Architecture Alive: Love the second skin you live-in
Is your home your castle or your best friend? Is she fit or failing, healthy or sick, smart or in need of an intellectual upgrade? Forget about a make-over; in her future is a full bionic overhaul. Yes, we can rebuild her! Why not think of your house as a human body? Her skin is … Continue reading
Girly Guide to the Internet: An animation
As promised, here is GG’s first attempt at explaining the digiworld using items from our analogue world. Most other simple guides use spidergrams (remember those from school?) to talk-through the idea of a network of devices and functions, but this animation relies on you as the actor finding concepts inside other concepts. I wanted to push the … Continue reading
3D Printing: The New Wikilution?
Print your own car? Download a pizza? Manufacture a flat-pack family home? The possibilities of 3D printing seem endless, but does the hype live-up to the reality? Let’s take a look at this new wiki wonder world … How does it work? The printing process is called ‘additive manufacturing’ in which objects are built-up in … Continue reading
Rihanna: Tattoo You … Or Not?
Just when we were all starting to forget about Robbie Williams’ left arm, Inia Taylor has reignited the debate about whether non-Pacific peoples have the right to wear Pacific tattoo by applying a Samoan malu to Rihanna’s right hand. Her tatau, using the traditional chisel and mallet technique, is now a meme supreme after a Youtube video posted … Continue reading
Three names to drop during coffee with your besties: A mini-series
The whole point of having coffee with your besties is to discuss how life is never straightforward anyway. Michio Kaku, Zaha Hadid and Anne Salmond know this too, as you’ll see in the following blogs. They see us all living in ‘relational’ world or worlds, where everything functions in networks. Imagine a meadow full of daisies, where each petal … Continue reading
First name to drop during coffee with your besties
Michio Kaku: or ‘Mr Multiverse’ as we like to call him at GG, is the world’s leading theoretical physicist. Of course your besties will have only ever heard of Stephen Hawking so just mentioning his name will make them wonder who else you’ve been hanging out with. An American of Japanese heritage, Michio is a professor at … Continue reading
Second name to drop during coffee with your besties
Dame Zaha Hadid, DBE: like Michio, Zaha works in a world that defies the normal rules of nature, designing buildings that often appear to defy gravity. An Iraqi-born architect whose company is based in the United Kingdom, she burst onto the design radar in 1983 when only five years out of architecture school she won an international … Continue reading
Third name to drop during coffee with your besties
Dame Anne Salmond, DBE FRSNZ FBA: as you’ve probably guessed, none of these great thinkers see life ticking along in a straight line. Anne is a world-famous anthropologist from New Zealand, a person who makes it their business to understand the social lives of different groups of people. She has mainly worked for and with Maori … Continue reading
Big Girls aren’t Boring
She’s big, she’s dirty, and if you live in Avondale or Waterview (Auckland) she’ll be digging a hole large enough to fit rush hour traffic under your living room. ‘Alice’ as she’s affectionately known, the tenth largest Tunnel Boring Machine (TBM) in the world, has just arrived from China and is being put to work cutting twin … Continue reading