Over the weekend I received an Amazon Echo as a gift. I set it up in my kitchen on Sunday morning and had it playing music and telling me the weather in no time. I also setup a couple of “routines” so that when I say things, such as “good morning”, it cycles through the weather, the news, and some other things that I might find valuable at the start of my day. It is pretty neat.

The truth is that I have actually been avoiding voice assistants since they were first launched. As much as I consider myself an early adopter, I have been generally uncomfortable with the idea that my voice commands, and perhaps other things, are being stored by Amazon. There are ways to delete that history, but I am not yet sure if that’s enough for me. Am I going to be served an ad because of something I mention in my own home?

Now that I’ve been trying it out for a few days, I will say that it is incredibly useful. I immediately see the value. I use it to control some of my lights. I ask it things when I’m cooking and my hands are dirty: “Alexa, how badly are the Raptors going to beat the Bucks this Thursday?” And I use it to play music. But is all of this a fair exchange for the creepy feeling that they create?

I’m not sure. But it certainly feels like the future.

Liz Diller of Diller Scofidio + Renfro was recently asked by designboom about how her firm approached the design of Fifteen Hudson Yards (the first residential tower in New York’s Hudson Yards).

The firm had never designed a high-rise before. So while their typical approach would be to analyze program, here they were heavily informed by the views – both in and out from the site – as you move up the tower.

The 88 storey tower transitions between two footprints. The base matches the street grid of the city, but as you move up the tower it transforms into a cloverleaf – allowing panoramic views of the city.

It is a somewhat similar approach to what has been proposed by Studio Gang for One Delisle. Except for the transformation here is to a multifaceted cylindrical shape (a hexadecagon is what has been drawn).

From the late 19th century when Chicago began to pioneer the modern skyscraper, architects and engineers have been thinking about how you treat a tall building as you move from top to bottom.

Chicago architect Louis Sullivan responded to this challenge with his tripartite approach to design. He believed that tall buildings should be characterized by three main divisions: a base (bottom), a shaft (middle), and a cap (top).

The technological innovation that allowed this thinking to flourish was the non-load-bearing curtain wall. Once the exterior walls of a tower no longer supported the actual building, architects then had the freedom to really experiment.

This remains true to this day, but we no longer need to confine ourselves to only three parts. New technologies now allow for more.

Today we have parametric modeling and other design tools that allow us to create new geometries and transitions; forms that would have been pretty complex to draw up in the past. 

In the case of Fifteen Hudson Yards, every floor plate from 20 something and up is slightly different. I wonder what Louis would think of this.

Image: Timothy Schenck via designboom

Over the weekend I received an Amazon Echo as a gift. I set it up in my kitchen on Sunday morning and had it playing music and telling me the weather in no time. I also setup a couple of “routines” so that when I say things, such as “good morning”, it cycles through the weather, the news, and some other things that I might find valuable at the start of my day. It is pretty neat.

The truth is that I have actually been avoiding voice assistants since they were first launched. As much as I consider myself an early adopter, I have been generally uncomfortable with the idea that my voice commands, and perhaps other things, are being stored by Amazon. There are ways to delete that history, but I am not yet sure if that’s enough for me. Am I going to be served an ad because of something I mention in my own home?

Now that I’ve been trying it out for a few days, I will say that it is incredibly useful. I immediately see the value. I use it to control some of my lights. I ask it things when I’m cooking and my hands are dirty: “Alexa, how badly are the Raptors going to beat the Bucks this Thursday?” And I use it to play music. But is all of this a fair exchange for the creepy feeling that they create?

I’m not sure. But it certainly feels like the future.

Liz Diller of Diller Scofidio + Renfro was recently asked by designboom about how her firm approached the design of Fifteen Hudson Yards (the first residential tower in New York’s Hudson Yards).

The firm had never designed a high-rise before. So while their typical approach would be to analyze program, here they were heavily informed by the views – both in and out from the site – as you move up the tower.

The 88 storey tower transitions between two footprints. The base matches the street grid of the city, but as you move up the tower it transforms into a cloverleaf – allowing panoramic views of the city.

It is a somewhat similar approach to what has been proposed by Studio Gang for One Delisle. Except for the transformation here is to a multifaceted cylindrical shape (a hexadecagon is what has been drawn).

From the late 19th century when Chicago began to pioneer the modern skyscraper, architects and engineers have been thinking about how you treat a tall building as you move from top to bottom.

Chicago architect Louis Sullivan responded to this challenge with his tripartite approach to design. He believed that tall buildings should be characterized by three main divisions: a base (bottom), a shaft (middle), and a cap (top).

The technological innovation that allowed this thinking to flourish was the non-load-bearing curtain wall. Once the exterior walls of a tower no longer supported the actual building, architects then had the freedom to really experiment.

This remains true to this day, but we no longer need to confine ourselves to only three parts. New technologies now allow for more.

Today we have parametric modeling and other design tools that allow us to create new geometries and transitions; forms that would have been pretty complex to draw up in the past. 

In the case of Fifteen Hudson Yards, every floor plate from 20 something and up is slightly different. I wonder what Louis would think of this.

Image: Timothy Schenck via designboom