Browsing the news at MOS we can find some indication of what happens when you make hairy architecture:

And, on that note, I urge you to read a review of the hairy installation by MOS architects, in which it is claimed this is “the first time hair has been convincingly employed in architecture. Not merely a simple novelty, the hairiness of the pavilion is distinctly unique enough to represent an entirely new category of material possibility.”
This review, by Trevor Patt on his blog, draws attention to some of the poignant …

“The consumer society is a kind of soft police state. We think we have choice, but everything is compulsory. We have to keep buying or we fail as citizens. Consumerism creates huge unconscious needs that only fascism can satisfy. If anything, fascism is the form that consumerism takes when it opts for elective madness.” — J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come (2006).

“But even before entering the Casino, we were aware that we were no longer in the world of quotidian politeness. The first task was to pass through the borderzone, out on …

A sort of reply to Nicholas’s post on the Lucas Arts: Fracture terra-forming computer game.  There’s been a lot of talk about how much video games and cinema (especially science fiction) have influenced wider design culture.  With advancements in our ability to represent ‘reality’ digitally, the games and animation industry has also influenced the development of many of the software applications used by designers and architects.  We’ve also talked about different scenarios of the future, be it dystopian or utopian or somewhere in the middle.  This 2005 article by …

In yet another onto-it post (from 2006) by Geoff Manaugh on his BLDGBLOG he throws up some enticing potentials about future aeroplanes printed out of plastic and the imagined potential of bio-printing.
But where it gets really interesting for me, is where he starts to discuss how contemporary life is slipping into sci-fi, and “Science-fiction and social realism will become one and the same thing.” Becoming increasingly future-focussed (reading between the lines) is valuable for the way it sparks, or encourages imaginative, open exploration of ideas. He yawns at much of …

An interview with Brian Massumi at Intelligent Agent discusses questions of flux and change, responsiveness and plasticity which seemed relevant in terms of autopoiesis and PALS – especially relevant to Peter’s line of investigation. Not too long or even especially jargony.
“The active emergence of form does not automatically carry over from the design process into the life of the building once it is constructed. How to make the carry-over is precisely the problem . How can a built form build form?”

This blog, BLDGBLOG by Geoff Manaugh, is very good.
I suspect his book may be worth getting.
He will be speaking at the Parallax conference in Melbourne in late April/early May.
I was particularly warmed by this post on heating via cremation.

John Thackara asks:
What would architects design, if they did not design buildings? What would designers design, if they did not design products, or posters?
He is not convinced that architects and other designers should limit their capacities to design-for-production, or for individual expression.

If any of you thought we were a little off-beam reading Stanislavski and building characters, here is an example of some others doing something similar:
Urban Futures: a performance based approach to residential design

somehow there was so much discussions on the idea of ’skins’, reminded me of this exhibition – ‘skins and bones‘ which I had attended a few years back. Really inspired me a fair bit; the relation between the process of fashion and architecture. did a summery of it a while back.

The first line of the algorithm streamed through his brain and he felt a burning sensation in his sinuses as the pattern formed itself in his mind’s eye. The job wasn’t going to pay, and it wasn’t particularly challenging in itself, but he felt it was a worthwhile thing to be helping these refugees. They were from London this lot. Not the worst affected area certainly, but everyone knew that there was barely anywhere in Europe that wasn’t a frozen wasteland, and people were saying that the Glaciation – nobody …