Archive for April, 2007

pecha kucha tonite

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The doors will open at 20.20. / Tick­ets can be bought for 5,- euro at the door.
Loca­tion: Off Corso, Kruiskade 22, Rot­ter­dam hope to see you there!!!
Con­tinue read­ing ‘pecha kucha tonite’

Data Art

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Chris Jordan – Cans Seurat, 2007 (from artist’s website)

Chris Jordan’s project “Running the Numbers” hits my weak spot for data visu­al­i­sa­tion. The artist about his project:

This new series looks at con­tem­po­rary Amer­i­can cul­ture through the aus­tere lens of sta­tis­tics. Each image por­trays a spe­cific quan­tity of some­thing: fif­teen mil­lion sheets of office paper (five min­utes of paper use); 106,000 alu­minum cans (thirty sec­onds of can con­sump­tion) and so on. My hope is that images rep­re­sent­ing these quan­ti­ties might have a dif­fer­ent effect than the raw num­bers alone, such as we find daily in arti­cles and books. Sta­tis­tics can feel abstract and anes­thetiz­ing, making it dif­fi­cult to con­nect with and make mean­ing of 3.6 mil­lion SUV sales in one year, for exam­ple, or 2.3 mil­lion Amer­i­cans in prison, or 426,000 cell phones retired every day. This project visu­ally exam­ines these vast and bizarre mea­sures of our soci­ety, in large intri­cately detailed prints assem­bled from thou­sands of smaller photographs.

See for your­self at www.​chrisjor​dan.com.

Emscherpark – Industrial Heritage Done Right

Zeche Zollverein

Zeche Zol­lverein (photo by toms)

Last week­end we went for a tour to the Emscher­park, which is mean­der­ing between Duis­burg and Hamm, with an approx­i­mate length of 70 km (straight tra­jec­tory Duis­burg – Hamm). The objec­tive of this trip was to get a feel­ing how a huge and dis­persed park can work. We are work­ing on a sim­i­lar project in the greater London area at the moment for or office maxwan, which spon­sored this trip. Con­tinue read­ing ‘Emscherpark – Indus­trial Her­itage Done Right’

Coming up Next

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Ned­er­lands Foto­mu­seum (screen­shot from their site)

I’ve just added a couple of dates to our Cal­en­dar page –

First of all, there is tonight's panel at the NAi dis­cussing the state of archi­tec­ture cri­tique in the Nether­lands (lan­guage will be dutch, fee is 5e). From their announcement:

Aan de hand van drie intro­duc­ties van archi­tec­tu­ur­crit­ica Ange­lika Schnell (D), archi­tec­tu­urhis­tori­cus Cor Wage­naar (NL) en docent archi­tec­tu­urkri­tiek Paul Ver­meulen (B) wordt gede­bat­teerd over de stand van zaken in de archi­tec­tu­urkri­tiek in Ned­er­land en Vlaan­deren. Zij gaan in op de vraag in hoev­erre de archi­tec­tu­urkri­tiek ver­drinkt in de ver­schuiv­ing van tekst- naar beeld­cul­tuur? Hoe reflecteert ons denken over het maatschap­pelijk belang van de archi­tec­tuur in de archi­tec­tu­urkri­tiek? En aan welk type archi­tec­tu­urkri­tiek is in de huidige tijd behoefte?

Also today the “Ned­er­lands Foto­mu­seum” opens at Las Palmas – finally. There they’ll have enough room to host their exten­sive col­lec­tion of not only pho­tog­ra­phy, but also movies and dig­i­tal media. The Las Palmas Build­ing housed the Holland-​America Line since 1953, but was soon used for other things, among them as a trade sta­tion for goods from the Canary Islands, thus the name. Ben­them Crouwel Archi­tecten con­ceived the ren­o­va­tion plans for its new use. The open­ing exhi­bi­tions are “Dutch Eyes’ and ‘Panorama Las Palmas”. See ned​er​lands​fo​to​mu​seum.nl to see what else is going on on this open­ing week­end and after.

On the 26th of April you’ll find us at the Worm – a loca­tion we favor anyhow – where the new Year­book of Dutch Archi­tec­ture will be pre­sented. It’s free, but you can make sure they’ll let you in at www.​naipub​lish​ers.nl.

In the night of the 24th of may you’ll be able to behold the results of the eldaplus.org work­shop “spelen met licht” (play with light). The selected loca­tions grav­i­tate around the Eras­mus bridge. You’ll find a full map soon at www.​rotterdam2007.nl, you can also reg­is­ter for the work­shop at http://​eldaplus.​org/​6​9​1​.​0​.html if yo spare 1140e. Let’s hope that the results are more sat­is­fy­ing as the pur­plish city of Archi­tec­ture instal­la­tions we’ve seen so far at sev­eral sites in Rot­ter­dam. The same evening will also be the open­ing evening for the Rot­ter­dam Bien­nale of Archi­tec­ture – which deserves an own post to be fully cov­ered.

For a com­plete list of what’s going on visit our Cal­en­dar page.

Taller Than Thou

Skyscrapers under Construction

Sky­scrap­ers under Con­struc­tion world wide (screen cap­ture sky​scrap​er​page.com)

Cities are as entan­gled in global com­pe­ti­tion as com­pa­nies, and what a TV Ad is for the car man­u­fac­turer, a sky­scraper is for a metrop­o­lis. You can rank them accord­ing to the height of their build­ings (or is it the extent of their iden­tity crisis?) on www.​sky​scrap​er​page.com. Beautiful.

Rotterdam High Rise

Rotterdam’s Tallest (screen cap­ture sky​scrap​er​page.com)

Also worth a look, but updat­ing their data­bases right now, is www.​sky​scrap​ercity.info. They are always on top fea­tur­ing pic­tures of recent devel­op­ments in their unfor­tu­nately often very shal­low forum discussions.

OmaWeb

www.oma.eu

OMA redesigned their web­site. No more flash, better struc­ture. And they might be work­ing on a blog

An Interview with Ole Bouman

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Ole Boumann (photo: v2 archives)

Ole Bouman became Direc­tor of the Nether­lands Archi­tec­ture Insti­tute in Rot­ter­dam a couple of days ago. See the press release and read an exten­sive inter­view with him at the bldg­blog. From the intro­duc­tion to the interview:

In May 2005, Ole Bouman, Rem Kool­haas, and Mark Wigley co-​founded Volume. Volume was meant as both a mag­a­zine and a “global idea platform… ded­i­cated to exper­i­men­ta­tion and the pro­duc­tion of new forms of archi­tec­tural discourse.” [...]
In the fol­low­ing inter­view, Bouman talks to BLDG­BLOG about some of these “spatial challenges,” includ­ing the role of “agitation” in archi­tec­ture; who the real audi­ence for archi­tec­tural jour­nal­ism might be; the “politics of the spectacular”; unex­pected pos­si­ble side-​effects of long-​term invest­ment in China; public space and dia­logue in post-​conflict cities; and the future of the Nether­lands Archi­tec­ture Institute.

Dysturb Friends and their Hangouts

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geolo­ca­tion of dys­turb users on 6 April 07

A screen­shot of our sta­tis­tics page from begin­ning of April – before we went beta. It is nice that we would be able to tell who is behind of each of these little icons. This will change, though. I’ll post more of these during our next steps until we go public – it will be inter­est­ing to see how the dys­turb virus spreads.

DEAF

DEAF

On Tues­day, April 10, 2007, Martin Berendse of the Dutch Min­istry of Edu­ca­tion, Cul­ture and Sci­ence will offi­cially open the Dutch Elec­tronic Art Fes­ti­val. The open­ing will take place at Rotterdam’s new Las Palmas cul­tural center at 7:00 pm. A per­for­mance by the Bel­gian group Code31 will be the high­light. DEAF, one of the most impor­tant inter­na­tional fes­ti­vals devoted to art, media and tech­nol­ogy, is orga­nized every two years by V2_, Insti­tute for the Unsta­ble Media. DEAF07 runs from April 10 to 29, 2007, in Rot­ter­dam. Con­tinue read­ing ‘DEAF’

3rd Rotterdam Architecture Biennale – POWER

Rotterdam Biennale 2007

The 3rd Rot­ter­dam Archi­tec­ture Bien­nale POWER is coming – so get ready
Con­tinue read­ing ’3rd Rot­ter­dam Archi­tec­ture Bien­nale – POWER’