Hungrier Mile ruins prize site: architects »

The NSW State Government is planning on selling East Darling Harbour in “superlots”, which will bypass the site’s architectural design of public streets and non-homogeneous buildings.

“If one developer is owning several blocks, they can do what they like with the streets,” Mr Thalis said. “They can move them, put malls on them, close them, turn them into business parks. The public interest in Sydney is at risk of being stolen by private and commercial interests. I don’t have a problem with density but I do have a problem when it’s at the cost of the public domain. We are the citizens. We own the streets. This will be thrown out the window for a 10-year fashion for big, monolithic buildings.”

Submarine cable map »

Shops track customers via mobile phone »

This system from Path Intelligence tracks people in a shopping mall by triangulating on their mobile phone. It can uniquely (but anonymously) identify people by the IMEI (a unique serial number) of their phone.

It would be a fascinating source of data to mine: paths through malls, shopping habits, how people behave differently on their own or when in a group; all kinds of things. But it does seem quite invasive; I think I would feel quite uncomfortable being under such close a gaze. Perhaps if they dropped the IMEI identification and only looked and aggregated trends.

Seems to be quite excitingly priced at around £20,000 a month to rent.

Truckload of concrete dumped into sewer »

This is weird: some bozo dumped 13 tonnes of concrete into the sewer that runs under the Sydney Football Stadium, the Sydney Cricket Ground, and the Hordern Pavilion, causing a blockage that runs 140 metres.

Sydney Water have installed a temporary bypass and have spent the past 10 weeks trying to unblock it, but they may have to run a new permanent line. The blockage very nearly caused the Mardi Gras party at the Hordern to be abandoned (18,000 people produce a lot of material for a sewer, one assumes).

It would have cost only $2,275 to be dumped legally.

Game/Space: An interview with Daniel Dociu »

BLDBLOG interviews game world designer Daniel Dociu:

Are there specific architects, historical eras, or urban designers who have inspired Dociu’s work? What about vice versa: could Dociu’s own beautifully rendered take on the built environment, however fantastical it might be, have something to teach today’s architecture schools? How does the game design process differ from – or perhaps resemble – that of producing “real” cities and buildings?
Of course, there are many types of games, and many types of game environments.

There’s some really beautiful concept design artwork included in the interview.

The mathematics of preservation and the future of urban ruins »

On bldblog: should we preserve civic infrastructure that is historically interesting, but no longer useful?

So the question becomes: at what point do we preserve something not for its historical value but for its topological interest? If a bridge, or a highway overpass, becomes functionally obsolete, is it still subject to the rules of architectural preservation — whether or not it’s mathematically unique or culturally intriguing? Surely infrastructure is just infrastructure — i.e. when it breaks you replace it? You don’t preserve infrastructure.

Or do you?

For visual reference here I mentioned architect Alberto Campo Baeza’s 2002 proposal for a Mercedes Benz Museum. Might Campo Baeza’s structure be a model for what the I-95/695 intersection would look like if it was detached from the highway system and left alone, to be surrounded by new freeways?