—Postcard of the 'Executive Park Motor Hotel' in Atlanta Mockitecture features a small series of American 'postcards from the future'. The cards are nearly fifty years old and unravel some nostalgic elements of modernism. Especially the text on the backside of the postcard of the 'Equitable Life Assurance Society Pavilion' for New York World's Fair speaks volumes about the urbanist's fascinations for showcasing data in the public domain as can be still found today. "The Equitable Pavilion, a contemporary open strecture located on the Pool of Inndustry, houses the famous Equitable Demograph, a 45-foot electronically controlled map of the United States. See for yourself America's growing population brought to life right before your eyes!"

Yesterday a new remarkable hotel opened doors in the Dutch city of Zaandam. The building embodies anew chapter in modern architecture making a solid design statement: modern design does not necessarily have to look modern and traditional design does not have to look traditional. We would call it neo-neo-traditionalism. The new Inntel hotel is already the main eye-stopper in the revamped town centre and a building that has set many tongues wagging in the Netherlands. The iconic green wooden houses of the Zaan region were the fount of inspiration for the hotel’s designer, Wilfried van Winden (WAM Architecten, Delft). The structure is a lively stacking of various examples of these traditional houses, ranging from a notary’s residence to a worker’s cottage. Wilfried van Winden envisages the hotel as a temporary home, alluding to that transience with the stack of houses. Visually speaking the structure is built up from a varied stacking of almost seventy individual little houses, executed in four shades of the traditional green of the Zaan region. The hotel is unique, familiar yet original and idiosyncratic. It is a design that could be realized only in Zaandam but at the same time transcends and reinvigorates local tradition. Interesting is the fun element in the design. It makes one think and wonder. It adapts to traditional regional style elements while ridiculizing it at the same time. —On Thursday March 25, the Netherlands Architecture Institute will be hosting a debate on the role of traditionalism in current architecture practice. Volume Editor-in-Chief Arjen Oosterman is one of the seven debaters. More information here (in Dutch).

Why not map the contemporary search for gold in the United States? Using a U.S. Department of Interior database, Gold Maps Online has created a series of KML files to help highlight areas where gold is currently being found. The maps can be imported in Google Earth and provide an almost real-time look at America's active gold deposits. "It's near real-time because gold mining claim holders are required to pay annual fees to maintain ownership. They wouldn't do that if they weren't finding gold on the property. This is a map of where prospectors are finding gold in 2010." Described as a "must-have planning and exploration tool for any gold panning adventure" the maps of 2010 contain 378,890 active gold claims and 181,134 abandoned gold claims. All claims are located on public lands spread across twelve western states. Maps of abandoned claims reveal activity from 1986 through 2010. Unfortunately the gold maps are not available for free, but hey, the trips offered by the California Steam Ship were not either. Nevertheless, it is possible to download a free sample map to see what it looks like.

13 March 2010, Trouw/De Verdieping, Amsterdam. More information here. Nature has always been complete, and yet it is never finished. Technology can expand nature infinitely, but should learn to play by some of the same rules. At the Transnatural symposium acknowledged designers, scientists, artists and architects explore the philosophical, cultural and practical implications of the fusion between technology and nature.

Last Saturday, the Studio Beirut collective launched Beyroutes in the city that it honours: Beirut. With many of the contributors packed into the tiny Papercup Bookstore, it became a happy, emotional, and shamelessly self-boosting affair. From an upper shelve of a book cabinet, Chris Fruneaux speeched about the deep friendships that underlie the making of the book. In a talk with the Royal Netherlands Embassy’s Cultural Attache, Joost Janmaat revealed some of the inner workings of the beast we refer to as Studio Beirut. In a far corner, Rani al Rajji could be found recruiting stunningly beautiful girls into the ranks of the Bounyaks. Joe Mounzer got into a signing frenzy of his own; brazenly scribbling away at every blank spot of paper that got near. And all along, Steve Eid and Pascale Hares were standing on the pavement outside Papercup, between them the intimidatingly pretty latest addition to the squad: baby Noa. Hardcore locals, engaged tourists and nostalgic diaspora: this guide was made by a broad array of committed amateurs that project themselves onto the city. For years, they have looked to this particular city to accommodate their dreams, ambitions, curiosities and insecurities.

Scientists of MIT’s Bits and Atoms Lab are helping people in the city of Jalalabad, Afghanistan, to turn pieces of board, wire, a plastic tub and some cans into reflectors for a wireless network named Fab Fi. The team has put up 25 nodes in the city, with locals now having access to a stable internet connection. With a little training, they even figured out to how to expand the network by copying reflectors and making new links. "You can’t always get nice plywood and wire mesh and acrylic and Shop Bot time when you want to make a link. Maybe it’s the middle of the night and the lab is closed. Maybe you spent all your money on a router and all you have left for a reflector is the junk in your back yard. That, dear world, is when you improvise." MIT is also shipping routers to Jalalabad to enable the city to further improve its network. The Fab Fi project is very interesting, especially since it proves the relevance to rethink foreign aid in terms of injecting knowledge and expertise to accelerate local progress instead of an injection of externally-managed aid money. "An 18-month World Bank funded infrastructure project to bring internet connectivity to Afghanistan began more than seven years ago and only made its first international link this June. That project, despite hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, is still far from being complete while FabLabbers are building useful infrastructure for pennies on the dollar out of their garbage."

Sketches for future cities and utopian buildings are often circular-shaped. Apparently a huge group of futurists, architects and urbanists prefers society to be rounded-up and dome-like. It's hard to find out why, but one of the main reasons might be that the future city in essence has to stay away from current urban forms. A utopian sketch containing family houses in a row would be pretty boring and not really interesting as a futuristic vision. Here's a way to create your own circular utopian future city in 3D. The ForCG website hosts a great tutorial explaining step by step how to make a utopian dream into a pretty render while using Autodesk’s 3DS Max. Here's part 1 and part 2 of the tutorial.

What to do with the big hole in downtown Chicago? That essentially is what the Chicago Architectural Club wants to know. Therefore they announced the competition 'Mine the Gap'. "'Mine the Gap' is a single-stage international design ideas competition dedicated to examining one of the most visible scars left after the collapse of the real estate market in Chicago: the massive hole along the Lake Michigan shore that was to have been—and may yet be—the foundation for a singular 150-story condominium tower designed by an internationally-renowned Spanish architect, a tower which was to have become a new icon for the city and region. What to do with the gap? Whether or not the project is resuscitated, what else can we do with this strategic and highly-charged site? Once the motor of real-estate speculation has stalled, what can we use to propel ourselves, and the discipline, forward?" More information about entry fee, jury, deadlines and registration can be found at the Chicago Architectural Club's webpage. Competitors may submit material online anytime between March 22, 2010 and May 3, 2010. Registration is open, and may be completed anytime before the deadline. The first prize is $ 3,500, the second is prize $ 1,500 and the third prize is $ 750. Up to 3 Honorable Mentions will be awarded.

Last week's item on Foodprint NYC made me think of an article I stumbled upon some time ago. It deals with the topic of so-called agro-imperialism. Issues such as rising global food prices, growing populations and scarcity of water make financially wealthy but recource-poor nations in the Middle East and Asia feel uncomfortable about their food security. In order to attempt to ensure food security, a number of these countries decided to "outsource their food production to places where fields are cheap and abundant" by buying large pieces of arable land in Africa, mostly in regions that are "least touched by development".

Via Yarbus, the new web project of former Volume/Archis web editor Edwin Gardner, we found this amazing presentation tool for architects and designers. Zebra Imaging 3D prints recently came up with a method to show virtual 3D models to a group of stakeholders. Zebra's holographic images enables architects and designers to show their 3D model without taking it. All sorts of architectural data can be transformed into a mind-blowing holographic animation. According to its makers, this method is much more rapid, much more accurate and less expensive than a real model. Interesting is the fact that the panel is a flat piece of plastic which is easy to transport, in contrary to regular 3D models. The times that we see an architect struggling in public transport while carrying unhandy models packed in wrapped garbage bag foil, are over soon. As the video explains we are not able to experience the whole effect as we are watching it on a 2D monitor. Nevertheless, this looks already amazing. All different perspectives can be shown — from street level to a bird's eye perspective. The models are available in different sizes and are full color. Next to architecture, this application finds a use in showing 3D maps for military operations.

"The city lets us know what they are up to by creating billboards that announce their projects. The Studio for Unsolicited Architecture and DUS Architects have pasted over five of these signs in Rotterdam with their own suggestions of how to make these projects more sustainable, more social and more exciting."

After buying a ghost town in the middle of nowhere, the new owner has to come up with a plan. The idea of privatizing property on this scale is a relatively new spatial phenomenon, which is exciting. Redeveloping a city that used to give home to 5,000 people with private money, is quite a job. According to the auction committee the new buyer can do whatever he or she wants with the area, as long as he will stick to the local environmental and building rules. Taking a close watch at the history of housing and the principles of human settlement, it will be immensely difficult to attract people to live here. There are no services and no other people, and there is no particular promise or story. Therefore I think housing will not work here. Pure recreation will not work either since there is no special attractor in the close environment, apart from a river and a small lake.

Yesterday we paid attention to Skrunda's auction and the new situation the east Latvian town has to deal with. A load of pictures of desolate cities and abandoned buildings inspired us to find out a little more about its history. A couple of professional news reports and home-made cinematic efforts, show a rather emotional situation. The Guardian reports about the rather mysterious history of Skundra-1: "Built in the 1980s, Skrunda-1 was a secret settlement not marked on Soviet maps because of the two enormous radar installations that listened to objects in space and monitored the skies for a U.S. nuclear missile attack. Like all clandestine towns in the Soviet Union, it was kept off maps and given a code-name — which usually consisted of a number and the name of a nearby city."

For three point one million dollar, in London, New York City or Moscow one buys a 300 square meters apartment in the city center, but on the grey Baltic country side one buys a complete city for this amount of money. A Russian investor bought the ghost town Skrunda-1 in Latvia at an auction in Riga, two weeks ago. The final price of 3.1 million dollars was far beyond expectation as the starting price was ten times less than that (310,000 dollars). Skundra-1 is an old military city that gave shelter to approximately 5,000 people during the Cold War. More than a decade ago the place was left as a consequence of the military and political collapse of the Soviet imperium. It's not clear yet which plans the buyer, Aleksejevskoje-Serviss, has for the property, which counts 45 hectares and is located in western Latvia, about 95 miles (150 kilometers) from Riga. The town consists of about 70 abandoned buildings including apartment blocks, a school, barracks, eateries, gyms and two night clubs.

26 February 2010, the Building Centre, London. Start 9:00 am. The one-day conference 'Unconventional Computing & Architecture' explores new materials for architectural practice in the 21st century. International architects and scientists will explore the decision-making properties of matter and how this may be applied to create increasingly life-like buildings. Organised by The Bartlett’s Advanced Virtual and Technological Architecture Research (AVATAR) group, the conference aims to bring together architects and scientists who are working with new technologies that are capable of self-assembly and organization. Such technologies may form the basis for architecture generated by unconventional computing techniques which range from the actions of protocells, (entirely synthetic DNA-less agents), slime moulds (simple organisms with very complex behaviours), crystalline computing (using the organizing properties of molecules) and algae (that can be engineered to respond to environments in new ways). Neil Spiller founded the AVATAR Group in 2004, whose interdisciplinary research agenda explores all manner of digital and visceral terrain and considers the impact of advanced technology on architectural design, engaging with cybernetics, aesthetics, and philosophy to develop new ways of manipulating the built environment. Speakers: Neil Spiller (University College London), Rachel Armstrong (University College London), Evan Douglis (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute), Paul Preissner (University of Illinois at Chicago), Lisa Iwamoto (University of California, Berkeley), Philip Beesley (University of Waterloo), Nic Clear (University College London), Martin Hanczyc (University of Southern Denmark), Ben de Lacy Costello (University of West England), Simon Park (University of Surrey), Lee Cronin (University of Glasgow). —More information here.