At the newly unveiled Web site Shape Vancouver 2050, users are given a digital model of the Vancouver skyline, the ability to extrude buildings upwards, and a visual gauge of the resulting effects on the city’s downtown. As the user drags the digital towers higher and population density increases, meters at the bottom of the screen go up too—energy saved, carbon use curbed, dollars added to the city coffers.

It’s a neat tool, if a bit of a one-liner: the more tall buildings you insert, the better things get; make nearly all the buildings tall and you’ve created an “Urban Paradise!” (Leave most of the buildings as low-rises and you’re chided for fostering sprawl.) It’s not entirely clear whether the site’s creators—the architecture firm Perkins +Will and the developer Concord Pacific—intended Shape Vancouver as an honest solicitation of planning input from the public, or a sneaky way to educate (or indoctrinate?) residents in the environmental benefits of high density. Either way, their message is clear: Want a better Vancouver? Build tall.

In the magazine this month, Paul Makovsky writes about the Utah teapot—the world’s first complex 3-D model, which, in the years since its design in 1975, has often been used as an inside joke among digital animators. The teapot has made its way into Pixar’s Toy Story, an episode of The Simpsons (above), and a video by the Norwegian synth-pop band Röyksopp. Watch video clips of these cameo appearances after the jump. Read more…

This morning I dropped by Pike Loop, a temporary installation in downtown Manhattan designed by the Swiss architects Gramazio & Kohler and fabricated by a large industrial robot that goes by the name R-O-B. Unfortunately for a robot lover like me, R-O-B had decamped the site weeks earlier, after having carefully stacked and epoxy-glued more than 7,000 bricks into a looping wall that runs the length of a small pedestrian island on Pike Street near Chinatown. (Scroll down to watch a time-lapse video of R-O-B at work.)

The resulting installation is not something that’s likely to stop passersby in their tracks—it is, after all, a brown brick wall—but it’s an appealing piece of urban art nonetheless. For me, it was all about city textures: Peering through the gaps in the brickwork, you see passing traffic, chain-link fencing, the garish signs on the storefronts across the street. An otherwise drab corner of the city suddenly seems a bit more colorful and strange.

Pike Loop was realized thanks to Storefront for Art and Architecture and the New York City Department of Transportation’s Urban Art Program. “It’s our first time bringing robot art to the streets of New York, certainly,” the NYCDOT’s commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan, told me in a recent phone call. “It’s cutting-edge innovation—and, you know, it’s a bit of a surprise. So it brings that element of play and liveliness to the streetscape.”

Here’s that time-lapse video: Read more…

Architizer, a new professional and social networking site for the architecture world, launched today. The brainchild of a group of young architects, Web designers, and curators, the site lets users create personal and firm profiles, upload project photos, announce exhibitions and events, and browse jobs and competitions. It’s too early to tell how useful Architizer will actually be—that will depend on how many people sign up and take advantage of its features—but already several big-name firms have created profiles, including Archi-Tectonics, Steven Holl Architects, and OMA. It’s worth noting, however, that the site seems just as interested in the little guy toiling away in obscurity. The founders write in a welcome message, “Created by architects for architects, Architizer’s design is predicated on giving credit where credit is due. A single project may have dozens of contributors and Architizer links them all, from the intern to the construction manager.” Interns looking to celebrate this news are advised that an Architizer launch party will take place Nov. 2 at 7 p.m. at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, in New York.

A research lab at UCLA aims to improve cities from the grassroots up, with a soon-to-launch platform that will allow citizens to document trends in their built environment using their mobile phones. The concept, dubbed “urban sensing” by the university’s Center for Embedded Network Sensing (CENS), hinges on taking as much advantage of the data-capture capabilities of the mobile phone as people already do of its communication capabilities. Read more…

Ikea offers a full range of computer-friendly desks and workstations—but what if the Swedish furniture giant designed desktop hardware as well? That’s the question being asked by Niero Gonzalez on the WePC.com discussion boards, and he’s compiled a handful of amusing examples of the imaginary results. He’s joking, of course—or is he? Gonzalez writes that the idea is actually “quite practical” and that it would be relatively easy for a company to make “cheap, standardized housings for computer parts and let people click them together.” Maybe so—and certainly most computer hardware could use a dose of clean, simple design (Apple’s Braun fetish being the one obvious exception). But as someone who once spent an entire Saturday in “indescribable purgatory” assembling an Ikea bed frame, I ardently hope this day never comes.

It’s the motherlode! In the 72 hours since this year’s NeoCon World’s Trade Fair wrapped up at Chicago’s Merchandise Mart, our roving photographers have been busy putting together a slew of nearly 150 photos (!) from the show floor and area showrooms. Without further ado, then, we present a tour of some of the best in workplace furniture, lighting, textiles, and technology (and cocktail parties) from the exhibitors at the 2009 NeoCon. Read more…

Even at NeoCon, the ground zero of wire management, the wires resist management.

Imagine a time when you don’t need to carry around your bulky, tangled chargers for your laptop and various PDAs, a day when there are no wires snaking across your living room floor as your computer powers up. Now, imagine no wires in sight. You simply put your laptop or phone on a flat surface and voilá, you’re charging and ready to communicate. This is not a far-fetched idea; it can start happening as soon as 2010. Read more…

Images: courtesy Eric Gordon

Eric Gordon, a professor of new media at Emerson College, and Gene Koo, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, just won a MacArthur Foundation grant for their innovative new take on community planning using Second Life, a three-dimensional virtual world which users explore as avatars. I spoke with Professor Gordon over the phone last week about how holding community meetings in Second Life transforms the planning process.

Tell me about the site that your workshops were focusing on.

We had the opportunity to work last summer with Library Park in Allston, which is a neighborhood of Boston. The park is being designed by Harvard University as part of their expansion into Allston, so it’s the first piece of a much larger development.

What’s wrong with the way architects’ plans are used at a typical community meeting?

The typical two-dimensional plans assume that the people viewing them have some understanding of architecture or urban planning—they adopt a professional discourse and bring it to a lay community, without enough thought into how to communicate abstract spatial ideas in a way that people can relate to. Read more…

For better or for worse, Judson Beaumont is the master of the design pun. And the Vancouver-based designer has a soft spot for the worst. His Bad Table, for example, naughtily raises a leg to pee on your carpet. He also sexed up storage in the form of the Little Black Dresser. But this year (his ninth as an exhibitor), I was charmed by a deliberately crude prototype: the iLog. Apple’s sleek MP3 player sticks up out of a sawed-off bark-covered stick, with speaker holes drilled in each end. It’s too loud at the Javits center to get a sense of the sound. (Besides, the piece is a prototype: Beaumont is looking for an interested party to handle the electrical components.) But I’m totally sold by Beaumont’s vision of the the unit playing in a fireplace, screen glowing warmly. “Docking stations are all big and plastic with no personality,” he says. “I wanted to take something hard and white and warm it up.”