(ETH, September 09)

In the current discussion about the 2000-watt society it seems very outmoded that we are still switching power manually and that we are still using stand-by modes for our devices while we do have the technology to switch power in a more intelligent way. The project bluepower would like to do a small step in that direction. In the shape of a power strip the project tries to contribute to a more intelligent handling of power as a link between power socket and device.

(more…)

Saturday, September 5th, 2009 at 7:03 pm, Filed under: electronics, oevre by yves
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(ETH, July 09)

In the month of July I attended a great workshop, covering the basics of rhino script. Since I first started to use rhino I was interested to learn rhino script. It lets you do all kinds of great stuff that could never be done by hand.

The specific theme of the workshop was how to display information in haptic 3d models. What we tried to prove is that it is often a lot better to show information in a spatial dimension than using boring 2d charts. By being able to ‘feel’ the information, to turn the model around, etc., one can develop a deeper understanding of information.

What I did is, I created kind of a spatial terrain section through a part of Switzerland and mapped demographic information (more specifically population growth, population count, population density  and public transport usage) onto the model. With it you get quite a good idea of the demographic development of Switzerland.

Saturday, August 1st, 2009 at 2:47 pm, Filed under: concept, oevre by yves
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(individual project, July 08)

Another HDR shot I did very recently while I was hiking in the wonderful Val d’Uina, which is situated in the Unterengadin, Switzerland.

The shot is a litte shaky because of the low light conditions I had there, but it still impresses me how much detail you can get out of just taking three different exposures. In any case, if you ever are in the Unterengadin, go hiking on this beautiful trail, it’s really worth it.

Saturday, August 1st, 2009 at 2:26 pm, Filed under: oevre, photography by yves
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(ETH, May 09)

In this semester the goal was to design a housing project. We were given an existing structure which is an office building at the moment (but will indeed be converted to housing very soon). The apartments had to be rather luxurious with a lot of outdoor area.

All apartments are east and west oriented and have a two storey high living room. This time – doing my semester at the studio of Miroslav Šik – I invested a lot of time to get the details right. I have written a script to draw the brick facade texture (to avoid noticeable tiles), spent a lot of time designing the windows (including the handles), and a lot of effort went into sculpting the interior appearance. This was also the first project where I had to really go to the details concering the construction.

(more…)

Friday, July 31st, 2009 at 5:21 pm, Filed under: architecture, oevre by yves
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(ETH, December 08, german text)

Auf einer Brache nahe des Bahnhof Altstetten in Zürich soll ein Kulturpavillon entstehen. Die Brache ist auf den ersten Blick schlecht erschlossen, denn sie ist eingeklemmt zwischen den Gleisen, der Europabrücke und der nahe gelegenen Autobahn A3. Generell ist das Gebiet um den Bahnhof städtebaulich ein schwieriges Pflaster. Umso grösser ist aber das Potential, welches sich durch einen solchen Eingriff ergibt. Dieses Potential wurde bereits erkannt, so entstehen dort in naher Zukunft einerseits Wohnungen, andererseits wird sich die Endhaltestelle des neuen Tram ‘Zürich-West’ auf dem Areal befinden. (more…)

Sunday, February 1st, 2009 at 8:44 pm, Filed under: architecture, oevre by yves
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(individual project, August 08)

I recently was on a short trip to Sweden and took some photos of the wonderful scenery that can be found there. The weather wasn’t always too good, so that was my chance to do some new HDRs. I’m still amazed what can be done with a series of boring looking photos (which is often the case if there’s bad weather and diffuse light…). Look at the picture of the castle, the atmosphere is just great, and I like the composition, too.

Sunday, August 24th, 2008 at 2:13 pm, Filed under: oevre, photography by yves
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(individual project, July 08)

This weekend, I visited a small village in the Swiss mountains, called Vrin. It’s quite special because they try hard to stay alive. Most young people of such small mountain villages are drawn into the cities, because there’s frankly just not a lot to do up there. On one hand, they try to improve the city’s organisation, on the other hand, they have built some very high quality architecture (by Gion A. Caminada) to make the village more attractive. I’ll post more about the town later, right now I just wanted to share a new HDR (high dynamic range) image I did up there. The weather wasn’t too good, but it created a very nice light situation. Enjoy!

Monday, July 7th, 2008 at 7:48 pm, Filed under: oevre, photography by yves
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(freelance, June 08)

Do you know the site song of the week? Well, you should! It’s, how shall I say, a group of audiophiles I guess. Though I think they are just as much interested in good literature and arts. Their concept is to present a cool song each week by writing a nice text about it, be it historical, technical or personal. You’ll find out it’s quite worthy of reading! Their texts are always accompanied by an illustration. This time around I had the honor to illustrate something.

This week’s post is about “money for nothing” by the infamous Dire Straits. It’s not only a cool 80ies song, its clip is also one of the first to use digital 3d animations. It was also the first clip aired on MTV Europe. For the illustration, I tried to copy the style of the clip. See for yourself if I was successful.

Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 at 10:34 pm, Filed under: illustration, oevre by yves
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(individual project, August 07)

I love to shoot panoramas. In order to do so, it’s often not enough to shoot it ‘free hand’. Instead it’s necessary to mount your camera onto a so called panorama head. The head is then mounted onto a standard tripod and makes it possible to turn the camera around the focal point of the lense. This is very important because if that’s not the case, you wont be able to precisely merge the images into a panorama (you’d get parallax).

Now, you could just buy a panorama head, but this costs around 500 USD and that’s why I decided to build one myself. I’ve drawn the plans in Vectorworks and then did a quick render to test if everything fits and works the way it’s supposed to. Finally I lasercut the parts (out of acryl) and glued the whole thing together. (more…)

Sunday, June 15th, 2008 at 10:32 am, Filed under: construction, oevre by yves
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(contest, December 07, in collaboration with Simon Zehnder)

This was a contest I did with Simon. We won the third prize and were invited to Seoul, South Korea. The task was to create a facade that would interact with its environment. Basically, the idea was to create a facade out of a lot of shells. Each shell would be a pixel that could display part of an image. That allone was not very special, it has been done several times already.

 

The twist of this concept was that we would use the geometry of the shell to direct the image in specific directions. So if you for example would stand on the right side of a facade, you would clearly see the image, whereas on the left side, you could only recognize that ‘there is something going on’. In that way the facade would steer people around, by using their interest to see the ‘whole picture’. This was actually pretty much our first attempt to attend a contest, and we are really happy how it developed. And our stay in Seoul was a blast!

Monday, June 9th, 2008 at 11:45 am, Filed under: architecture, oevre by yves
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