratic base columns and what can only be described as a rain-screen skirt.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t internal gymnastics going on – there is as this flickr set illustrates.

What I find interesting is that this building shows a real design maturity from Thom Mayne which previous designs lacked. There is a real balance of form, function and economy which earlier work lacked; for example the International Elementary School has many layers of form which diagrammatically might be useful, fail to find resolution. That isn’t a critique of the previous designs, but rather my surprise regarding how rational the underlying building is and how restrained the overall composition of the building is compared to previous work.