serial consign

Over the last few days I've discovered a pair of interesting projects that explore urban form through computation. The first is an interactive map of Rome that locates and contextualizes a number of 18th century perspective drawings, the second is a software application that utilizes procedural modeling to generate expansive 3D cities.

Imago Urbis: Giuseppe Vasi’s Grand Tour of Rome is an interactive archive of the work of Giuseppe Vasi (1710-1782). Like Pannini and Piranesi, Vasi is considered one of the great vedutisti (delineators of urban space). His masterwork was Magnificenze di Roma antica e moderna, a 238 image, ten-volume collection of prints that provided comprehensive documentation of the architecture and urban character of Rome. The crux of the Imago Urbis project is that it is takes Vasi's perspectival views and locates them on the Nolli map. The screen capture above illustrates how the vantage point of each perspective is identified and how architectural and infrastructural "points of interest" are annotated and colour-coded so that the user can situate the drawing in relation to the surrounding urban fabric.

The statement for project contextualizes the relationship between Vasi and Giambattista Nolli (the author of the Nolli map) as follows:

Given that Nolli and Vasi were contemporaries and collaborators focusing on the same subject, it seems obvious that their work is intrinsically related; up to now no vehicle existed to effectively synthesize their individual achievements into a single resource that effectively evokes Settecento Rome. We believe that it will be extremely informative to place these 18th century documents into their 21st century context so that spatial relationships can be drawn and new conclusions reached about their continuing significance to the understanding of the city. Our overarching objective is to document and integrate two distinct graphic modes for representing the Eternal City: the pictorial view and the ichnographic plan.

This interactive piece functions as both a map and an archive, a historical document and a database of urban views.

This is the main interface for Imago Urbis, which identifies the location of each of Vasi's drawings. Beyond communicating the inventory of available views, the map resonates with the increasingly familiar process of geo-navigating through a set of images (on everyblock for example). I find Imago Urbis extremely engaging because it applies numerous tropes from contemporary urban informatics to a historical archive, breathing new life into old representations of urban space. In addition to the overall scope of the project, the elegant interface and design are also commendable; how can you not love an "urban viewport" with a taxonomy class for the sites of executions?

Imago Urbis was developed by Jim Tice, Erik Steiner, Allan Ceen, and Dennis Beyer from the Department of Architecture, InfoGraphics Lab and Department of Geography at the University of Oregon. This is the same team that brought us the Interactive Noli Map in 2005. [via the map room]

CityEngine is a new software system developed by Procedural Inc., a Switzerland-based developer with ties to the ETH Zürich technical university. In watching the video above, it is quite clear how this tool could be employed to quickly produce sophisticated models of urban space based off defined parameters, design rules, material palettes, etc. The application seems equally capable of generating meandering street geometry as it does detailing elevations - one can only imagine how useful a tool like this could be in the film or gaming industries (the software made quite a splash at fmx/08). More abstractly, the software speaks to the emergent nature of urban form and growth, when viewed in fast-forward the process seems even more amazing.

More information on CityEngine can be obtained at the Procedural website as there a number of additional animations available for viewing, Procedural CEO Pascal Müller's site is also worth taking a look at. [via digital urban]

Earlier this month, I was semi-inspired by a Dataisnature post on some recent work by Lia. In that post, Paul Prudence contextualized Lia's Isaidif project in relation to some of other great "drawing machines". To add to that list of projects:

First up is The Plotting Machine, a modified wide format printer that can be outfitted with a variety of "print-heads" to produce a variety of imperfect output. The project was developed by You Don't Matter, a design collective comprised of Martin Borst, Sebastian Cremers and Daniel Schludi. The device can be equipped with blades, a variety of styluses, and the trio of designers have even conducted some long exposure photographic experiments with the contraption. The statement for the project outlines some of the wonderful idiosyncrasies of the content output on this machine:

Most interesting and inspiring are all the little mistakes this machine produces, because of too much data, too much water, color, pressure etc. There are always gradients because the color gets less and less as the machine draws on. This expansion space describes the machine's actual identity. No Image looks like the other.

Take a look at the gorgeous output that this machine has generated - I'm particularly taken by the watercolor grid drawings.

Secondly, Rob Meek recently produced the above demo video for his Meek FM "typographic synthesizer" [see previous post]. While this device isn't a drawing machine in the conventional sense, the demo clearly illustrates the manner in which this system reads individual letterforms as reconfigurable vectors. The character of these "lines" can be modified and that shapes and modulates the sound travelling along these paths. This project is quite noteworthy in that it creates an interface through the intersection of two distinct disciplines.