Aug 6, 2022
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Pillow Fort Semper Design Sketch, Fred Scharmen:
Pillow Fort Semper was designed to be an interactive system of elements that could be arranged and rearranged over the course of the Baltimore Museum of Art's event series. In the longer term, most of the components of Pillow Fort Semper were repurposed, donated to organizations in Baltimore helping displaced people, refugees, and those experiencing homelessness.
Pillow Fort Semper Elements, Fred Scharmen
The tectonics of Pillow Fort Semper were based on Gottfried Semper's Four Elements of Architecture. For Semper the 19th Century German critic of art and architecture, the home was constructed from traditional craft activities like ground cultivation, solid masonry, stick framing, and cooking. Each of these methods is translated into the building of the pillow fort. First comes the ground preparation, as the rugs and pillows are organized to make the floor inhabitable. Large couch cushions are arranged like modular stone slabs, with uprights and lintels enclosing space.
Architecture is entering a period in which the destabilizing effects of robotics, digital communication, and computation are being brought to ground. New internet protocols coming online in the next few years will automate many aspects of the home, and there will soon be enough new IP addresses available to give every armchair and billboard its own identity and ability to communicate, fulfilling Scott Brown’s vision of assertive home furnishings and self aware monumentally generic buildings. We will all have our badges to scan, and our conversations with each other, our spaces, and our things will be captured and recuperated constantly. As in Koolhaas’s Manhattan, and in the conventionally universal convention space in Philadelphia, weirdness and xenocentrism will be deprecated and absorbed. In the future, everything will be normal.
A Retroactive Manifesto for the AIA National Convention by Fred Scharmen
Fred Scharmen (previously) has a beautiful new project up and running:
The Nonhuman Autonomous Space Agency is a network of robotic and biological systems, tied together by exchanges in the material and attention economies. One set of probes searches the asteroid belt for resources drifting in the solar wind like giant flowers. Another set, made from modified classic spacecraft, uses its manufacturing and fabrication capacity to shape those resources. Together they build and nurture the habitats for animals and robots, while the whole process can be followed on social media from Earth, all mediated by servers on the Moon.
Read more at the Nonhuman Autonomous Space Agency website. Submissions are encouraged:
The Nonhuman Autonomous Space Agency is an open world project. If you have an idea for an image, story, comic book, toy, scenario, or any other media, narrative or not that explores the interaction between nonhuman Earthlings in space exploration and colonization, please get in touch and share it at sevensixfive ~at~ gmail ~dot~ com
“The Nonhuman Autonomous Space Agency is a research project from the Working-Group on Adaptive Systems.”
_[Charismatic Megafauna](http://www.flickr.com/photos/harleycat/8019879538/)_, [Fred Scharmen](http://www.sevensixfive.net/)
Branching: Drawings, 2008 - 2009 by Fred Scharmen. An ongoing series of drawings, photographs, and digital work, investigating aspects of line, shape, and form.