This morning the Faculty of Architecture of the Delft University of Technology caught fire.
The building was evacuated immediately, there were no injured.
The probable cause of the fire was a short-circuiting in a coffee-machine on the 6th floor of the northern wing of the building, resulting from water leakage. The fire spread to the upper floors and later to the southern wing. Due to the height of the building, the fierceness of the fire and possible collapsing of the building firemen had to retreat and continue their work from the ground.
According to the fire department the building by Van den Broek and Bakema is to be considered lost entirely and could even collapse due to severe damage done to it’s structure.
Images here (Nu.nl) and here (NOS.nl). Movies after the break.
Fellow dysturber, Darrel Ronald, founded Open Form Architecture in Montréal (Canada) with colleagues Maxime Moreau and Maurice Martel. We were recently invited to participate in the Pecha Kucha Montréal as our first public presentation. Following our 20 slides / 20 seconds at the special edition of Pecha Kucha Montréal as part of the Portes Ouverts Design Montréal festival, we have made the slides, as well as video available online.
The title of our presentation is, Simple Rules, Complex Behaviour, and illustrates a limited selection of our work over the past years dealing with generative design, cellular automata, simple programming and complexity. We have been particularly influenced by the work of Steven Wolfram and his book, A New Kind of Science. Having participated in two of his NKS Summer Schools, we’ve been fortunate to collaborate with him and a team of mathematicians and programmers in the United States using Mathematica software.
The presentation is bilingual French and English, just like our favourite city! Unfortunately the first words are cut off, and they are: WE ARE OPEN FORM, and WE LOVE OPEN FORM! We hope you enjoy! Below are our 20 slides, that accompany the video. Continue reading ‘Open Form Architecture @ Pecha Kucha, Montréal’
Emap, a Business-to-Business media group (from their website), hosts the first World Architecture Festival in Barcelona. Architects are invited to put their buildings up for competition (entry fee a smacking 950€), and among the exhibited projects the best will be awarded. The interesting jury (to name a few: Will Alsop, Cecil Balmond, Stefan Behnisch, Richard Burdett, Luis M. Mansilla, Richard Meier, Sir Peter Cook, Neil Denari, Norman Foster, Massimiliano Fuksas, Zaha Hadid, Michel Rojkind, Michael Sorkin, Francine Houben, Robert Stern, Christoph Ingenhoven, Charles Jencks) might redeem the commercial/artificial flair the event exudes. We’ll keep our final judgement to ourselves until we know more about the event.
This friday at 16:30 an interesting exhibition opens @ the Casla in Almere. It will feature the winning projects of the Eenvoud Competition, the third edition for an experimetal neighbourhood in Almere. Its predecessors, “De Fantasie” and “De Realiteit”, ‘Fantasy’ and ‘Reality’ were held back in the eighties and their results are still worth an excursion. More information on that below.
“De Éénvoud” or ‘Simplicity ‘is the result of a competition held in 2006. The brief was to design a freestanding and simple low-cost house, expressing their own wishes and ideas for dwelling. The winners got the possibility to build their design on a beautiful open spot in the woodland of Noorderplassen-West. Continue reading ‘De Eenvoud - Simplicity’
A new documentary film, archiCULTURE, is in the works about the lives of student architects and the culture surrounding the daily life of design students. The film (trailer) is a grassroots project currently seeking money to finance the project. Continue reading ‘archiCULTURE: The Film’
June 11th the first Museum entirely dedicated to Graphic Design will be opened by our Queen Beatrix in Breda.
For the opening my friend Teun Castelein will make his graphic statement out of concieved content from 250 participants. Everybody is welcome to design its own flag and mail it to flag@graphicdesignmuseum.com. All designs will be printed on unique flags and put against the building. The result will be an explosion of information. A colourful art piece at the old baroque building of the supermodern Graphic Design Museum.
Really a piece of art that makes people think about modern visual communication, about the position of musea in the contemporary image-culture and the fact that everybody is a designer/ image-maker nowadays. Continue reading ‘Get A Flag!’
I recently discovered a radio program that is broadcast by Radio France Culture every Wednesday from 10 to 11 am. Called Métropolitains, this show existed since 1999 and is hosted by the architectural critic François Chaslin. Métropolitans is a program about architecture and the city. With a smooth voice, François Chaslin and his guests talks about several subjects from landscape architecture to design, lighting, scenography, exhibitions, the city and - of course - its buildings. For example the show of February 27 was entirely dedicated to the British architect Richard Rogers, who is presently presenting a monographic show at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Also have a look at the 5th of March show, which was dedicated to the philosopher and architect Wittgenstein. Celine Poisson, specialist of the Wittgenstein house and professor of design at the Université du Québec à Montréal, was guest of the show. On the 20th of February the roles were reversed: various architects and historians challenged François Chaslin on issues regarding the actual status of architecture.
You can download Podcasts and archives of the show at the Métropolitains site.
Peter Fischli / David Weiss: “Objects From the Raft”, 1982; Source: unknown
This sunday i went to see the exhibition of swiss artist duo Fischli & Weiss in Milan,Italy, organized by the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi. Get the first impression by a video on youtube. It runs until the 16th of march, but afterwards it will move to Hamburg (18. April until 31. August in the Deichtorhallen Hamburg). The exhibition space is the beautiful Palazzo Litta, the perfect frame for their work. They are dealing with a wide range of means: multimedia installations, photography and sculptures.Their most famous piece of work is the movie titled “Der Lauf der Dinge” (How things go), from 1987, at the documenta 8. Their basic principle is to pick up objects and situations of daily life and transforming them into a new context. What do they exactly aim at? Do they try to find answers on the philosophical and theoretical questions of life is their irony and also tremendous humour a notion to cheer up in a complex world?
One extract of a Super 8 movie shows Fischli & Weiss, dressed as a bear and a rat, strolling through Hollywood, questioning life.The bears’ comment ( in “the least resistance”): ” I hate this chaos in the world. Nothing works. Everything is hopeless and sad.” Continue reading ‘Questions & Flowers - a Retrospective by Fischli & Weiss’
UN data: slum population in metropolitan areas 2001
“The UN-system has accumulated over the past 60 years an impressive amount of information. UNdata, developed by the Statistics Division of DESA, is a new powerful tool, which will bring this unique and authoritative set of data not only to the desks of decision makers and analysts, but also to journalists, to students and to all citizens of the world, ” says Sha Zukang, Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs.
Since its foundation, the United Nations system has been collecting statistical information from member states on a variety of topics. The information thus collected constitutes a considerable information asset of the organization. However, these statistical data are often stored in proprietary databases, each with unique dissemination and access policies. As a result, users are often unaware of the full array of statistical information that the UN system has in its data libraries. The current arrangement also means that users are required to move from one database to another to access different types of information.
UNdata addresses this problem by pooling major UN databases and those of several international into one single internet environment. The innovative design allows a user to access a large number of UN databases either by browsing the data series or through a keyword search.
I love when major organisations understand that opening up their knowledge to the public is the way to the future. We’ve added the UN database to our our list of resources - scroll down to ‘data’.
I have been hearing more and more about VVVV. If you are a fan of Processing, then you’ll surely be a fan of VVVV. The results are amazing, both the screenshots and videos, it is worth a look for its inspiration alone. And if you’re interested in a visual programming interface for real-time video creation, this is a fascinating software: Continue reading ‘VVVV Real-Time Video Programming Toolkit’
If you’re the type to follow the latest developments in architectural software (read: CAD Geek), then you’ll be excited about this announcement. Bentley Systems has released it’s industry-leading software, Generative Components, as a free trial until May 2008. The software has been making waves, especially in London, over the past few years. I was especially taken by the Generative Components plug-in when I heard Robert Aish speak (director of researcher at Bentley Systems) at the Game, Set and Match conference at the NAi in Rotterdam, 2006. Continue reading ‘Free Trial Until May - Bentley’s Generative Components’
Ahhh, the Venice Architecture Biennale is coming again in 2008! The exhibition runs from the 14 September to the 24 November and I’m totally stoked for another visit to the magical city.
DRL actually stands for Design Research Lab, a research unit started at the AA in 1997. To celebrate the tenth anniversary of DRL, the AA have decide to organise an exhibition, build a temporary pavilion in Bedford Square, and publish DRL TEN: A Design Research Compendium. Continue reading ‘DRL Ten _ AA School London’
If you busy creating 3D digital models and don’t know about the Netherlands-based CG Textures database, it is worth the look. Run by a friend, Marcel Vijfwinkel, he generously has an open source attitude to the content. You can read the license here. A lot of the material comes from Marcel himself from his work in the gaming industry, and the site now has many content contributors. If you or your office are able to pay for a year-long membership, it will support the site and give you multiple perks.
